Fitzgerald "Jerry" Atkinson Jr. (January 25, 1921 – April 21, 2006) was vice mayor of Nashville, Tennessee, USA from 1966 to 1971. Early life and career Atkinson was born to longtime Nashville-area residents Fitzgerald Atkinson Sr. and Catherine Kerr Atkinson. He attended Davidson County public schools, including the former Central High School, from which he graduated. Following high school Atkinson enrolled in the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, but left in June 1942 to serve in the United States armed forces in World War II. He enlisted into the United States Marine Corps, serving primarily with the 1st Tank Battalion, 1st Marine Division. He was wounded in the Battle of Okinawa and was subsequently awarded the Purple Heart and the Navy Cross. Atkinson was honorably discharged in 1946 and the same year was licensed as an insurance agent. Early in his insurance career, he was a partner in the insurance firm of Stokes, Bandy & Atkinson. Politics While with Stokes, Bandy & Atkinson, Atkinson was first elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives. Like almost all members of the Tennessee General Assembly from the western two-thirds of the state in that era, Atkinson was at least nominally a Democrat. However, the party's Southern wing, especially at this time, was not particularly liberal, and Atkinson was in many ways somewhat typical of his era. Atkinson was to serve a total of three terms in the Tennessee House, serving Davidson and Williamson Counties as a "floterial representative", part of an arcane system which was then in use in Tennessee to avoid the constitutionally-mandated redistricting of the House according to population every ten years following the census (and which was eventually invalidated by the United States Supreme Court in its landmark Baker v. Carr ruling). In 1964 Atkinson left Stokes and Bandy to form his own insurance firm. Atkinson's service in the Tennessee General Assembly came at time when there was no actual salary but rather only an expense per diem for the days in which the legislature was actually in session; in no way was politics providing him with a substantial living. In 1966, Atkinson was elected to an unusual five-year term as vice mayor under the Metropolitan Charter, which had been adopted by voters four years earlier to merge many of the functions of Davidson County and the Nashville municipal government. In one of the charter's many compromise provisions,