Jim was born in San Francisco in 1963, the seventh of eight children.  The family moved to the Monterey/Carmel area, just south of Silicon Valley, where Jim grew up. 

His father, originally from Berkeley Springs WV, worked as a civil servant at the local army base.  His mother, a Denver native, was a career social worker. 

Taking after his father's earlier career as a pilot, Jim loved aviation from an early age and learned to fly during high school. He began working as a flight instructor while attending community college in 1982 and, after an 8-month stint in Alaska as a bush pilot during 1985, found himself at age 22 working as a 737 co-pilot for Aloha Airlines in Honolulu. In 1990, at age 26, Jim became the youngest 737 captain at the airline. 

After 19 years at Aloha Airlines, during which he graduated from the University of Hawaii, Jim moved all the way to Italy and worked there as an airline pilot from 2006 to 2019, including a four year contract with a Chinese airline, flying Europe-China routes. 

During the time Jim was based in Italy, he became fluent in Italian, purchased and oversaw the restoration of a 19th Century rural Italian farmhouse, married, and became the father of four children. 

Since 1986 Jim’s been a member of the Air Line Pilots Association, AFL-CIO, and he now flies for a major U.S. airline, based in Pennsylvania.  With his wife Elena, a native of Southern Italy, the Atkinson family is now happily settled and raising their children in Lancaster, PA.

Jim’s interest in government and politics goes back to growing up in a family which welcomed political discussions at the dinner table and valued openness over ideology. For Jim, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 sounded the alarm -- democracy is more fragile than most of us were aware, and all of us need to play a part in defending it. Jim decided then that if the opportunity arose, he would be willing to run for public office in order to join forces with those who also feel strongly that our nation truly is unique and worth defending. 

I want to be a champion of Main Street over Wall Street, preserve and strengthen the Middle Class of which I'm proudly a member, defend the Social Security we've all invested in and which belongs to us, overhaul our healthcare system so that it serves those who need it over those who most profit from it, and stand up for true American values such as accountability, transparency, honesty, fairness and peaceful transfer of power.