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Six decades after completing undergraduate professional studies, Vera Ellithorpe continues her life-long pursuit of learning and teaching about architecture. A native of Russell, she has served with remarkable energy, skill and dedication in working to improve quality and to preserve the state's architectural heritage for all Kansans.

Graduating with a degree in architecture from Kansas State University in the midst of the Great Depression, Ellithorpe nonetheless found employment. Foreshadowing the direction of her life's work, she gained valuable experience as a cost estimator with a home builder in Salina before embarking on graduate studies at Cornell. Returning to Kansas State, Ellithorpe completed the M.S. in Home Management and joined the Kansas State University Cooperative Extension Service in 1939, with which she served in many capacities for 35 years.

Crisscrossing Kansas on innumerable trips, Ellithorpe counseled her fellow citizens in each of the state's 105 counties on demonstration projects for the design of new homes and home improvements. She led housing workshops, tours and home visits, developed and taught courses to train extension agents, prepared monographs on housing issues, worked with 4-H Clubs and their leaders, and responded to myriad inquiries on every aspect of housing.

Despite the demands of her position, Ellithorpe recognized the importance of continuing her education. Short periods of study at Purdue, Oregon State, Arkansas, and Columbia complemented her earlier work at Kansas State and her doctorate completed at Ohio State in 1964. Ellithorpe's dissertation, reporting on her studies of the housing choices made by families dislocated by construction of Tuttle Creek Reservoir, led to many consultations with families displaced by urban renewal, highway construction and expansion of military bases across Kansas.

Long a member of the American Association of Housing Educators, she served for a decade as its Executive Secretary and held a variety of other offices including President during 1977-78. Vera Ellithorpe was among the first architects licensed under the post-World War II Kansas law requiring the registration of architects, and she was for some time the only woman member of the American Institute of Architects/Kansas, in which she continues to play an active role as a member of the Committee on Historic Resources.

Vera Ellithorpe's lifetime of service embodies the highest values of the professions for which the faculty of the College of Architecture and Design prepares its students.