• Jason Grow is an award-winning Boston-based photographer who specializes in photographing exceptionally accomplished, busy people with real time constraints in real environments. With a background based in photojournalism his experience has ranged from refugee camps to conference rooms. Jason is available for assignments locally, nationally and internationally.
• Corporate and Design clients include: Panera Bread, Fiera Capital, Entrada Therapeutics, Amylyx Therapeutics, Skanksa USA, VendPark, AccessCorp, First Republic Bank, DivcoWest, Flexion Therapeutics, MFS Investment Management, Sarepta Therapeutics, Fidelity Investments, Cross Harbor Capital, Modus Operandi, Jounce Therapeutics, CA Technologies, FirstData, STAR Networks, Matrix Partners, Waring School, Kingsley Montessori, Putnam Investments, Greylock Partners, Loring, Wolcott & Coolidge, Unison Realty Partners, VSA Partners, The Boston Company, Merrill Lynch, Sullivan & Worcester, PA Consulting Group (UK), Colliers International, EA Fish, Chevron, Textronic, Ask.com (Ask Jeeves), Imprivata, Sainsburys Plc. (UK), Redpoint Ventures, Microsoft, Chem Connect, Personic, Lucent among others.
• Editorial clients include major national and international magazines: Politico, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, US News & World Report, Reader's Digest, Forbes, Bloomberg Markets, Smart Money, Barron's, AARP Bulletin, Institutional Investor, Private Clubs Magazine, Investment Advisor, Der Spiegel, CRN, VAR Business, HHMI, New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Inc, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Sports Illustrated, Time Custom Publishing, US News & World Report, Bicycling, Boston Magazine, CFO, CIO Insight, Radcliffe & Harvard ED, Stanford Magazine - among others.
• A graduate of San Francisco State University with a degree in Journalism, Jason worked for seven years as a photojournalist for the San Jose Mercury News before turning freelance in 1996. He was a member of the news staff that won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper's coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. In addition to the rise of Silicon Valley, he photographed the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico and the Kurdish refugee crisis in Turkey and Northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf War.
Portrait Photographer, Portrait Photography, Boston Headshot Photographer, Boston Headshot Photography, Boston Headshots, Headshots, Boston Portrait Photographer, Boston Portrait Photography, Boston Corporate Headshots, Boston Corporate Photography, Boston Corporate Photography, Award Winning Photographer, Executive Headshots, Executive Portraits, Annual Report Photographer, Senior Portraits
Senior Portraits - $750 session.
We'll spend about an hour and a half in a variety of locations around Cape Ann. If there's someplace special you want to be photographed, let me know. Wardrobe is entirely up to you and we can do several changes of clothing. Importantly, your senior needs to feel comfortable and themselves. The idea afterall is to have fun and really show your daughter or son at their best and most relaxed.
Following the photo shoot, I'll provide you an editing gallery with 40-50 images for you to download and share - these files are great for smaller prints, social media and sharing. Additionally I will provide up to six fully retouched, high resolution files for making large prints, announcements etc. I'll gladly help you with the printing so you get the best results possible. You can order additional high res images for an additional per-image processing and retouching fee of $100.
Given the current Covid crisis, all shoots will be done with social distancing care so that everyone remains safe and healthy.
If you have any questions, please let me know. To book a session, just call: 978-884-7964 or jason@jasongrow.com
Senior Portraits - $800 session
We'll spend about an hour and a half in a variety of locations around Cape Ann. If there's someplace special you want to be photographed, let me know. Wardrobe is entirely up to you and we can do several changes of clothing. Most importantly, your senior needs to feel comfortable and themselves. The idea afterall is to have fun and really show your daughter or son at their best and most relaxed.
•••
Following the photo shoot, I'll provide you an editing gallery with 30-50 images for you to download and share.These files are great for smaller prints, social media and sharing. Additionally I will provide up to six fully retouched, high resolution files for making large prints, announcements etc. I'll gladly help you with the printing so you get the best results possible.
•••
You can order additional high res images for an additional per-image processing and retouching fee of $150.
•••
If you have any questions, please let me know. To book a session call: 978-884-7964 or jason@jasongrow.com
As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it's associated isolation, and massive increase in un- and under-employed members of the Cape Ann community on Massachusetts' North Shore, I and three other photographers, Bill Sumner, Shawn Henry and Paul Cary Goldberg embarked on a family porch-rait fundraiser for our community's food pantry, The Open Door (www.foodpantry.org). The goal was simple: make fun, intimate portraits in a socially distanced and safe manner.
We expected maybe 50-60 families would respond, but by the end of it we photographed about 250 families and organizations and raised about $30,000 for hunger relief for our neighbors in Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Essex, Ipswich and the rest of the Cape Ann, North Shore community.
The images in this gallery are a selection of my contributions to the effort.
KOREA & VIETNAM & The COLD WAR: THE FORGOTTEN WARS
In the wake of World War II and \"The Greatest Generation,\" the United States became embroiled in three major conflicts, one in Korea from 1950-1953; one in Vietnam, from 1962-1975; and the ever present Cold War.
In Korea, nearly 1,800,000 men and women served, 36,940 died, 92,000 were wounded and 3,373 are MIA. In Vietnam, 3.1M soldiers served in country, 58,220 died.
Veterans from both these conflicts returned home from their service to an ambivalent (in the case of Korea) if not downright hostile (Vietnam) reception.
This project is an effort to honor the men and women of Cape Ann who served, and preserve their stories.
Ten years ago, with tremendous community support, I produced an exhibition of Cape Ann's Greatest Generation - Veterans of WWII. Now, with the 50th anniversary of the end of our involvement in Vietnam, it is well past time to honor the service of those who answered their nation's call for the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the nebulous Cold War conflict.
Gloucester and the communities of Cape Ann have a long history of stepping up in times of war. Unlike the men and women who returned from Europe and the Pacific, these veterans returned to an altogether different reception: indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility. Every veteran who serves our nation, especially those who served during times of conflict, deserves respect and honor.
Over the course of the three years in Korea and the nearly 20-year Vietnam conflict, thousands of men and women on Cape Ann enlisted or were drafted into service. Many came home scarred visibly and invisibly and some never came home at all.
As a photojournalist, this is my small attempt to tell and preserve their stories. It also serves to remind us that while this is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the legacy of that conflict continues to impact the lives of those who served, as well as their families.
-Jason Grow
Robert Hull, 91
Gloucester, MA
Born: 12/11/1931
Died: 8/20/2023
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Sgt.
Service: US Air Force
Korean War
Spokane, WA
Dates of Service: 1950-1954
Robert Hull graduated GHS in 1949 and in 1950 he enlisted in the US Air Force as the US became embroiled in the Korean peninsula. He spent his time as an aircraft mechanic working on B-36 “Peacemaker” bombers. This would translate into a position at Logan Airport as a mechanic with Northeast Air and Eastern Airlines and eventually back home in Gloucester at Varian where he worked for 13 years.
He married Anne Harding in 1952 and the couple remained married for 52 years until her death in 2004. The couple had three children: Bobby, Nancy and Susan, eight grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Robert died August 20, 2023.
John Cluett, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 9/3/1946
Died: 9/24/2024
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Captain, 101st Airborne, 2-502 Strikeforce
Service: US Army
Camp Eagle, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1968-1971
Commendations: Silver Star, 2 Bronze Stars
John Cluett Jr. was born and raised in Gloucester and a Class of ’64 graduate of GHS. He joined the Army in 1968 at 21, ultimately becoming a captain in the 101st Airborne 2/502 Strikeforce, The Widow Makers, stationed at Camp Eagle in the Thua Thien province in Vietnam. His unit would often deploy for three weeks at a time in the jungle.
In April 1971, he was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry for his actions and leadership in rescuing personnel from a downed “dustoff” medevac helicopter under intense enemy fire. Forty years later he would run into the pilot of the downed helicopter, Fred Behrens, at a reunion, recognizing him by his big handlebar moustache. He was also awarded two Bronze Stars and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
Cluett made a career working at Bickford Marine in Gloucester. He has been married twice and has two children and two grandchildren and continued to live in Gloucester until his passing in September 2024.
