Charles Arthur Sullivan
Hydraulic engineer, U.S. Geological Survey
Charles Arthur Sullivan was born May 18, 1914, in Chicago, Illinois. His family moved to Oklahoma City in 1916 and stayed at the Skirvin Hotel until 1920. His parents were Charles Alexander Sullivan and Marie C. (Kaufert) Sullivan.
He attended Lincoln Grade School, Webster Junior High, and Central High School in Oklahoma City, earned a B.S. from Oklahoma State University in 1936, and completed a year of master’s study at Oklahoma State in 1940. He worked as a hydraulic engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey / U.S. Department of the Interior in Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma.
His first wife, Dickie D. Spencer, daughter of a homesteader in the Yale, Oklahoma area, died in 1944. He later married Emma Belle Humphrey. Their children included Caroline D. Sullivan, Cheryl A. Price, Charles D. Sullivan, Walter R. Sullivan, and Bradford W. Sullivan.
He was a member of First Presbyterian Church of Oklahoma City, National Honor Society, Phi Kappa Phi, and Sigma Tau.
Source: Oklahoma County Historical Society biographic sketch form (scan provided by Steve Lackmeyer, September 2026).
