Marion Moore McCroskey

Dr. Marion Moore McCroskey (89), formerly of Atlanta, Georgia, passed away August 17, 2020 in Fort Myers, Florida. The family will receive friends and extended family at Berry Highland Memorial (5315 Kingston Pike) in Knoxville, Tennessee on Saturday August 29th at 1 PM followed by the funeral at Highland Memorial Cemetery on Saturday, August 29 at 3 PM.

Marion was born in April 1931 in a small coal mining town on the Kentucky-Virginia border where her father was the mining company’s medical doctor. Soon after her birth, she and her parents moved to her mother’s home town of Knoxville, Tennessee where she grew up attending Knoxville High School and then started at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. After about a year, she then transferred to the University of Tennessee Medical School at Memphis where she graduated at age 23 as one of the first five women students to graduate as medical doctors. She did her residency in New Orleans and then returned to Knoxville briefly and started medical practice in her father’s practice in downtown Knoxville. She soon married Ralph A. McCroskey, a pilot for Delta Air Lines, and they together moved to Atlanta in 1958. Marion practiced anesthesia in various hospitals in the Atlanta area until the late 1990s, including Ponce de Leon Infirmary and Atlanta Hospital.

Marion’s husband Ralph died in 1991. Marion’s first son, Benjamin, died as an infant in 1958. Marion is survived by her three children: Douglas William McCroskey, his wife Kacey and their daughters Lucy and Katie of Atlanta, Georgia; Elizabeth Anne McCroskey of Boston, Massachusetts; and Thomas Randolph McCroskey and his wife Zulfia of Fort Myers, Florida. She is also survived by her brother Dr. Robert Moore Senior and his wife Doris Jean; her sister Dorothy Moore Hyder; Maureen Moore, widow of her brother Dr. John D. Moore Jr., and many nieces and nephews and their children.

Marion was known as an expert doctor with a calm, patient bed-side manner and a truly encyclopedic knowledge of everything. She was a loving wife and mother. She will be dearly missed by her family.

The family requests that mourners send donations to Planned Parenthood or your local National Public Radio station in lieu of sending flowers.