Chris Larsen, 76
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/18/47
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Specialist 4th Class
Service: US Army
127th MP Company
D Company 58th Infantry
A/B Detachment 93rd MP Battalion
Vietnam (Qui Nhon, Phu Tai, Bong Son)
Dates of Service: 1967-1969
It would seem most fitting that the son of a Main St. shoe-shop owner and its eventual proprietor for over 60 years, Chris Larsen would bring home a pair of “Ho Chi Minh” sandals, crafted from old tires, when he returned from his service in Vietnam.
The plan after high school was to buy a motorcycle and travel the country. The US Army had other thoughts drafting Larsen in 1967 and deploying him as a military police officer for the duration of his service in Vietnam ending in 1969.
Back in Gloucester, in 1970, he met Joan Eastman on The Boulevard. The two married and have four children: Wendy, Laurie, Kristie and Kyle. His wife’s brother is fellow VN veteran Willy Eastman, “we were brothers-in-arms and brothers-in-law.”
Mike Favazza, 80
Allan “Doc” Goodhue III, 77
Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army
25th Infantry, 155th Artillery
Vietnam, Cu Chi – Tet Offensive, Tu Lai, Da Nang
Dates of Service: 1967-1969
“I met a guy from Gloucester. His unit got beat up a bit. I was a buck sergeant, and he ended up on my squad,” “Doc” Goodhue describes meeting Mike Favazza in the PX at base camp in Cu Chi, Vietnam. The pair conspired to get assigned to the same squad and ended up in the same Howitzer tank for six months in Tu Lai and Da Nang. “We’re like brothers,” says Goodhue.
John McKenna, 80
Gloucester, MA
Born/Raised: 2/23/45, Winthrop/Revere
Rank: Major (ret.)
Unit: 41st Signal Battalion, 21st Signal Group,
138th Aviation Company RR
Service: US Army
Da Nang, Quy Nhon, Nha Trang
Dates of Service: 1965-69, 1969-2005 (Army Reserves)
Recipient: Bronze Star
John McKenna’s father, John Sr., was a sea captain who commanded a Liberty ship in the Merchant Marines during WWII, but John Jr. wanted to fly. He signed up, in 1962, for the high school Naval Air Reserve program because he wanted to go to the Navy flight school. Instead, after a short stint at Mass Bay Community College, he ended up in the Army in 1965, still wanting to fly. The Army gave him his chance. Flight school at Fort Wolters, TX and then Ft. Rucker in Alabama prepared him to fly Hueys, “an incredibly wonderful machine to fly” which he would do in the Central Highlands from 1966-67. He received the Bronze Star for a litany of acts of bravery.
He returned to Ft. Wolters in 1967 as an instructor which really wasn’t his cup of tea. He picked up his fixed-wing qualifications and answered an ad for the Army Security Agency looking for pilots, a job that required him to get top-secret clearance, a process that would take nearly four months. As luck would have it, during those four months, he would meet Louise Tikkanen of Annisquam, at The Outside Inn, a folk music bar in Boston. “We dated by correspondence.” Sixty-nine days later, on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1968, they wed. They would share 53 years together before her passing in 2021.
In the following January 1969, John would return to Vietnam as part of the 138th Aviation Company RR flying fixed wing RU-8D Beechcrafts doing Aerial Radio Direction Finding, seeking out enemy locations by triangulating radio signals. He would do this until November when he left Vietnam for good. He and Louise would end up buying her family’s cottage in Annisquam and there they would have and raise three daughters, Meredith, Kathryn and Gretchen, “they led kind of a Huck Finn existence.” He has three grandchildren.
From 1969-1972 John held various jobs in the private sector, but the pull of aviation proved too strong and he took a civilian position with the aircraft maintenance office at Fort Devens as well as maintaining his position with the Army Reserves, a job that had him working with FEMA and other organizations. In 1983, and for a decade beyond, he flew helicopters for news and radio station reporting on traffic and weather as an “eye in the sky.” He retired from the Army Reserves in 2005 as a Major.
Robert Balzarini, 94
Rockport, MA
Born: 6/9/1931
Born/Raised: Rockport
Rank: Sergeant
Unit: US Marine Corps, 1st Division
Dates of Service: 1950-1953
Robert Balzarini’s father, Martin, a 1st generation immigrant from Italy and his mother Ernestine, who was born in Italy and came to America on a WWI troop ship, owned a butcher shop on Washington Street in Gloucester. Robert really didn’t want to follow his father’s footsteps as a butcher – so much so that he declined an offer to work in the relatively safety (if such a thing existed) as a cook in the Marines.
Instead, the 1949 Rockport HS graduate, opted for a three-year stint in Korea with the Marine’s 1st Division doing small arms and weapons repair. He was awarded the Korean Service Medal with 2 stars, the National Defense Service Medal, the UN Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal.
On his return home he went to work for the Bell Atlantic Telephone Company as a lineman and installer. He married Natalie Balzarini, and the couple had three daughters, Kathleen Chung, Judi Hunt and Debra Balzarini. They have one grandchild, Benjamin. The couple were married for 65 years before Natalie’s passing in 2022.
Robert retired in 1986 at the ripe old age of 55 and turned his attention to golf. When the Rockport Golf Club celebrated its 100th anniversary, Robert was its oldest active member. He was active in the Rockport Legion and continues to live in Rockport.
Harry R. Hoglander, 92
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/12/1933
Born/Raised: Queens, NY, Long Island &
Staten Island NY
Rank: Lt. Colonel
Unit: US Air Force
Dates of Service: 1951-1955 Taegu/Kimpo, Korea, Yokota Air Base, Japan; 1959-1965 Pease Airbase, NH; Massachusetts Air National Guard 1965-1986
The New York runs deep in Harry R. Hoglander. Born in Queens to Harry L., a “Wall Street guy,” and Erna Hoglander, he grew up in Queens and both Long and Staten Islands along with his brothers Arthur and Edwin. Not a keen scholar as a teenager, Harry quit high school in 1951 and jumped head-first into the US Air Force. Not long after basic training, he found himself as a tail-gunner on B-29 bombers flying 45-50 missions over Korea. He finished his tour as a Staff Sergeant.
Following his first 4-year hitch, Harry took advantage of the GI Bill, first getting his high school diploma and then attending Florida State University where he earned his B.A. in business administration. He also joined the ROTC program. With degree in hand, he went back in the service for another six years as an Air Force pilot stationed at several bases, but primarily Pease Airbase in Portsmouth NH. In 1965 he traded his military cockpit for one in the private sector and became a Captain for TWA, a job he’d have for the next 30 years. He continued his military service in the Massachusetts Air National Guard as a fighter pilot retiring in 1986.
While at TWA he became the head of the TWA Pilots Union and then VP of the National Pilots’ Union. In 1967, with all his extra time, he studied law at night at Suffolk Law School in Boston. Four years later he took the Bar in Florida even though he was living in New Hampshire with his then-wife, Joan, and their four teenage children. In 1974 Harry and his second wife Jane moved to Magnolia. The couple divorced in 1981, but Harry’s connection to Gloucester remained strong.
It was 1984, in Birmingham, Alabama, while attending a training event for rising Air Force colonels, when Harry met Judith, an opera singer from Kansas City with two children of her own. She asked him, “have you ever been to an opera?” The two married on Valentine’s Day four years later. They’ve been married now for 36 years. Between them they have six children, 12 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Harry hung up his professional wings in 1993 but continued his involvement in the labor and political arena lobbying Congress and running the pilots’ union in NYC. He served as special assistant to Congressman John Tierney from 1996-2002. In 2002 he was appointed by President George W. Bush, with US Senate confirmation to be on the National Mediation Board on the recommendation of Senator Kennedy because of his extensive work with unions. He was re-nominated by President Barak Obama and served in the role, multiple times as Chairman, until 2017.
Both Harry and Judith share a strong connection to civic engagement, Judith currently serves on the Committee for the Arts and Harry sits on the Community Preservation Committee.
Mark Nestor, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 2/5/1948
Born: Brooklyn, NY
Rank: Chief Warrant Officer (VN),
Major (US Army Reserves)
Unit: Company A, 4th Aviation Battalion,
4th Infantry Division
Service: US Army, Central Highlands, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1967-1971 (USANG & US Army Reserve 1971-1993)
Recipient: Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Air Medal with 20 clusters; Army Commendation Medal.
Mark Nestor’s connection with service runs deep in his family. His father Edward fought in an artillery unit with the storied Big Red 1 in WWII throughout Europe, while on the other side of the world, his mother Helen, an Army lieutenant nurse, was one of the Angels of Bataan - 77 nurses held for more than three years by the Japanese as POWs in the Philippines. His parents met while standing in the pay-line at a base in California. Edward was recovering from wounds he’d received in Europe and Helen had just been repatriated to the US from her internment and was collecting three years of back pay.
