Luther H. Gulick

A portrait photograph of Luther Halsey Gulick.Luther Gulick was the first director of the physical education department at Springfield College. While at the college, he inspired James Naismith to devise the game of basketball and was responsible for the creation and adoption of the inverted triangle used by Springfield College and the YMCA as their seals and symbols. Gulick felt the inverted triangle was the perfect symbol to represent the whole man, denoting the perfect balance of the spirit, mind and body. After leaving the Training School, Gulick served as physical education director at the Pratt Institute High School in Brooklyn and later became first director of physical education for the New York public schools. Gulick and his wife, Charlotte Vedder Gulick, went on to found of the Camp Fire Girls of America in 1910 as a sister organization to the Boy Scouts of America. They also founded two summer camps in Maine, Wohelo for Girls and Timanous for boys. Luther Gulick died August 13, 1918 at his summer home in Maine at the age of 52