Edmund D. “Ted” Fuller III (1934-2021) Fuller is the President’s Award recipient, given to a Rhode Islander involved with aviation who made his primary mark in another field. Fuller’s visionary entrepreneurship in the hospitality industry, combined with his extensive philanthropy, are the bases for this award. He founded and operated Gregg’s Taverns and Restaurants, and […]
Edson Fessenden Gallaudet (1871-1945), Aviation Pioneer/Aircraft Manufacturer In 1898, four years before the Wright Brothers, he constructed and flew a glider, now in the Smithsonian, which embodied the principle of the warping wing. In 1911 he learned to fly at the Wright school, earning US pilot’s license #32 and a similarly low number in France. […]
Vice Admiral Peter Garvin, US Navy, is President of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. An Annapolis grad, he is a career Naval Aviator who served until August, 2024 as President of the US Naval War College in Newport. “It is an honor to serve my teammates. It is the shared mission, the family […]
Antoine Gazda was an Austrian count, a race car driver, and a World War I fighter ace (on the losing side), but he spent World War II in Providence, living in suite 1009 of the Biltmore Hotel. The work he performed here in Rhode Island was considered so crucial to the Allied war effort that […]
Domenic Giarrusso has spent his life in aviation. At 101 years old (at the time of this writing), he served as an Army Air Corps flight engineer and mechanic in North Africa and Italy during World War II. After the war, he worked as an aircraft mechanic and supervisor at the Naval Air Rework Facility […]
Russ, an East Greenwich resident since 1965, served in the Navy from 1944 to 1969. During his flying career he landed on 21 different carriers; he also served on the USS Wasp for two years and USS Lake Champlain for one year. He flew F8F Bearcats with fighter squadron VF-19, and later transitioned to jets […]
2/LT Walter S. Gladding (1915- 1945), a Tuskegee Airman, was born in Plainfield, CT in 1915, the son of Walter and Elsie Gladding of 17 Olney Street, Providence. He attended local public schools, and later played football and ran track at Hope High School. He was an only child. He went on to Rhode Island […]
Major John Trevor Godfrey, USAAF (1922 – 1958), World War II Fighter Pilot Born in Canada, Major Godfrey moved to Woonsocket as a young boy. He was Woonsocket High School’s 1940 class president and a football star. He joined the RCAF in 1941 to avenge the death of his brother, and trained in Spitfires with […]
Newport-born Michael Gold (1920-) was a B-17 navigator with the 447th Bombardment Group whose flak-damaged plane was shot down by German fighters on just his fourth combat mission (January 30, 1944). Two crew members were killed by gunfire, and the others bailed out. Gold faced the difficulties and deprivations of Nazi POW camps with the […]
Captain Adolphus W. Gorton, US Navy (Ret), (1897-1989), was born January 29, 1897 in Pawtuxet, a direct descendant of the Gortons who founded the City of Warwick. He graduated from Moses Brown and entered Dartmouth in 1916, but left to join the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in France. He sailed abroad on May 5, […]
Major General William A. Gorton US Air Force (Ret) (1933- ) was born in Providence in 1933. He entered the Air Force as an aviation cadet in February 1954, and earned his wings and commission in June 1955. He flew F-100 Super Sabre fighters in France and Germany in the late 1950s. He returned to […]
Charles Gordon Greenhalgh (1895-1977) was born into a Pawtucket manufacturing family. Early in 1917, Greenhalgh and a number of Yale classmates left school to fight with the Allies, prior to US involvement.
Long-time Wakefield resident LCDR John “Jack” Greenwell, USN (Ret) (1922–2011) earned the Navy Cross, our nation’s second-highest military decoration, for dive-bombing and sinking a Japanese cruiser in April, 1945. Although he was born and raised in the Philadelphia area, Greenwell lived in Rhode Island for the better part of his life. He was a standout […]
LTC Charles E. Griffith, USAAF (1916-1944), Griffith was a fighter pilot who fought in the Aleutian Islands campaign of 1942/3, came to China in mid-1944 and joined the 76th Fighter Squadron of the famed 23rd Fighter Group. Born in North Dakota, he was a 1935 Hope High School graduate and all-state athlete who went on […]