One of three adopted children, Mark was born in Brooklyn, NY. He started attending Penn State University in 1965, a college career that was interrupted by his service in Vietnam. He joined up in 1967 and became a helicopter pilot because, he said, “I didn’t want to walk.”
After basic training, a year of language school and flight school, he was deployed to Vietnam in December 1969 to serve in the 4th Aviation Battalion of the 4th Infantry based primarily in the Central Highlands, but not before being introduced to his future wife, Louise Savaggio, by his friend Danny Reed before shipping out.
In Vietnam, Mark flew Hueys for troop transports and Jet Rangers for observation & intelligence gathering missions. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1970 for heroism in conducting reconnaissance missions over hostile territory.
On his return stateside in late 1970, Mark worked for a while before returning to Penn State where he finished his BA. He and Louise married in 1972. He received his law degree from Boston University in 1976. He and Louise have just celebrated their 52nd anniversary. They have two children, Rachael and Jeremy. They moved to Gloucester in 1986 where he established a successful law firm.
Mark remained in the US Army Reserves until retiring as a Major in 1993. He continues his service as Commander of the CPT Lester S. Wass American Legion Post 3, a post he will have held for nearly 12 years when he steps down in June of this year. He remains deeply committed to advocating on behalf of veterans.
Francis J. “Kerry” Sullivan, Jr., 77
Rockport, MA
Born: June 10, 1948
Born: Cambridge, MA
Raised: Cambridge & Rockport MA
Service: US Army
Rank: E-4 Specialist
Unit: 523 Signal Battalion, AmeriCal Division
Dates of Service: 1968-1969
When Francis J. Sullivan, Jr. was christened, his grandfather, who had immigrated during the potato famine, declared that there would be no Juniors in the family and that Francis would be known as Kerry, after his home county in Ireland. His parents, June & the senior Francis were both veterans of WWII. June was an Army nurse in England and France, and his father was an electrician in the Navy in the Pacific. June was part of the WWII Veterans Project in 2015.
His family spent summers in Rockport until he was 14 when they moved permanently from their home in Cambridge. He graduated from Rockport H.S. in 1966. He and his friend Walter Rich enlisted in the Navy but received deferments to attend college (Kerry) and a vocational school (Walter). Unfortunately playing pool and cards won out over academics and Kerry left Salem State and lost his deferment. In 1968 he was drafted into the Army. He trained at Fort Gordon as a radio relay carrier attendant and was shipped off to a communications bunker in Chu Lai, Vietnam.
“We got hit a lot because they wanted to knock out our communications.” In one attack, he was running toward the bunker door yelling at another solider that “they” were right on top of them. That soldier dove down and landed on top of Kerry just as an RPG round exploded about 10 feet from them. The other soldier was wounded and sent to the hospital. Kerry had no obvious injury but attributes a subdural hematoma that he experienced later in life to the “non-contact blast injury.” He also lost some hearing because of the blast. He spent 13 months in Vietnam and was shipped home in October 1969.
On his return, Kerry really wanted to get back to school. He went up to Vermont to earn money at a ski area and intended to re-enroll at Salem State for the Spring semester, but the ongoing protests and sit-ins effectively shut the university down. “Even the WWII vets were antagonistic towards the Vietnam vets saying it wasn’t a real war.” He went back to Vermont, saved money and then traveled to Australia where he had visited during a week of leave while in Vietnam. He returned to Rockport and Salem State in 1971 and received his degree in Social Work in 1975. While at school, working during the summer, he met his future wife Patricia Nelson, from Boulder, Colorado, at Front Beach. She was doing summer work in the fish factories, and he was working at the Rockport Rope & Twine. Three months after meeting, they were married and have been for 54 years. They have two children, Kacia Reilley and Kelsey Sullivan, and two grandchildren.
Kerry took a Social Studies teaching job at Gloucester’s O’Maley Middle School (12 years) and taught boat building at the Museum School and was a lifeguard for the Town of Rockport. While teaching he went to night school at New England School of Law and received his JD. Patty wanted to head back west so they moved to New Mexico where Kerry got a job as a Special Attorney General. Summers in Rockport proved too much of a lure for Kerry, so for five years he came home to Cape Ann.
In 1999, due to PTSD, he had an emotional breakdown. He began to work as an attorney with the Committee for Public Counsel, essentially a contracted court-appointed lawyer. This he did for 12 years in addition to his own private practice. Starting in 2010 he began to have serious health issues leading to multiple heart surgeries and subdural hematoma which he attributed to the blast in Chu Lai. He fully retired in 2014.
He and Patty are currently in the process of moving permanently to Corrales, New Mexico just north of Albuquerque. Kerry has been writing a book about his experiences and recovery from his brain injury called The Long Triage.
Earl Kishida, 79
Rockport, MA
Born: February 14, 1946
Born: Honolulu, Hawaii
Raised: Hawaii, France, New York, Germany, Washington (State).
Service: US Navy
Rank: Captain
Unit: USS Rogers (DD-876); Underwater Demolition Team 12 (UDT-12); Reserve Affiliation: NR SEAL Team Two; NR Naval Special Warfare Group 2; JRU Iceland Defense Force.
Dates of Service: 1968-1973 (Active Duty); 1988-2003 (Reserves)
Earl Kishida’s grandfather Eiichi Kishida was sent by the Japanese government to Hawaii from Japan to establish schools for Japanese laborers working in the Hawaiian sugar cane and pineapple plantations. Eiichi met and married a Japanese-American teacher, Tamae Asao. They had three children including Earl’s father, Tatsuo Kishida. In February 1942, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was issued, resulting in the internment of Eiichi and some 1,500 Japanese, (US citizens and aliens), in camps in the continental United States. He was repatriated to Japan in 1943 and never returned, leaving Tamae and their three children behind. Eiichi was interned in several camps on the west coast of the US. He was repatriated to Japan in 1943 and never returned to Hawaii, leaving, Tamae and their children behind. Earl met his grandfather years later for the first and only time in 1969 when USS Rogers made a port of call in Yokosuka, Japan.
Tatsuo, Earl’s father, was drafted at the end of WWII and became career Army. He married Mikako Okimoto. Earl was born in Hawaii in 1946, as was his brother Carl two years later, but when he was nine, his father and the family began the career Army march through multiple postings. By the time Earl graduated from high school in 1964 in Tacoma, Washington, he’d lived in France, New York, Germany and finally Tacoma.
He received a Naval ROTC Scholarship to Yale University. “Back then Yale was a really different place.” He earned a B.S. degree in Administrative Sciences. He was commissioned an ensign in 1968 and became the Damage Control Assistant (DCA) on USS Rogers (DD-876), a WWII-era destroyer. As one of the engineering division officers, the DCA was responsible for the ship’s stability, fire-fighting, and damage control during battle. After a western Pacific (WESTPAC) deployment to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Korea, Earl volunteered for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training.
He completed the 26-week BUD/S training in September 1970 and was assigned to UDT-12 in Coronado, CA. Further training included U.S. Army Airborne School and SEAL Cadre training. His first assignment with UDT-12 was as Assistant Platoon Commander for the hydrographic reconnaissance and using explosives to clear beaching channels. While forward-deployed with UDT-12 in the Philippines, his other assignments included UDT-12 Diving Officer and platoon commander at Nam Can in the Mekong delta in support of SEAL platoons and U.S. Navy Riverine forces.
In January 1972, as a lieutenant, Earl was assigned as the Officer-in-Charge of the UDT-12 Apollo 16 Recovery Team. On recovery day April 27, 1972, working from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, the recovery team jumped from helicopters and attached the floatation safety collar to the command module. Opening the hatch of the command module, the team helped transfer the three astronauts to the rescue helicopter
In June 1972, Earl was assigned as Operations Officer for Naval Special Warfare Group (WESTPAC Det) in Okinawa. This staff oversaw the SEAL, UDT, and boat support operations in the Western Pacific.
He left Navy Active Duty in September 1973 and enrolled at Harvard Business School. Upon receiving his MBA, he worked for a year for offshore/diving contractor Oceaneering International, Inc., then joined Atlantic Diving Company, started by a former SEAL, in Gloucester. He decided that he wanted to live on Cape Ann and changed his career to accommodate that goal, working at Cyrk, then as a financial planner.
