The Conestoga Road Foundation

George Rosengarten Atterbury, Sr., our paternal grandfather, gave generously throughout his life.   He always stressed the importance of curiosity, of exploration of the immediate world around us as well as the larger world, and above all he spoke of the importance of education.  He bestowed on his five children's schools, and then to the educational institutions of his ten grandchildren. His thirst for knowledge was unending throughout his entire life.  

 

Born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, he was quite a student and studied engineering at Yale and earned a Masters degree in business from Harvard.  He served in the Navy commanding a Naval  destroyer which received  three presidential unit citations for routing German submarines from the Atlantic supply line.  After the war, he taught navigation to reservists at Villanova University, in Villanova, PA. 

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He worked in a brokerage firm in Philadelphia before leaving to breed cattle in Ithan, PA.  He was an avid sailor and traveled around the world until his late 80's.  Late in life, he wrote a biography about his father William Wallace Atterbury, former president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a pioneer in the railroad industry.  And in the early 1980's at the dawn of the personal computer, our grandfather taught himself basic coding and adeptly used email and the internet until the week he died. 

 

He died in 2007 at the wise old age of 95.  He left behind a foundation for which he entrusted his heirs to preserve his love of learning and to support all those who want to learn as much as he did.