Jean Teresino Yarnall

In September 1943, Jean Teresino Yarnall (1923-2013) was living in Hartford, CT and working for an insurance company. She decided to join the new Navy unit called “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service”, or WAVES.

She was sworn in on January 12, 1944 and attended a ten week boot camp at Hunter College. She then
volunteered for Link Instrument Training Instructor School (L.I.T.I.S.) in Atlanta, having chosen to train pilots
in cockpit instrumentation and blind flying. After a year at NAS Atlanta, she transferred back to the northeast,
first to Quonset Point and then to the auxiliary field in Groton, CT, where she served until the war ended. She
decided to stay in the Navy and returned to Quonset in 1946, where she attained the rank of Chief in March
of 1947. She met her future husband, Robert Yarnall, an aircraft mechanic and career Navy man, while he
was playing baseball for the Quonset team. They married in November of 1948, and she continued on active
duty until her pregnancy forced her honorable discharge on Feb 2, 1950. The Yarnalls lived in North
Kingstown until 1955, when they moved to the Potowomut section of Warwick/East Greenwich, where they
lived until she died in 2013.

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