Earl moved to Rockport in 1978 with his wife Sharon Byrne Kishida whom he met while at graduate school. He re-affiliated with the Navy Reserve from 1988-2003 and served in command and staff positions including tours as Commanding Officer, NR SEAL Team 2 and Commander, JRU Iceland Defense Force. He retired from the work world in 2022. He and Sharon have two sons, Perry and Christian. He now spends his time sailing, ski racing, gardening, and seeking good espresso.
Ron Arabian, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/3/1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Specialist E-4 (Sergeant)
4th Division, 2nd & 9th Artillery, B Battery
Attached to the 25th Infantry
Service: US Army
Ban Me Thuot, Dak To, Kon Tum Province, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1968-1972
When Ron Arabian graduated from Gloucester High School in 1967, he was planning on becoming an engineer. He was accepted and started to attend the Franklin Institute in Boston. Having to work for his tuition took its toll and he left in February 1968 only to be drafted by the Army in March.
The following October, as part of the 4th Division, he and his team were assigned to the 25th Division, in the 2nd of the 32nd infantry battalion, a field artillery unit that functioned as a reactionary force securing LZs or Landing Zones. He would be part of securing 18 different LZs during his tenure in-country.
“I’m proud of what I did; proud of how I reacted. I knew what my job was and I did it to the best of my ability.” His battery operated six M102 howitzers with his being nicknamed “Snoopy.” At one point during his year in Vietnam, he and his team were assigned to a Special Forces group to train South Vietnamese Army troops how to use the weapon.
Ron is one of five children (Kay, James Jr. (Fred), Clair and Kevin) born to his mother Janette and father James. While he was in Vietnam, his older sister Kay, who worked at Gorton’s, sent him a reminder of home in the form of a half-gallon of canned steamed clams.
Following his active service in 1970, he took a position at the Gloucester Marine Railways where his father, James, worked as a blacksmith. He worked there for 21 years becoming a foreman before moving across the harbor for a job at Rose’s Marine for another 16 years and eventual retirement.
Ron has been married three times, the second of which, to Cindy, who would make him a father to son, John and daughter, Shannon. He has been with his current wife Colleen for 27 years.
John Laurie, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/8/1947
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Army
Rank: E-4, Medic
Unit: B-Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry,
198th Light Infantry & 23rd Medical Battalion
Chu Lai, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1966-1968
Recipient: Bronze Star with Valor 12/9/1967
“Sometimes I wonder if it was real, but it was real.”
John Laurie was drafted into the Army in 1966 and served as a medic until his discharge in September of 1968. The son of Mary and Donald Laurie, himself a WWII veteran who served in the Pacific, John is the oldest of five siblings: three sisters and a brother and grew up on Trask Street. He graduated from Gloucester High School in 1965.
He began his service at Fort Hood before being transferred to Ft. Sam Houston for medic training and eventual assignment to B Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry. His entire brigade of 5200 men were shipped out on two transports out of Oakland to his post in Chu Lai, Vietnam. He spent six months in-country, on patrol with his infantry unit, before being assigned to the 23rd Medical Battalion for six months. “That was mind blowing. That’s where I really learned to respect Army nurses. They’re the most wonderful people on earth.”
On December 9th, 1967, while on patrol, running through a rice paddy, he and his unit were ambushed. John turned back, along with another soldier and rushed to pull a fallen comrade from the paddy and evacuated him by helicopter. Sadly, that soldier was KIA. John was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor for his actions.
On his return to Gloucester, he would continue his first responder identity as a Gloucester firefighter starting in 1971, a position he’d hold until 1992 when he retired. Simultaneous to being a firefighter, John worked as a longshoreman on the Gloucester waterfront. He’s photographed with a “jungle postcard,” cardboard ripped from a C-ration box and sent to his mother, Mary.
John was married and has a stepson, John Laine. He continues to live in Gloucester.
Robert Rutchik, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 4/22/1947
Born/Raised: Norwich, CT/Gloucester
Service: US Army
Rank: E-5 Sergeant
Long Bin, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1969-1971
Bob Rutchik was born in Norwich CT to Louis and Yetta Rutchik in 1947. Nine years later his father moved the family, including his younger sister Diane, to Gloucester to join the family business, The Factory Outlet, a clothing company located on the waterfront. He graduated Gloucester High in 1965 and for a short time attended UMass Boston and worked for the Gloucester DPW.
He joined the Army in late 1968. In January 1969 he was sent to Boebligen, Germany to work the motor pool for the first few months of his service before being transferred to a heavy equipment supply company in Long Bin, Vietnam north of Saigon. He finished his tour in late 1971 and headed home.
“I got serious about education. Three years as an enlisted man in the Army will do that to you.” Serious he was. He received his B.A. in political science from UConn in 1974, then earned his Ph.D. from Penn State, also in political science. He went to work for the federal government in the Energy Information Administration, a department that compiles and analyzes all information regarding everything related to energy production. He did that until leaving government service in 2010.
Bob remains connected to politics through his connection with the Gloucester Democratic City Committee.
Mike Cody, 79
Gloucester, MA
Born: 3/20/46
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: E-5, Sergeant, Recon Marine
Unit: US Marine Corps, 1st & 3rd Force Recon Companies
Quang Tri Province, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1965-1969
Mike Cody, the son of a fisherman, grew up on Warner Street with his two sisters, Deichie (Patricia) and Marcia, and his parents Evelyn and Joseph. His father was a Gloucester fisherman who owned the fishing vessel Cape May. Mike graduated from Gloucester High School in 1965 and promptly enlisted in the US Marine Corps.
Following his Marine training, Mike was posted to the Quang Tri Province along with 239 other highly specialized Marines in the 1st and 3rd Force Reconnaissance Companies. He would spend the next two years running missions in 4-man teams that would be in the field anywhere from two to ten days or more. They’d start with 75-pound packs carrying everything they’d need for the mission at hand. “We weren’t resupplied. When you ran out, you had to live off the land.”
Mike left the Marines in 1969 and returned to Gloucester where he worked construction, owned a gym for a while and served as a Gloucester firefighter for a dozen years. He was married and is the father of three: Anne Marie Oliveira, Jackie Howard and Jay Cody, and the grandfather of seven.
When asked whether he kept touch with anyone from his days in Vietnam, “they’re all on the wall.”
Ed Kaznocha, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 7/5/1948
Born/Raised: Waltham, MA
Rank: Sergeant
Unit: US Air Force
1967-69: Myrtle Beach AFB, South Carolina
1970-71: Korat RTAFB, Thailand
1971: Homestead AFB, Florida
Dates of Service: 1967-71
Ed Kaznocha grew up around hard work. His father, Ed, owned the Bedford Diner and his mother, Mary, was a seamstress and union steward. On the heels of graduating from Waltham High in 1967, he enlisted in the US Air Force, following the example of seven uncles who served in the military in WW-II. Though he and a friend enlisted early in the ‘buddy system’ a serious injury prevented his friend from going to basic training with Ed.
Ed achieved sergeant while stationed at Myrtle Beach AFB before being assigned to the 38th Combat Support Group, Korat RTAFB Thailand, to fuel and service aircraft flying sorties over Vietnam, until January of 1971. His final orders were to service Air Force One and other aircrafts with the 31st Combat Support Group at Homestead AFB, FL, where he fulfilled his 4-year commitment stateside.
He began college at the University of South Carolina before being sent to Thailand, and resumed college after being discharged, at Curry College in Milton MA, where he earned his BA in business and economics, and met his future wife, Amy — they married on campus in 1975. As a labor market economist for the Commonwealth of MA, Ed researched the state’s labor market and wrote reports on many topics, including military spending in Massachusetts and the effect of tax breaks for the film industry.
The couple moved to Gloucester in 1978, when Amy was an editor at Para Research. Two of their sons are GHS graduates and a third son lives in Alaska. Ed and Amy have two grandchildren.
Arley Pett, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: August 28, 1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: E-5 Sergeant
Unit: 58th Military Police Company
Dates of Service: 1970-1972
Arley Pett and his two brothers Barry (a US Army Captain) and Toby are first- generation Americans, the sons of Polish and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who came to the United States before WWII. Their father, Dr. Morris Pett, was a general practitioner at Addison Gilbert hospital and the City Physician for over 40 years. Their mother, Faye, a high school teacher in New Jersey before marrying, was an active volunteer in the city. They grew up in the family home on Beach Rd., now the home of Arley’s daughter Isabel. Arley was married to Miriam Pett for 43 years.
