Personal Life
Bradford Parkinson was born in Madison, Wisconsin on February 16, 1935, but grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the only son of Herbert Parkinson, an architect who was also an alumnus of MIT. For his secondary education, the younger Parkinson attended the Breck School, then a small, all-boys preparatory school, graduating in 1952. Parkinson has credited his experiences at the Breck School for inspiring in him an early love of math and science, an interest which eventually became his life's calling.
In addition to his career, Parkinson has a number of avocations, perhaps the most important of which is the outdoors. Over the course of his life he's been an avid skier, snowshoer, and hiker, all of which he enjoys today with the help of GPS units. Parkinson is also an experienced sailor, recently sailing a catamaran around the Caribbean with one of his sons. Beyond athletics, Parkinson is a student of history, with Abraham Lincoln and Admiral Horatio Nelson being two of his lifelong heroes.
In 2003 Parkinson was awarded the Draper Prize for his contributions to GPS, along with the Ivan Getting, the long-time chairman of the Aerospace Corporation. The award is a $500,000 cash prize, and is commonly considered the Nobel Prize of engineering. In addition, in 2004 Parkinson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his contributions.
Today, Parkinson lives in San Luis Obispo, California, a small city located halfway between San Jose and Los Angeles. He is married to Virginia “Ginny” Parkinson, with whom he has one child. He also has five children from a previous marriage with Jill Horner-Jencks (remarried), as well as five grandchildren.
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