Van Riper, Walker

Walker Van Riper (1887-1960) was born in Sedalia, Missouri on March 9, 1887. After receiving an A.B. at Yale University in 1909, he was Secretary at the American Trust Company, St. Louis, Missouri 1909-1912, and received a B.L. from St. Louis University in 1912. He went west in 1912 for health reasons and taught Banking and Investments at Colorado College from 1914-1915, and Investment Banking in Denver from 1915-1925. From 1926 until his retirement in 1943, he was an Investment Analyst at Colorado National Bank in Denver. Mr. Van Riper was a very keenly interested naturalist. Following his retirement, he became the Curator of Spiders and Insects at the Denver Museum of Natural History with a salary of $1.00 per year. This collection of his papers relates only to his interests as a naturalist. He was particularly interested in the photography of natural subjects. He specialized in the photography of rattlesnakes, hummingbirds and spiders and wrote accompanying texts. From a technical photographic standpoint, he was involved in the early use of the high-speed electronic flash, or strobe light, invented by Harold E. Edgerton of M.I.T., whom he knew and with whom he did photographic work on the hummingbird.