Arley graduated from Gloucester H.S. in 1966 having served in the ROTC band and the Cape Ann Symphony as a trombone player. He attended Boston University and studied Physical Geography/Meteorology and Climatology with the intention of becoming a TV weatherman. The draft and the US Army would derail those plans.
Drafted in 1970, Arley quickly became a squad leader and then platoon leader because of his experience in ROTC. After basic, he was assigned to MP (Military Police) school and volunteered for Correctional Training school in hopes of securing a stateside assignment and an additional stripe (Spec. 4). He figured that with 40 stockades in the US and only one in Vietnam, he was less likely to be sent overseas. The odds were in his favor. He finished his training in the top half of his class and achieved both his goals. He was posted to the Fort Bragg stockade in North Carolina and spent a year as a cell block commander. Several times he escorted prisoners from there to the stockade in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Also in his favor was the decision by then president, Richard Nixon, to return the military to an all-volunteer force. This shortened Arley’s tour by about six months. On his return, he utilized the GI Bill and returned to BU earning his graduate degree in Occupational Therapy with clinical work in mental health. He worked for the VA (Veterans Affairs) for 35 years in Boston, Jamaica Plain and Brockton. In 2008 he became the Director of Veterans Services for the Cape Ann Veterans Services, a position he held for 4 ½ years.
He now spends his time selling antique military toys and figurines. He also serves the City of Gloucester as chairman of the Historic District Commission and has been actively involved with the Temple Ahavat Achim on the building committee that rebuilt the Gloucester temple follow a devastating fire in 2007.
Robert Muniz, 94
Gloucester, MA
Born: 3/7/1931
Died: 4/27/2025
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Sergeant
Service: US Marine Corps
Unit: Cherry Point Air Base, SC,
Opa-Locka Marine Base, FL
Dates of Service: 1951-1954
Robert “Bob” Muniz was born on Green Street and moved to Mt. Pleasant Avenue in the third grade. His parents William McKinley Muniz, a Gloucester Police detective, and Winifred Harnish had nine children. Bob was the third youngest. All six of his brothers served in the military, three were WWII veterans.
He graduated from Gloucester High in 1949 which included two years in the ROTC – a requirement at the time. Upon his graduation, he tried to get a job at a local bank but was turned down, so he decided to enlist. The day he went to sign up, the Navy was full and the Army was full, so he joined the Marines.
After basic at Parris Island, Bob served at Camp Lejeune, NC; Cherry Point, SC; and Opa-Locka, FL where he was a truck dispatcher. He left the service in February 1954 and returned to Gloucester. Utilizing the GI Bill, Bob enrolled in Holy Cross, the first in his family to go to college, and earned a degree in accounting. Holy Cross became be a common thread for him and his family: his four sons, a son-in-law, and three granddaughters all attend the college.
In 1960, on Good Harbor Beach, Bob met Jean Abrahamson, a nursing student at Addison Gilbert Hospital. The two married in July of 1960 and have six children (Paul, Matt, Sandy, Mark, MaryAnne and Steven). Bob worked for the IRS for a while and then took a position at United Shoe in Beverly and attended Harvard Business School. He ultimately started his own tax business. He worked his way through the ranks at the Gloucester Co-op Bank (now BankGloucester) ultimately becoming President, CEO and Chairman of the Board. His son Paul carried on the military service tradition of the family in the Navy as an anti-sub and nuclear weapons officer on the USS Ramsey.
Bob and Jean, married for 63 years, have 15 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Bob passed away on April 27, 2025. He is photographed with his son and Navy veteran, Paul Muniz.
Tom Piraino, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 10/7/47
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Spec-5 Sergeant
Service: US Army
Unit: 4th Armored Division, S-2 Radar Unit, Germany;
G-2 Intelligence, Americal Division Chu Lai, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1966-1969
Commendation: Bronze Star
“We used to look at them and they used to look at us,” Tom Piraino says of the Russian soldiers he observed while serving in the 4th Armored Division in Germany. While Vietnam was a hot war on the other side of the world, the Cold War was simmering in Europe. Tom spent 18 months with the S-2 Radar Unit in Germany before being transferred to Vietnam and an intelligence unit with the Americal Division in Chu Lai.
The Granite Street son of James and Francis Piraino, and one of four children, Tom graduated in from Gloucester High School in 1965 before joining the Army in 1966. He was drafted and decided to enlist instead.
During his service in Vietnam, Tom was assigned to work with the G-2 as an intelligence gatherer which meant a lot of time spent in helicopters. He was right in the room with the general when they got all the briefings on KIA/MIA and POWs. It was “not good” recalling the flow of information he received in his role. He received the Bronze Star for meritorious service under enemy fire. His future brother-in-law, Sammy Piscitello would be one of those killed in action in 1968, one of 11 Gloucester men to die in Vietnam.
Tom returned to Gloucester in 1969 and attended Beverly Community College where he learned to be a machinist taking night courses and ultimately worked at Bomco in Gloucester for more than 30 years, finally retiring at 67. He has been married to Mary Piscitello for 50 years and they have three children, James Thomas and Jaclyn, and ten grandchildren.
“I didn’t even want to tell anyone I was a Vietnam veteran. I love the United States. I love my country. I did my time,” Tom said. “The veterans of Gloucester are all the same. We love our country. We’re too old now, but if we got called, we’d go again.”
Josephine “Jo Ann” Sanfilippo, 79
Gloucester, MA
Born: 2/9/1946
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Navy WAVES
Rank: E4 Communications Yeoman 3rd Class
Dates of Service: 1964-1967
Jo Ann Sanfilippo grew up ‘down the fort,’ living on Fort Square until she graduated from Gloucester High in 1964 and enlisted in the Navy. The daughter of Nina and Louis Benson, an identical twin to Elizabeth, and sister to four more siblings, Jo Ann knew she wanted to join the military, “I wanted to since I was little.”
Her first posting was at the US Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland for basic training. She was then stationed at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, where she was trained on the job in communications and teletype. “I hated typing in school, but I became a teletype operator and loved it.” She spent three years in Pensacola.
Once out of the military she moved to NY City for three years, where she worked as a teletype operator, before returning to Gloucester in 1971. She was hired at United Shoe in Beverly as a teletype operator. Years later she met and married Anthony Sanfilippo and together they raised their three sons, James, Joseph & Nino. While raising her sons she worked for the Gloucester School Department as a bus driver and in the school cafeterias. She now has four grandchildren.
“Not many people can say they did what they wanted to do in life, but I did. It’s the thing I’m most proud of - except for my children.”
George Benson, 70
Gloucester, MA
Born 12/4/1955
Born/Raised: Gloucester/Various, MA
Service: US Navy
Rank: Petty Officer 3d Class
Dates of Service: 1973-1976
George Benson, born in Gloucester, was going to high school in Methuen in 1973 when he turned 17. The ongoing product of the foster care system, George and all his seven brothers and sisters were taken into care and placed either in foster homes or orphanages. His parents John Colby Benson and Jenny Lane were incapable of caring for them properly. George, the last of the children, was six months old when the state took him. He guesses he was raised in 5-7 homes before he left school and his last foster home in Methuen at 17 to join the Navy in 1973.
When he joined the Navy, he wanted to be a cook and the Navy obliged, assigning him first aboard the USS Newman K. Perry, a destroyer. He was reassigned in 1975 until the end of his service in 1976.
“I more feel for my brothers.” His brother Rusty was with the 101st Airborne and the recipient of a Bronze Star in 1969 but died of small cel lung cancer after exposure to Agent Orange, and another brother Tommy was in heavy artillery also with the US Army in 1970.
When he returned in 1976 he burned everything he had that had to do with Vietnam – his discharge papers, his uniform, all because of all the guys they left behind. He did return to Methuen however and finished his studies to get his high school diploma. He met a girl, got married. It didn’t work out and he headed off to Reno, Nevada among other places. In 1983 he was back in Gloucester and has been here since.
He met Dawn Burfoot and married her in 1989 and three years later they had their son, Dylan Benson, now a Gloucester City Councilor. George continued his cooking career working at Captains Courageous, The Easterly, and the Hancock House. He’s been a landscaper, a carpenter and for the past 25 years a clammer.
