Jerry Luxemburger

n.b. Jerry Luxemburger wrote his own obituary, much of which is included here. His children have added and subtracted a few details, which would likely have disappointed him. Jerry Luxemburger died on March 6th, 2026 at age 92; his final destination is unknown. Dee, as he was known to his six grandchildren, was a paper boy, textile mill worker, post office clerk, merchant seaman, maritime reporter for the Boston Globe, and elected office holder. For a time, he was a lawyer associated with some of Atlanta’s finest. Nothing, however, provided the feeling of exclusive dominion over his small world than his early morning newspaper route as a boy in Greenville, South Carolina. With papers folded neatly, bike loaded fully, and a practiced toss, he landed the paper with a soft plop on the porch or sidewalk of his sleeping customers. From time to time, particularly at first light in good weather, he had a sense of calling that theologian John Calvin would have approved. He began at age 12 with a 52-paper rural route, and rose, by dependability, to a city route with over 200 papers. The enthusiastic applause Jerry received after his fourth-grade cornet solo at the August Circle PTA meeting ensured he would play the cornet through high school. He also sang with the Rotary Boy Choristers with weekly Sunday night appearances for vespers at the Lutheran Church on Greenville’s North Main Street. Along with his mother’s effortless harmony, these activities introduced him to the joy of music. In later life, he made do with whistling. Jerry was a lifelong tennis player, and it was tennis (and a dedication to earning high marks in school) that took him from Greenville, South Carolina to New Haven, Connecticut, where he earned an academic scholarship and briefly played for Yale University before deciding that tennis in the cold, windy, and bleak New England weather was not for him. Although several of his many very great grandfathers served as foot soldiers in the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and with Napoleon’s Grand Armee, Jerry’s military career took him over the sea and into the air. After graduating from Yale, Jerry enlisted as an officer in the Navy and, in 1956, received his Navy Wings. His pilot’s log shows 74 day and 28 night carrier landings and about 700 hours of flying time in the AD-3, a single engine, propeller-driven, carrier-based aircraft. In 1957, at the Quonset Point Rhode Island Naval Officer’s Club Jerry spied an attractive young woman who smiled at him across the shrimp bowl. He was delighted to find that Elaine Gillaspie, a student at nearby Brown University, was also a native Southerner. Throughout their courtship, he sent her a gardenia corsage every Wednesday during the school term, and they exchanged many love letters during his Mediterranean deployment on the U.S.S. Wasp. Elaine and Jerry were married on June 13, 1959, a month after her graduation (their Sea Island honeymoon picture can still be found in The Cloister’s archives). Jerry had already begun law school at Harvard University, and, after graduation, they settled in Atlanta where Jerry practiced law, and their family grew by three boys and a dachshund named Junior. As an associate at Jones, Bird, and Howell, Jerry was assigned to serve on the newly formed Atlanta Crime Commission. This service pushed him into Atlanta’s civic affairs and, in 1969, he was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education. Jerry joined the board in the middle of the court-ordered desegregation of the Atlanta Public School faculty, which he defended despite much public criticism and picketers outside his home. For his role in the story of Civil Rights in Atlanta, Jerry was honored with his lawyer peers in 2015 by the Georgia Bar for “playing an active part in the Civil Rights Movement, [...] working diligently to fight racial injustice.” After leaving the school board, Jerry held leadership roles in various communities that mattered to him, including Trinity Presbyterian Church and Brookwood Hills neighborhood. He continued to work as an attorney, with a focus on corporate tax law and tax benefits for historic preservation, retiring from the firm of Morris, Manning, and Martin in 2000. To his last days, Jerry particularly enjoyed wearing his shawl-collar dinner jacket, bought in 1954 for the Junior Prom, his patent leather pumps, and his 1969 orange madras bathing suit, which Elaine mended on many occasions. Jerry was an avid reader, and his library reflected his fascination with intellectual history, American history, biography, physics, cosmology, and advanced mathematics. He enjoyed days in the sun on Fripp Island, South Carolina; polishing his penny loafers; singing duets with Elaine from Camelot and Oklahoma!; writing a family history (which begins with the Big Bang and doesn’t arrive at his own birth until page 136); acting as head counselor at Camp Dee for his grandkids during summer break; driving his Miata convertible; and serving as a valued confidant and trusted advisor to his many clients, friends, and family. Jerry is survived by his wife, Elaine; three sons, Peter, Tim, and Hans; their wives, Muriel, Ann, and Lynn; and his six grandchildren, Holden (Jenni), Nathan, Theo, Camille, Louise, and Lucas, none of whom was named as he suggested. In lieu of flowers, Jerry suggests that his friends who have not done so (and are still living) read one or more of the following: A Theory of Justice (Rawls), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawny), or the less formidable, All the Kings Men (Warren). For friends who don’t want to remember him quite that much, he asks that they view the movie, The English Patient, or listen to Mozart’s piano concerto No. 21, or sing along with Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” His friends are sure to note that the novel, the movie, and the music are each stories of friendships, loyalty, betrayal, love, and loss. His debt to those he loved was large, and, as to repaying it, he took comfort in his mother’s oft-repeated incantation of Shakespeare’s Portia: “The quality of mercy is not strain’d/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed;/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” And so it did. A celebration of Jerry’s life will take place on Tuesday, March 24 at 11:00 a.m. at Trinity Presbyterian Church, 3003 Howell Mill Road, Atlanta, Georgia, 30327.

Jerry Luxemburger

September 1, 1933 - March 6, 2026