John Kerr (governor-general)
Sir John Robert Kerr, (24 September 1914 – 24 March 1991) was the 18th Governor-General of Australia. He dismissed the Labor government of Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975, marking the climax of the most significant constitutional crisis in Australian history. He had previously been the 13th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
Robert S. Kerr
Kerr was born in a log cabin in Pontotoc County — near what is now Ada — in Indian Territory, the son of William Samuel Kerr, a farmer, clerk, and politician, and Margaret Eloda Wright. Kerr's upbringing as a Southern Baptist had a profound influence on his life. Not only did his religious beliefs lead him to teach Sunday school and to shun alcohol throughout his adulthood, it also aided his political aspirations in a conservative state where Baptists were the single largest denomination. He enrolled at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee as a junior in high school. He later attended and graduated from East Central Normal School in Ada. He briefly studied law at the University of Oklahoma until poverty forced him to drop out in 1916. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Kerr was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the army. He never saw combat, but he used his active involvement in the Oklahoma National Guard and the American Legion to forward his business and political careers. He then returned to study law under an Ada judge. Kerr passed the bar exam in 1922, but a business failure the previous year had left him deeply in debt. In 1924, his wife of more than four years, Reba Shelton, died in childbirth, along with his twin daughters. The next year he married Grayce Breene, the youngest daughter of a wealthy Tulsa family. They had four children.