Rosalie Lorraine Atkinson

Rosalie Lorraine Atkinson, Port Orchard, died January 4, 2020 at the age of 89. She was a loving and beloved wife, mother, sister, grandmother, aunt and friend to many.

Rosalie, called Rosie by her family and friends, is survived by her six children, Nancy Doyle (Bill), Phyllis Counts (Dennis), Susan Mullins (Alvin), Richard Atkinson, Teri Girard, and Tom Atkinson (Sharon), brother Harry Brown and brother Larry Bruder. Also surviving is her brother-in-law DeMack Atkinson (Irene), sister-in-law Molly Atkinson, 12 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren. Rosie is also survived by several nieces and nephews who live in the area, and have remained close to our family throughout our lives.

Born September 16, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, she was the 2nd of 4 children of Esther Brown and Fred Bruder, both deceased. Married to Charles Rook Atkinson in 1948, the young couple made their home in Port Orchard for 57 of their 68 years of marriage. Charlie and Rosie were high school sweethearts when they graduated from Silverdale High School (now Central Kitsap High School) in 1948. They settled into their first home together in Bremerton.

Rosie began her writing and journalism career as a neighborhood columnist, writing humorous and feature stories about our family and our Harper and Southworth neighbors for the Port Orchard Independent, which published her weekly humor column called A Word from Rose.

Her talent and enthusiasm landed Rosie a job as an editor at the Independent. She began her much longer career at the Bremerton Sun (now the Kitsap Sun) daily newspaper as editor of the women’s pages. She later renamed the section People, where she continued to write a weekly column called From the Trellis in addition to feature stories and family and community news articles.

After leaving the Bremerton Sun in the early 1980s, her freelance writing continued. As she and Charlie cruised the San Juan Islands, Canadian Gulf Islands and other Puget Sound waters, their experiences of cruising, fishing, crabbing, clam digging, and socializing with other yacht club friends became fun and educational content for articles in publications such as Nor’westing Magazine, Sea Magazine, and Wednesday Magazine. Rosie was also a proficient photographer, carrying a camera with her when she interviewed people for news and feature stories.

Rosie was a member emeritus of Washington and National Federation of Press Women, and a member of the Peninsula Chapter, Romance Writers of America. Rosie was also a member of Soroptimists International.

Rosie and Charlie moved their family to Seattle in 1955. In 1959 they moved back to the west side of Puget Sound and bought a house on the beach in Harper, where they lived for the next 40 years. Their home in Harper was where they raised six children, and it was the scene of many beach parties, holiday celebrations, and busy family life.

Rosie and Charlie were active members of the Port Orchard Yacht Club. The family spent many years cruising Puget Sound and Canadian waters with other POYC members, many of whom became lifelong friends.

After retirement, Rosie and Charlie added motor home travel to their busy lifestyle. They used their first RV to travel around the USA, eventually reaching Louisiana, Tennessee, and Chicago. They also took shorter trips in Washington and Oregon before they started making an annual trip south to Arizona as “snowbirds”. Rosie enjoyed shopping for bargains in the border towns of Mexico and for Southwest style art and jewelry in the open air markets of Yuma and Quartzsite.

After Charlie suffered a disabling stroke, Rosie moved into Ridgemont Senior Apartments in Port Orchard, so she could be near Charlie at Stafford Healthcare next door. She walked across the parking lot almost every day to have lunch and visit with the love of her life. In typical Atkinson fashion, after a period of many difficult adjustments, they succeeded in making the best of a bad situation and — as Rosie called it, their next chapter — continued into their later years as best friends, with the mutual love, support and good humor they had given each other since they were teenaged bride and groom.

Rosie didn’t (couldn’t?) stop writing, and after the significant adjustment to her and Charlie’s new lifestyle, Rosie produced a manuscript for a dramatic retelling of the story of her Finnish grandparents’ meeting and immigration to America, which was published as Albin’s Letters. A few years later, Rosie continued the story with her new book, Hilda’s Secrets. Within the past year Rosie completed the first draft of a new manuscript for a novel, which is currently in the editing phase. We promised her we would see it through to publication. She wanted to see it published as a serial in chapters on her blog, which contains many more of Rosie’s stories: https://pugetrosie.wordpress.com

After Charlie passed away in 2016, she stayed in her Ridgemont apartment home where she had made many friends, and she enjoyed afternoons of bingo, Mexican Train, dominoes, and other games with friends and neighbors up in the dining room. Rosie had a passion to get to know and befriend new people. Many of those who read this will remember her open and friendly manner, her way of smiling and laughing her way into their lives and hearts, listening to their troubles with a sympathetic ear and heart. She wanted to include everyone she met in her ‘circle’, to make sure no one ever felt excluded in her presence. She had a way of adopting the lonely and treating them as part of her family.

In October 2019 Rosie was advised that Assisted Living would be a safer and more comfortable place for her to live, so she moved into Stafford Suites on November 1st. She was just getting to know and love her new friends and staff there.

This fiery, exuberant woman will be missed for the love and joy she added to all of our lives, and we will forever miss those inquisitive blue eyes asking us to tell her our story!

“There’s a lot more to a person’s life than what gets recorded in an obituary.” -- Rosie Atkinson

In lieu of flowers, her family would appreciate donations to honor her memory to:
Tracyton Community Library Foundation
PO Box 456
Tracyton, WA 98393

American Lung Association:
https://action.lung.org/site/Donation2?df_id=31272&31272.donation=form1