Kerr F Atkinson

Engagement and Marriage of Elsie S. Church to Kerr Atkinson in 1921

Engagement of Elsie S. Church to Kerr Atkinson announced on April 8, 1921
The Ithaca Journal, Apr 8 1921, P. 3. Col. 1

"Professor I. P. Church of 9 South avenue has announced the engagement of his daughter, Miss Elsie S. Church, Cornell '18, to Kerr Atkinson, Cornell '12, of New York City. Mr. Atkinson is the son of the late Professor George F. Atkinson of Cornell University.
  Miss Church received the degree of A.B. from Cornell in 1918, having prepared at the Emma Willard School. She is a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Soon after her graduation she went to France where she remained more than a year engaged in war work, first with the Y. M. C. A. and later with a branch of the Red Cross, carrying on reconstruction work.
  Miss Church has been in New York City during the winter where she holds a position with the Guaranty Trust Company, but expects to return to Ithaca this summer.
  Mr. Atkinson was granted his M.E. degree at Cornell in 1912. He was a member of Tau Beta Pi, the Aero Club, and the University Orchestra. After his graduation he was for a time instructor in engineering at the University of Missouri and later held a position with the Lehigh Valley Coal Company in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. In the spring of 1917 he entered the Reserve Officers' Training Camp at Madison Barracks from which he was graduated with the rank of second lieutenant of engineers. He saw service in France, returning to this country after the signing of the armistice. He is now engaged in the engineering business in New York City.

Marriage of Elsie S. Church and Kerr Atkinson on August 18, 1921
The Ithaca Journal, Aug 19 1921, P. 7   
Image is too poor for OCR or accurate transcription. 

Obituary for Kerr Atkinson.  Engineer's services set.
The Ithaca Journal, Sep 20 1976, P. 4, Col. 1.

"A memorial service for Kerr Atkinson, 86, formerly of Ithaca, will be held at 1 p.m. Wednesday in the Interfaith Chapel, Anabel Taylor Hall, Cornell University.
  Mr. Atkinson died Friday, Sept. 17, 1976, at his daughter's home in Toms River, N.J.
  A native of Ithaca, he was the son of Prof. George F. Atkinson, professor of botany at Cornell University. A member of the Class of 1907 of Ithaca High School (of which Barbara Bell wrote recently in her Glance Backward column) he was graduated in 1912 from Cornell with a degree in engineering.
  He taught engineering at the University of Missouri, and later served in France in 1918 with the U.S. Army.
  In 1926 he joined the Boston, Mass., engineering firm of Jackson and Moreland, where he remained for 24 years until he opened his own office in 1950, in Boston.
  He and Miss Elsie S. Church, daughter of Prof. Irving Porter Church, professor of hydraulics and mechanics at Cornell University, were married in 1923.
  A member of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, he was a pioneer member of the Cornell Aero Club, and was active in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He served for a time as president of the Engineering Societies of New England, was a member of the Cornell Society of Engineers, and of the Harvard Musical Society.
  Surviving are his daughter, Mrs. Holley A. Simmons of Toms River, N.J., and a son, William C. Atkinson of Weston, Mass., and seven grandchildren."

Kerr F. Atkinson

DoB: 1 May 1890
PoB: Auburn, Lee County, Alabama
Died: 17 Sep 1976, Toms River, Ocean County, New Jersey
Buried: Ithaca City Cemetery, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York

Extracts from
Francis Kerr Atkinson 1890-1976: Some Biographical Notes
By his son, William C. Atkinson

"My grandfather George Francis Atkinson, after having graduated from Cornell University in 1885, held teaching positions in zoology at the University of North Carolina, later of botany at the University of South Carolina, and then at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn. He had moved there with his wife Elizabeth Graham Kerr (“Lizzie” Kerr)—formerly of Raleigh, NC where her by then deceased father, Washington Carruthers Kerr, had been the State Geologist. A daughter, Josephine, was born but died in infancy.

My father—Francis Kerr Atkinson—was born in Auburn, Alabama on the first of May, 1890.

In 1892 his father accepted an appointment at Cornell University as an assistant professor of botany and the family moved to Ithaca, New York where his sister Clara Packard Atkinson was born that year.

The family settled on the campus in a house at 5 East Avenue whose wooded backyard sloped steeply down to Cascadilla Creek. From visits in the late twenties I can remember the house which was eventually swallowed by the burgeoning engineering campus after WWII.
...
Kerr entered Cornell in 1907 and in 1912 graduated with a double degree in mechanical and electrical engineering. The engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi inducted him as a member. His classes in mechanics were taught by Professor Church, his future father-in-law. This period was barely five years after the Wright Brother’s success in 1903 and my father—an early member of the Cornell Aero Club—was active in the designing and building of tethered gliders and towed machines which were tested and “flown” on the open heights to the east of the campus. Cornell (perhaps my father) built one of the earliest wind-powered flight trainers.
...
My father disliked the name Francis and took his middle name as his first: Kerr [pronounced “car”]. In his early years he attended “Miss Hitchcock’s” school on the Cornell campus along with other children of faculty families, most notably my mother who was almost the same age—Elsie Sterling Church, daughter of Professor Irving Porter Church of civil engineering.
...
As I have heard it, late in 1920 Kerr bumped into Elsie Church in the New York City subway. I suppose each must have known of the other’s presence in the city but hadn’t yet formally arranged to get together. Elsie had just taken a job at the Guaranty Trust after a summer of odd jobs at home in Ithaca. Following a springtime courtship they became engaged and were married in Cornell’s Sage Chapel on August 18, 1921."