Edson Leigh Tennyson

edson tennyson
EDSON LEIGH TENNYSON (Age 92)

Edson L. Tennyson, professional engineer and public transit expert, died July 14, 2014 at home in Vienna, Virginia.

Ed was born in Orange, N.J. on July 6, 1922 to Jane Virginia (Leigh) and William Edwin Tennyson. He graduated from West Orange High School in 1940 and attended Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pa. (now Carnegie-Mellon University) on a Westinghouse Memorial Scholarship.

In 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and on July 15, 1944, he married Shirley Lou Forward of Pittsburgh. They lived in the New York area for the rest of World War II, where Ed served as a Transportation Corps Officer and Shirley worked for Westinghouse on the Manhattan Project. After the war they returned to Pittsburgh to finish college. After Ed completed two management engineering degrees, he began his career at Pittsburgh Railways and then Milwaukee Rapid Transit. In 1951 he was appointed City Transit Commissioner for Youngstown, Ohio. He served there until 1956, when he became the Deputy Commissioner of Transportation in Philadelphia, PA. In 1972, Governor Shapp of Pennsylvania appointed him Deputy Secretary of Transportation. When his term expired in 1979 he consulted with San Diego Trolley, Inc. to begin operations there, and with other transit entities.

In 1983 he was appointed Public Works Planning Coordinator for Arlington County to complete the Metro Orange Line to Vienna, VA, retiring in 1992. More recently, he has served on the Fairfax County Transportation Advisory Commission, and as an emeritus member of the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council.

He leaves his wife of 70 years, Shirley, daughters Lynn Tennyson (Peter Day) of Colorado, Connie McCarthy (Jim) of California, and Marjorie Tennyson of Montana. He is also survived by his brother Walter of Florida and by three grandchildren, Nancy and Thomas Day and Nathaniel Podgajny.

Services are at 2 pm Tuesday, July 22, at Vienna Presbyterian Church, Vienna, VA. Interment will be in a family plot in the cemetery at Liberty Corner Presbyterian Church, Liberty Corner, NJ. Online condolences may be made at www.moneyandking.com.

Funeral Home:

Money & King Funeral Home

171 W. Maple Ave.

Vienna, VA

US 22180

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  1. 70 happy years together. Who could have ever asked for more. I miss you so much. Love always, Shirley Lou

  2. Ed was a terrific source for me when I covered transportation at The Washington Post. I learned a lot from him. It was not just his knowledge of transportation that stood out. It was his passion.

  3. Dear Shirley and family, Barbara and I send our deepest sympathy and condolences. Ed was very special to me. I have no doubt that a significant part of the success I have had was due to the foundation Ed helped to build during our time together at PennDOT. Working for Ed was one of the great honors of my life. The phrase. “Mind like a steel trap” certainly applied to Ed. He knew more about public transit and what drives the behavior of transit riders than anyone I have ever known. Millions of transit riders everyday benefit from Ed’s work and the professionals he trained. I am glad we stayed in touch all these decades. I will miss receiving what I came to call. ‘Tennygrams,” lengthy letters in which Ed solved some weighty transit problem or maybe reworked the bus schedules for the Northside buses or some such thing! I am sure he is already working to redo the trolley schedules in Heaven. God Bless Ed Tennyson, may he rest in peace.

  4. Every day I read the excellent arguments about transit, useful all over the world. Now I am sad, my condolences to Edson family.

  5. Ed was a singular presence in my life; the smartest transit man I have ever met. He was a never-ending source of ideas and experience to me, no matter what the situation over which I was puzzling. I knew him for almost sixty years. He was one of the last survivors from the era in which transit service was provided by private enterprise and its managers had to be smart enough and experienced enough to be able to operate it at a profit. That sort of expertise is sorely lacking today and it is greatly missed. I will deeply miss being able to talk with Ed about transit matters as we proceed with our attempts to restore what was so thoughtlessly destroyed more than sixty years ago. God bless you Ed. Rest knowing that you have done more than almost anyone else to preserve and modernize public transportation in the United States.


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