He was born on April 8, 1919 in Pasadena, Maryland. During the Great Depression Art and his siblings and mother Mabel Frances (Davis) farmed their property while his father, Daniel P. Corey, worked nearby in Baltimore, Maryland as a machinist. After graduation from high school and having a year of college at the University of Maryland he was one of the first five persons drafted in his region and spent much of WWII being educated at Pennsylvania State University in Civil Engineering by the military prior to serving overseas in Europe and the far east near the end of the war. After returning from service he completed a bachelor’s degree in Soil Science at the University of Maryland, then continued for a Master’s Degree in Irrigation Engineering at Colorado A&M, followed by a PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey in Soil Physics and Physical Chemistry specializing in ground water.
He and his late wife Vera K. Corey (Karel) and two sons Philip and Paul moved back to Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1955 after working at the Gulf Oil Corp. near Pittsburg, PA for a few years as a research physicist. He was first employed by the experiment station at what was then Colorado A&M as a ground water scientist eventually becoming a full professor at Colorado State University in the Department of Agricultural Engineering.
Art always enjoyed traveling. In 1959, while at CSU, Art was persuaded by the late Dr. Maurice Albertson to take his family to Bangkok, Thailand to teach for the first two years of the SEATO Graduate School of Engineering now known as the Asian Institute of Technology. Dr. Albertson, no doubt inspired by his success at organizing a graduate school in a foreign country, went on to assist in the creation of the Peace Corps and numerous other activities. Art convinced some of his Thai students to return to CSU for PhD degrees. Perhaps his most famous former Thai student is Dr. Subin Pinkayan who, among his many accomplishments, served as Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Royal Thai Government (roughly equivalent to the US Secretary of State) and founded SEATEC, a large international engineering consulting firm based in Thailand. Subin had lived with the Corey family during his first year at CSU and has remained close to the Corey family since then.
In 1965 Art worked on a water project in Lahore, Pakistan, from which he was evacuated when a war between India and Pakistan broke out after he had only worked there for a few months. Near his retirement he was a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology while on sabbatical there. After retiring from CSU in 1975, Art taught and also worked as a water scientist in Ireland, Turkey, and Sri Lanka, as well as various state universities in the United States. Later, he lived in Ft. Collins and Las Cruces, New Mexico and worked into his late 90’s with his son Dr. Philip D. Corey, now retired from Boeing, on various technical papers in his field of ground water dynamics and on his memoirs. He also continued his interest in genealogy. He has been a powerful influence on all who have known him including those who have studied and worked with him and has been a leader in his field of research. His final goal to become a centenarian was unfulfilled; he missed by only 4 short months.
Art was preceded in death by his wife of 73 years, Vera (Karel), who died a couple of months short of her 99th birthday in March of 2016, by three of his sisters, Rose, Isabel, and Ellen and by his two brothers Danny and Albert. He is survived by his sister Mabel Zwobot and his two sons Philip and Paul Corey and Paul’s wife Jean and Philip’s wife Nafise Nili and their two children Camilla and Danielle Corey and their adopted son/nephew Richard Pana and his wife Clare and two small daughters Julia and Valerie. Of course, Art has a multitude of nieces and nephews from his sisters and brothers.
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