Wellesley “Willy” Eastman, 79
Gloucester, MA
Born: 3/13/46
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Specialist E-5
Service: US Army, 101st Airborne Div.
& 173rd Airborne Div.
Bien Hoa & Dak To, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1965-1968
Commendations: Air Medal with 22 Oak Leaf Clusters
The son of a WWII Navy veteran, Willy initially wanted to join the Air Force in 1965 to learn a trade. Because the recruitment office was closed, the 1964 GHS graduate ended up signing with the Army in 1965. He did his basic training at Ft. Dix, NJ and a stint at Ft. Eustis in Virginia where he trained as a helicopter mechanic. The next step for him was Ft. Benning and paratrooper jump school then off to Dak To, Vietnam assigned to the 101st Airborne Division.
After serving for a short while as a mechanic in Bien Hoa, he eagerly volunteered to be a crew chief on a helicopter gunship because he wanted to fly. As part of the 173rd Airborne, he would man the M-60 machine guns for a year aboard a helicopter that escorted “slicks” or troop transports. In addition to escorts, they would clear LZs (landing zones) so the slicks could land and drop off or pick up troops.
He and his crew survived a mechanical failure that ended up with his helicopter crashing deep into the canopy of trees. After regaining consciousness, he realized that a big chuck of the helicopter engine was occupying the seat where he’d been sitting. The helicopter crew that finally found them had to lower a rope down and individually pluck each crewman to safety.
Upon his return to Gloucester, his friend Bob Grover talked him into going into the construction business. He thought he would join the fire department and continue with construction, but the deadline for the exam had passed. He ended up taking the police exam at age 34. He served as a Gloucester Police officer for 32 years before retiring.
In August 1969 he married Catherine Schmorrow and the couple would have three children: Ann-Marie Luster, Jennifer Marshall and Aaron Eastman, and eight grandchildren. This year they will celebrate their 55th year together.
Before leaving Dak To, Vietnam in 1968, Willy took a clump of mud from his boots and tucked it into a Sucrets box as a memento. He held onto that tiny bit of Vietnam until 2023 when he quietly dug it into the flower bed surrounding the newly dedicated Vietnam Memorial in Stage Fort Park.
Ralph Fatello, 74
Hampton, NH
Born: 7/26/1951
Born/Raised: Lynn/Beverly
Service: US Marine Corps
Rank: Lance Corporal
Unit: Fox Co. 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines 3rd MarDiv
Dates of Service: 1969-1971
In 1968 a Marine recruiter came to Beverly High School where Ralph Fatello was a senior. Hearing that Ralph was a talented artist, the recruiter promised that he would become a combat artist and that’s all Ralph needed to know. At 17, he had to get his parents, Gus and Eva, to sign his pre-enlistment papers. “My dad and all my uncles served in WWII.”
At Parris Island during basic, he became a “mouse” for a gunnery sergeant. “I’m just going along for the ride. I didn’t care because I was going to be an artist.” On the day that he needed to qualify on the rifle range he noticed his rifle coach had a large meatball sub. His gunnery sergeant told him that if he shot ‘expert’, he’d get the sub. He did, and he did, but that changed his direction dramatically. On the day he graduated he learned he wasn’t going to be an artist for the Marines, “we don’t want you drawing pictures if you can shoot like that” they told him.
He became a squad leader operating out of Camp Carroll in Dong Ha near the DMZ with North Vietnam. Every couple of weeks he and his squad would fly out to the USS Okinawa for some recuperation. The first time he saw the flight deck of the ship he thought that if he had a skateboard, he could ride it. He wrote to his dad who sent the skateboard, and one day, during a typhoon when he was supposed to be in his rack, he went to the ship’s deck and made one pass. “It was awful.” The skateboard was confiscated, and he thought he was going to be court martialed.
When it came his time to go home in 1970, his lieutenant pulled out the confiscated skateboard and all the guys in his squad signed it. “Nobody got killed in my squad. My squad all made it back.”
On his return to Massachusetts, he attended the Art Institute of Boston, graduating in 1974. This would lead to a career as an artist at various newspapers and advertising agencies. He worked for the Gloucester Daily Times from 1984-1987.
In addition to art, Ralph was heavily involved in the Boston punk and New Wave music scene as a member of The Vinny Band, opening for the Police their very first night in Boston as well as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was also singer, song writer and guitar player in bands Semper Fi and The Nor’Easters.
He met his wife Cory at a club in Boston and the couple have three kids and five grandchildren. In 1990 they moved to Hampton, NH, “I’m a surfer. It’s huge in my life. When I came back from ‘Nam, surfing saved my life.”
Herb White - 79
Gloucester, MA
Born: 8/8/1946
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Army
Rank: Spec. 4
325th Signal Detachment
Dates of Service: 1965-1967
“I got drafted at 19, in Vietnam before I as 20, and out of the Army the day before I was 21. I couldn’t even drink.” Thusly, Herb White outlines the irony of being under 21 in the military – charged with risking one’s life, but unable, legally, to have a beer on the way.
Herb was born in 1946 to Herb and Mary White and lived mostly on Granite Street growing up. His father was a housepainter. The oldest of four boys, he graduated from Gloucester High School in 1964 and was drafted in 1965.
Sent to the Mekong Delta to a base in Sok Trang with the 325th Signal Detachment he repaired and installed radio equipment in helicopters that had been shot up. “You do what you gotta do. What choice do you have? I did what I was told to do and I got through it.”
Herb returned home in 1967 and started a life-long career in construction. In 1970 he married his wife Sandra (Sandy). They have two daughters, Janelle and Alison, and five grandchildren. Married for 45 years, Sandy died in 2015. He now spends his time hunting and fishing.
A dozen years ago he joined a PTSD group for veterans, “we got home and we weren’t too popular. We were fighting for our country, but we were losing lives over there.”
Avis Murray, 88
Gloucester, MA
Born: 9/20/37
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Women’s Army Corps
Rank: E-5 Sergeant 1st Class
Unit: Various
Dates of Service: 1956-1965
“I was the tomboy of the neighborhood. Pick-up football games at Newell, baseball, Annie Gosbey and I were the first to play baseball.” Avis Murray grew up with her sister Estella and their mother, Ruth Johnson Murray, on Exchange Street. Her mother had left her father and worked at the W. T. Grant Co. department store to support the family. Avis attended Hovey School, Central Grammar and Gloucester High School where the Sawyer Medal honoree finished first in her class in 1955. “I got a year’s subscription to Reader’s Digest.”
The future tennis pro would sow the seeds of her career down at the courts in Stage Fort Park, playing all day long after walking her grandmother to her job at The Cupboard. She bought her first racquet for $5. “I remember the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I always wanted to serve my country.” She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corp in 1956 for a two-year hitch while she hoped to get into Salem State College. At the end of her first enlistment, she re-upped for a year only to receive a call shortly thereafter letting her know she’d gotten accepted at the college. She stayed with the Army.
She would extend again for three more for a total of six, working transportation, personnel, the JAG’s office and as a company clerk. She became an aide to General Charles Tank and along with it, top-secret clearance.
By 1960 she was transferred to Bremerhaven, Germany where she worked in public relations publishing a newspaper for the Air Force, Navy and Army. In 1962 she returned home to Gloucester, got a job at a savings bank in town and 89 days later decided to re-enlist. “I was lost.” She re-upped for three more years and a posting at Fort Devens. “I worked for the greatest guy, Col. Morris Montgomery.”
When she had two years left, she volunteered to go to a developing conflict area called Vietnam. Unfortunately for her, they wanted a five-year commitment and she wasn’t prepared to sign for quite that long. In 1965 she left the WACs and again returned to Gloucester. She would get a job as a secretary for a while, but “my love was tennis. I wanted to teach tennis ten hours per day for $10.” She started working at Bass Rocks as the tennis pro in 1971 and has been there ever since.
Samuel Calomo, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/7/47
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Medic, Spec. 5th Class
Service: US Army, 199th Light Infantry Brigade
Long Binh, Bien Hoa
Dates of Service: 1967-1969
Sam Calomo, born and raised in Gloucester, he graduated from Gloucester High School in 1965 and took a job at GE where he worked for two years before being drafted in 1967. Sent to Fort Dix, NJ, which he described as awful, cold and miserable, he was presented with a choice: become a medic or be sent to Vietnam as a combat soldier. “I can’t be a medic, I’m afraid of needles and blood. I can’t do it.” But do it he did and after six months of training at Fort Ord in Monterey, CA, he was deployed to Vietnam with a mortar company. He spent five months in the field.
