Roger Lamont Creighton, member of the Society since 1981 and President from 1993-1995, died on October 2, 2017 in Walnut Creek, California where he had resided for several years. Mr. Creighton was born in Shanghai, China in 1923, the son of missionaries Roy L. and Clara Creighton. He attended schools in Beirut, Istanbul, and Peking before returning to the United States in 1941 to graduate from the New Hampton School in New Hampton, NH and begin studies at Harvard College. During the Second World War he served in the Army Air Force, flying P-40 and P-38 fighter aircraft. He was promoted to First Lieutenant and stationed at Adak in the Aleutian Islands to defend against a potential Japanese attack. During a routine patrol his P-38 aircraft caught fire and he was forced to bail out, thus gaining entry in the Caterpillar club.
He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1947 (class of 1945) and his Master’s Degree in City Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1950. During these years he met and married Martha Immel, a graduate student at Wellesley. In 1950 he was appointed Planning Director of Portland, ME, and from 1955-1961 he was Assistant Director of the groundbreaking Chicago Area Transportation Study, the first large-scale effort to plan a city’s transportation network based on surveys and computer models. From 1961-65 he was Director of the Upstate New York Transportation Study.
In 1965 he founded a consulting firm, Roger Creighton Associates, which evolved to become VersaTrans, Inc. and Creighton-Manning Engineering, LLP. He undertook a major transportation study for Buffalo, participated in planning for the West Side Highway in New York City, analyzed a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound at Rye, New York, traveled to China on behalf the U. S. State Department, and advised the government of Venezuela on the design for a new subway system.
In the 1970s he developed and marketed one of the first computerized school bus routing programs. Software based on his original program is now an industry standard. He retired in 1992.
Mr. Creighton authored Urban Transportation Planning (University of Illinois Press, 1970), School Redistricting (Oakmore Associates, 1994), and an essay, “Lightning, Smoke, and Fire,” published in the August 2007 issue of Air and Space Magazine. He also compiled, with John A. Willison, the Bicentennial History of the St. Andrew’s Society of the City of Albany, 2004.
He served as President of the Western Great Lakes Chapter and the Upstate New York Chapter of the American Planning Association, a President of the St. Andrew’s Society of the City of Albany, and was a long-time supporter of the Albany Symphony Orchestra where his wife was a harpist. He was a member of the Delmar Reformed Church.
Mr. Creighton established a Foundation in the St. Andrew’s Society for the Preservation of Scottish Monuments in the City of Albany in memory of his deceased wife Martha in 2014.
A memorial service in celebration of his life was held at the Delmar Reformed Church in Delmar, New York on December 2. The Rev. Dr. Joseph Shook, a Past President of the Society delivered the homily.