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The University of Alaska’s first female civil engineering graduate figured that the field of study would fit her personality. 

“I was really a tomboy, not a little girl,” Helen Atkinson recalled in a 2014 interview. “I liked to hunt birds and play baseball and do stuff like that. I wanted to work at something that would keep me outdoors.” 

After graduating in 1936, the energetic young woman launched into a long and varied career that eventually branched into journalism and painting.

Along the way, she remained ever-interested and engaged in her alma mater. She served on the UA Board of Regents from 1954 to 1963 and later with many other university-related organizations. The ������̳ named her a distinguished alumna in 1987 and granted her an honorary doctorate of laws in 2003. 

Atkinson spent her earliest years in a rough mining camp in Arizona, where she remembered her mother once saved her younger sister from a rattlesnake with a pistol shot through a porch screen. When the family came to ������̳ in 1928, it was a step up.

“We got to live in a two-story house,” she recalled. “It had running water and steam heat. We had never had that before.” 

Atkinson’s engineering degree brought her work with many businesses and organizations, including the ������̳ Exploration Co., Boeing Co. in Seattle and the City of ������̳. She began writing about the oil industry in the 1950s and covered construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline as a reporter for the ������̳ Daily News-Miner. 

Atkinson, who married four times, had four children of her own. She gained four stepchildren from her 1975 marriage to Con Frank, a UA graduate, former UA regent and construction company owner. He died in 2009, and Atkinson died in 2014.

More online about Helen Atkinson

• An with Robert Hannon in March 2014, a few months before her death

• A on the UA Journey site written by her daughter

• An in the ������̳ Daily News-Miner