William Hudson Bleakney was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on October 15, 1866 to Abraham Walker Bleakney and Catharine Bleakney. He attended Grove City College where he met and married Lelia Ada Schults on June 30, 1896. The two then moved to California, where he attended San Francisco Theological Seminary and graduated in 1899. They then moved to Elgin, Oregon where he was a pastor for two years. He then went into education and served as the principal of Pendleton Academy for eleven years before becoming a professor at Whitman College and retiring in Walla Walla in 1939. The couple had five children between 1897 and 1914, Sarah Roberta (Blomquist), Fredrick Walker, Thomas Day, Catharine Landon (Rea), and James Patton. William Hudson died on April 23, 1959.

Abraham Walker Bleakney, nephew of William Hudson Bleakney, is the other primary subject of this collection. He was born to Robert Wilson and Wilda Hall Bleakney on February 8, 1901 in Elderton, Pennsylvania. Walker attended Whitman College and graduated in 1924. He was one of four physics majors known on campus as “the Four Horsemen of Physics.” After graduation, he received a one year scholarship to Harvard for physics research and then a teaching fellowship at University of Minnesota from 1925 to 1930. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1930 and began teaching at Princeton the same year. He married Dorothy Clyde (Tommie) Thomas on July 16, 1931 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bleakney received a Presidential Certificate of Merit on March 1, 1948 for his work in the field of terminal ballistics for the National Defense Research Committee. He retired to Santa Barbara, California and died on January 15, 1992.