After returning to Gloucester, and GE, he was married to Carol Bradshaw for four years with whom he had a son, Sam Jr. In 1977 he took a position at the US Post Office. In 1983 he married Susan Wiley and would be with her for forty years before her passing in 2023. They have three grandchildren. Sam remains active with the Disabled American Veterans.
David Lloyd, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 8/15/47
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Specialist E-4 MOS 71Q20
Service: US Army
Cam Ranh, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1966-1968
We were the “Park Kids” says David Lloyd – who grew up in Riverdale Park. One of five children, his father left when he was two and it was his grandfather and uncle, he says, who taught him to survive. A graduate of GHS class of 1965, Lloyd was drafted into the Army in 1966 and volunteered to go to Vietnam. “Four of us volunteered and the four of us came back.” He served until July of 1968 extending his tour an additional three months.
He spent his service as an information specialist primarily at Cam Ranh which was an Air Force base during the war. “There was sand in the food and sand in the bunks.” Assigned to the 44th Medical Brigade he spent his time interviewing convalescing wounded soldiers.
On his return to Gloucester he took work as a painter and eventually became a licensed electrician, apprenticing with his best friend, Vito Favalaro. He worked all over Canada and the United States, a member of IBEW 103. He retired as an electrician at 60. Lloyd would have three marriages, the longest, 40 years, to Ida Scola, with whom he had two children, Brian Lloyd and Bethany Parachi.
Peter Asaro, 72
Gloucester, MA
Born: 3/29/1953
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Navy
Stationed: USS America, USS Nimitz
Attack Squadron – NAS Oceana,
VA-35 “Black Panthers”
Rank: Petty Officer 3rd Class
Dates of Service: 1972-1976
Raised on “Portagee Hill,” Peter Asaro is the son of fisherman and WWII naval veteran, Peter Asaro and Jean Sonia Asaro. He attended Gloucester High School where he was class president his freshman and sophomore years, was in the ROTC, and from which he graduated in 1971.
He knew, in 1972, that his draft number was coming up, “I was pissed about it because my family was poor and couldn’t send me to college,” so he decided to join the Navy along with its four-year enlistment. The Navy ended up sending him to school to be a cook and then on board the USS America where he worked as a commissary man. That led to becoming an apprentice to the captain’s cook and cooking in the officers’ mess.
At the time, the USS America was operating in an area off North Vietnam called “Yankee Station.” The collection of naval ships stationed there were colloquially referred to as the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club, but this was not the deck shoes and polo shirt crowd. “It was like living at an airport – controlled chaos.” It was from these flight decks that flight missions were being launched over Vietnam. “It was really noisy all the time and there was lots of tension on the boat.”
There were 5000 men aboard the America, but Peter was primarily assigned to work directly with the officers and pilots as a steward. The upside of this assignment was that he was billeted in the officers’ quarters instead of one of the 300-men bunks.
In 1974 the USS America was reassigned to the Mediterranean and in 1975, Peter was reassigned to the newly commissioned nuclear carrier, USS Nimitz becoming a “plank owner” as an original crew member. Peter left the Navy at the end of his enlistment and returned home to study food science at the North Shore Technical Institute. In 1985 he met and married Deborah Chernin and the pair would be married 32 years until her death in 2017.
Save for a substantial stretch of time living in Kona, Hawaii from 1983-2007, Peter made a career out of working at a who’s who of Gloucester bars and restaurants: The Legion, Old Timers, Pratty’s, AmVets, VFW, The Elks, Latitude 43, The Seaport Grille. He returned to Gloucester to help care for his father who died in 2013 at 93. Retired now, he volunteers with the Salvation Army and Meals on Wheels.
James Robertson, 80
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/26/1945
Born/Raised: Beverly/Gloucester
Rank: Specialist E-5 (Sergeant)
205th Assault Helicopter Co. “Geronimos” 612th Transport
Service: US Army
Base Camp Phu Loi, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1967-1969
Born in Beverly but raised in Gloucester, Lanesvillian James Robertson graduated from GHS in 1963 before attending North Shore Community College where he studied criminal justice. He grew up with his parents James and Evelyn, his sister Jane and his 1st cousin George whom he considered a brother. Shortly after high school James totaled his 1962 Chevy Impala in a serious accident, but luckily suffered no long-term injuries.
After his stint at NSCC, he was both married and drafted in June of 1967. Trained as a helicopter mechanic at Ft. Eustis he was sent to Vietnam in early 1968 right before the Tet Offensive and remained through January 1969. After two months as a crew chief on a Chinook helicopter, he volunteered to return to the relative safety of the ground as a mechanic. “When we’re in flight, a lot of ground fire was coming up at us. You could never see the enemy, but you could see where they were firing from.”
Over the year, as a Spec. E-5 he worked his way into supervising a crew of seven or eight guys working maintenance on the helicopters at Base Camp Phu Loi. By January of 1969 he was on his way home to Gloucester and his then wife, Virginia (Johnson). They have two children, James and Liisa.
On his return he got a security job at United Shoe Company, a position that offered a lot of downtime to study for several different civil service jobs. His first was a stint at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but that lacked the excitement of what would be his career as a Gloucester Police detective, including five years working undercover on the Cape Ann Regional Strike Task Force. He retired from the GPD in 2002 after 31 years. He now splits his time between Gloucester and Florida.
Mike McLeod - 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 4/7/1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Navy
Rank: E-5, 2nd Class Petty Officer
USS Saratoga – Mediterranean
Dates of Service: 1967-1971
Born at home on Taylor Street, the youngest of five children, Mike McLeod was a small-town boy who saw a good chunk of the world serving his country and came back to that same small town to serve his community.
The son of Malcolm and Mary Evelyn McLeod, Mike grew up and graduated from GHS in 1967. He wandered out to Hawai’i where his brother Malcolm was teaching at the University of Hawai’i. He thought he might enroll at the school and found himself enlisting in the Navy instead.
His first duty station after basic training was Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. He wanted to be an “airdale” – in naval aviation - and worked his way up to being an E-5. Eventually he was assigned to VF-103 (Strike Fighter Squadron) Sluggers aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga stationed in the Mediterranean as part of a stabilizing force in that region. Egypt’s Nasser had just been assassinated and the Cold War was in full swing. He once shook President Richard Nixon’s hand.
Mike is quick to point out that his time during the Vietnam era was much different than that of his friends serving in Southeast Asia. “We were in a tumultuous time.” Nuclear weapons were on deck with orange cones to indicate their presence. At one point the Saratoga was deployed to the Pacific responding to a potential crisis.
But not all was looming crisis. On September 27, 1969 while on leave, Mike married his high school sweetheart Terry and the couple have been together now for 55 years. They would have two children, Michael and Shilo, and four grandchildren: Michael, Austin, Madelyn and Hannah. Mike left the Navy in 1971, though he remained in the reserves, and returned to Gloucester.
In 1974 he joined the Gloucester Police Department full time and worked just about every job there was to work: beat cop, dispatcher, EMT/Ambulance, Street Sergeant, Lieutenant, Drug Task Force and finished his 34-year career with three years as Chief. In 2005 he stepped up once again to run for and serve as a Gloucester City Councilor for two terms. He’s photographed with a book about his service authored by his grandson Austin.
Joseph “Monkey” Orlando, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 2/17/48
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Army
Unit: 101st Airborne
Rank: Spec. 4/Corporal
Dates of Service: 1968-1970
Commendations: Bronze Star
Gloucester has a few Joe Orlandos, but only one Joe “Monkey” Orlando. He got his nickname as a kid because he was always climbing trees. The son of a Gloucester fisherman, Anthony, and Jenny Orlando, the 1966 St. Ann’s graduate was drafted in 1968 and landed in the Army’s 101st Airborne. He did his basic training at Fort Dix before heading to Ben Hua, Vietnam for further training and then his assignment to an infantry support unit at Camp Eagle in Hue.
The night before he arrived at Camp Eagle, it had been overrun in an attack. “We needed to clean up the mess.” He remembers the camp at Hue being “hit every night.” “If anyone said they weren’t scared over there they were full of shit.” Joe lived up to his nickname during his tour by keeping an actual pet monkey named “Newey” while he was in Vietnam. “When something was going to happen, he’d grab right on to me.”
