Atherton Hall Sprague (AC 1920) (1897-1986) was born in Amherst, and served in the U.S. Army during World War I before receiving a Bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1920. He later received a Master's in 1923 and a Ph.D. in 1941, both from Princeton University. He served as a professor of mathematics at Amherst College from 1920 until his retirement in 1966, and authored three mathematics textbooks: Essentials of plane trigonometry and analytic geometry (1934); Essentials of plane and spherical trigonometry (1942); and Calculus (1952). He also coached the Amherst College tennis team. Following his retirement, he served as a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke and Hollins Colleges. After his retirement, he and his wife Marion moved to Penobscot, ME, where he lived until his death.
Marion Whittemore Sprague (1900-1990), better known as Mary Ann, was born and raised in Newport, New Hampshire, and graduated from Smith College in 1922. She was involved in Amherst social and literary life, including the Ladies of Amherst College organization and the Tuesday Club. She was a frequent contributor to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. She and her daughter Rosemary were both involved with Amherst College's Kirby Theater, where Marion may have helped with making costumes. She and her husband, Atherton, moved to Maine after his retirement from Amherst College, and she passed away at a nursing home in Penobscot, ME, in 1990.
Rosemary Sprague (1926-2005) was the only child of Atherton Hall Sprague and Mary Ann Whittemore Sprague. Like her mother, she was a graduate of Smith College (1949). She worked for a time at the Mead Art Museum. She contracted tuberculosis as a young woman and spent a year, from 1951-1952, at the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, NY. Later in the 1950s she lived in Boston and worked in a laboratory. She graduated from Western New England College of Law in 1969, was admitted to the bar in 1970, and practiced law in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts until her retirement in 1981. She wrote several unpublished novels and plays. She traveled extensively, including yearly research trips to Oxford, England, where she apparently studied hieroglyphics at Oxford's Bodleian Library.
From the guide to the Sprague Family Papers, 1890-2005, 1920-2005, (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)
