Bradford Kelleher (July 31, 1920 – October 31, 2007) reinvented the Metropolitan Museum of Art's gift shop and merchandise marketing program in the 1960s. He also served as the vice president of the Met from 1978 until 1986. His ideas for marketing the Met's gift shops and collectible reproductions have been mimicked by other museums and nonprofit institutions worldwide. He actively worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1949 until his retirement in 1986. He continued with the Met as a consultant from 1986 until 2007. Early life Bradford Kelleher was born on July 31, 1920, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His parents were William Kelleher, who owned several area department stores, and Dorothy (Crane) Kelleher. Following his graduation from Worcester Academy, Kelleher became a student at Yale University. However, he dropped out of Yale when the United States entered World War II in order to join the U.S. Army. He served in the Army Signal Intelligence Service, based in Washington, D.C., for four years. Kelleher returned to Yale after his departure from the military and began specializing in East Asian studies. He received his bachelor's degree in 1948. Metropolitan Museum of Art Kelleher had initially hoped to pursue a career as a cartoon animator. However, he was hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1949 after his father, William, ran into the museum's then director, Francis Henry Taylor, at the Century Club in New York City. Kelleher was first hired as a sales manager for the Met. Soon after joining the Met, Kelleher created a new sales department, which was separate from the museum's information services. He opened a new museum gift shop, which was called the Art and Book Shop. At first, Kelleher's new Met store offered little more than a collection of postcards of museum objects and other trinkets. However, he soon began to act on plans to expand the store and sell reproductions of famous works of art. Kelleher continued to supervise the Met store's expansion throughout the 1950s and 1960s. According to The New York Times, by the early 1960s Kelleher's store was selling a wide variety of items ranging from the traditional museum merchandise, such as books, to the less traditional, such as jewelry, prints and other collectibles. As the museum's merchandising business grew, Kelleher began to focus on producing high quality replicas of the Met's vast collection of historical and artistic objects. He