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Edward Mowbray Tate, who went by the name E. Mowbray Tate throughout his life, was born in 1902 in Portland, Oregon. His father, Robert H. Tate (1860-1934) operated an electrical shop, and patented an improved bicycle handlebar. His mother, Elizabeth Ruge Tate (1868-1956), was active in the Oregon Congress of Mothers, which was the precursor to the Oregon Parent Teachers Association. E. Mowbray Tate attended Portland Academy and Washington High School as a boy. He was admitted to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, but did not go because he believed he would fail the physical examination. He attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, from 1919-1923.

During the 1920s, Tate held a variety of jobs, including as a teacher and a temporary pastor, and received further education in New York and in San Anselmo, California. In 1929, he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister at the Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church in Portland, and afterward attended graduate school at Columbia University in New York. He graduated from Columbia in 1932. That same year, he married Josephine Louise Albert, and was appointed as a missionary to Thailand, where he worked for the next decade. In December 1941, Tate and his family were detained by the Japanese in Bangkok, but were exchanged in the summer of 1942. Following his missionary work, Tate embarked on a career in academics, serving as a counselor to Protestant students at Columbia University from 1942-1945; as a dean at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, from 1946-1947; as a dean at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, from 1948-1960; as a professor at Hanover College from 1961-1967; and as a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from 1967-1974.

Tate and Josephine had two daughters, Mary Carolyn (1935-1940) and Louise Genevieve (1940-1999). Josephine Tate died in 1973; the following year, E. Mowbray Tate married Henrietta Osterman Brotherton. E. Mowbray Tate died in Pasadena, California, in 1988.