In June 1969 he was sent back stateside to Fort Dix where he was assigned to Graves and Registrations doing first notifications to families of KIA soldiers. He and an officer would make one or two notifications a day and he estimates he attended over 100 funerals. The experience dissuaded him from reupping when his time was up. “Keep your sergeant stripes.” He was out in January 1970.
He took a variety of jobs on his return to Gloucester, working at Sears & Roebuck Auto in Saugus and Peabody; the Cape Ann Tool Company, and he was a bar manager and three-time Commander at the Legion in Gloucester. He currently works at the Shaw’s Market on Eastern Ave.
In 1972 he married his St. Ann’s high school sweetheart, Lourdes Cecilio, with whom he had a daughter Bobbi Jo. While they split eight years later, he would meet his second wife, Diana Muise, and marry again in 1982 raising her two sons Paul and Jeremy. They’ve been married ever since and have nine grandchildren.
Joe served on the Gloucester City Council from 1983-1989 first as the Ward 3 councilor, then one term at-large, and finally he served one year filling the remaining term of Bob McCormick who died while in office. He’s photographed with a copy of the Gloucester Daily Times that featured his front page photo on his return from Vietnam.
Steve Canning, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 1/17/48
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: Staff Sergeant
Service: US Army
21st Signal Group, 1st Signal Brigade
Nha Trang, Vietnam
Dates of Service: 1968-1971, 1975-81 US Army Reserves
When Steve Canning received his draft notice, he opted to enlist which allowed him to delay his entry into the Army until after he’d finished his studies at Wentworth Institute of Technology. The GHS Class of ’65 graduate and Cherry St. resident studied study electronics which set him up for a role as microwave radio repair technician with the 21st Signal Group. He spent his time in Vietnam primarily in the central highlands of II-Corp.
He finished out his hitch at Ft. Hood, TX before heading home to Gloucester. While he completed his enlistment in 1971, Steve returned to serve in the US Army Active Reserves from 1975 until 1981 finishing as a Staff Sergeant.
In early 1972, hanging out in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot in downtown Gloucester with his best friend David Lloyd, he was introduced to Susan Williams. The couple dated for a few months and married in November 1972. They have two sons, David and Corey. Steve had another son, Shayne, from a prior relationship. The couple will be celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary last November. They have five grandchildren.
His studies at Wentworth translated into a career in electronic engineering at Varian where he worked for more than 30 years before retiring in 2013.
Michael Lafferty, 82
Gloucester, MA
Born: 2/26/1943
Born/Raised: Dixon Ill./Sterling Ill.
Service: US Air Force
Unit: 19th Air Commando Squadron,
41st Air Refueling Squadron
Rank: Captain
Dates of Service: 1965-1971
Commendations: Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with 7 clusters.
“I got to Gloucester because my wife went to camp in Minnesota,” explains Michael Lafferty formerly of Sterling, Illinois. But more on this later.
The Midwest boy, son of a district foreman for Commonwealth Edison, Bill, and nurse, Olive, Michael has two brothers (Ed & Bill) and a sister Judy. He attended Monmouth College, also in Illinois, and graduated with a degree in history and an engagement to Ann Murphy, a fellow student studying English. They would marry in December 1965.
Despite that degree in history, what he really wanted to do was fly, so, also in 1965, he joined the Air Force. He attended Officer Training Corp in San Antonio, Texas; pilot training in Lubbock “By God” Texas through February 1967. By May 1967 he was flying C-123k transports out of Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon resupplying troop reinforcements and supplies to various bases, something he would do through the Tet Offensive in 1968. Occasionally those transports included USO entertainers. “We had a girl from the USO and put her on the radio for landing instructions. When we landed, you never saw so many guys lining the runway.”
Michael left Vietnam in May 1968 but returned to service flying KC-135 refueling planes, affectionately referred to as “gas passers” over two three-month tours in Thailand from 1969-1971.
Shortly after leaving his Air Force service, he took a job with Eastern Airlines flying out of Boston. Ann’s friend from that Minnesota summer camp lived in Gloucester, so they visited, and as is typical, fell in love with the area and made it their home where they raised their two daughters, Casey and Sarah. They have one grandchild, Lena. They’ve been married for 58 years.
Michael would continue flying as a commercial pilot for Eastern, US Airways and American until his retirement in February 2000. He now spends his time photographing; riding his motorcycle; and “enjoying living in Gloucester.” Michael had another connection with Gloucester, the Air Medal he earned was designed by longtime Gloucester resident and sculptor and World War II Monuments Man, Walker Hancock who crafted the medal in 1942.
Ken Hruby, 86
Gloucester, MA
Born: 12/4/1938
Born/Raised: Ft. Mead, SD/Military
Service: US Army Ranger
Unit: Various
Rank: Lt. Colonel
Dates of Service: 1957-1982
Ken Hruby was raised in the military by his mother Evelyn Mae Byers and father, Lt. Colonel Joe Hruby. By the time he was gearing up for college, he’d already lived on several bases, including Fort Omaha during WWII and in Yokohama, Japan in 1946 after the conclusion of World War II. “I got two letters (in 1957), one offer from Harvard and the other an appointment to West Point. I didn’t know anything about the Ivy League, so I went to West Point.” Given the history of his family, the decision isn’t all that surprising: his brother Dale preceded him at the esteemed Army college.
Upon graduation in 1961 as a 2nd Lieutenant, he jumped right into Airborne and Army Ranger school. His first posting would be for 18 months along the DMZ in Korea with the 1st Cavalry dealing mostly with landmines, defectors and spies. Following this assignment, he was sent to the Fort Bragg Language School in Monterey, CA, to learn Vietnamese in readiness for his next assignment. While there, he met a “nice Gloucester girl,” Billie Jensen, whose mother had sent her to Monterey to “meet a husband.” Dinner and six weeks later they would be married. Nine days after that, Ken was on a plane to Vietnam. During his deployment, Billie joined Ken in Saigon and up-country for a six-day reunion.
He would spend most of 1963 and ’64 as an advisor to infantry and Ranger battalions of the SVA (South Vietnamese Army) providing air and artillery support and resupply missions. Most of the SVA officers he worked with had been in the French Foreign Legion, so they spoke French with each other. Twelve days short of the end of his tour there, he contracted hepatitis, malaria and dysentery and would spend eight months in hospitals in the Philippines, Hawaii and the Chelsea Navy Hospital to recover.
His career took him to Fort Lewis, in Washington, Fort Benning (now Moore) in Georgia where he taught machine gunnery, and once again back to Korea as a Protocol Officer for the United Nations Command and back on the DMZ as an Infantry Battalion XO. 1969 found him at the University of Georgia getting his MBA in Data Processing and a PhD (ABD) in Organization Behavior; Fort Hood, TX in 1971; the Leavenworth Command Staff College; Headquarters Commandant of XVIII Airborne Corps (Mayor) and his terminal assignment to Belgium assigned to SHAPE (NATO). Ken retired from the Army in 1982 as a Lt. Col. and the Hruby family moved back to Gloucester. Billie became a nutrition counselor and owned and operated the Diet Center for over a decade.
Along the way, he and Billie had three children, Melissa Paladino, Amanda Waters and KC Hruby and, in turn, six grandchildren. Ken attended the Museum School to study sculpture and became an artist and a teacher. He was one of the founding members of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. After 60 years of marriage Billie died in 2023.
Joe Ciarametaro, 79
Gloucester, MA
Born: 6/25/1946
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: E-4/Corporal
Unit: US Marine Corps, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, Infantry Group
Dates of Service: 1965-1970 USMC Ret.
The son of “Baby Rose” Captain Peter and Florence Ciarametaro, Joseph Ciarametaro was born down the Fort and then raised on Washington Street along with his three sisters and a brother. His parents owned and operated the Gloucester Grocery Boat & Supply on Rogers Street for 45 years.
Joe graduated from Gloucester High School in 1965 and along with friends Ron White and Rick Pino, enlisted via the “buddy system” in the US Marine Corps in late July of that year. His training began at Parris Island and then off to Camp Geiger in North Carolina, Vieques Puerto Rico and Camp Pendleton before shipping off to Hoi An, Vietnam in the fall of 1966.
During a firefight in January 1967 near Da Nang, a Navy medic, Phil Valdez who was wounded during his own efforts to save two other wounded marines, died in his arms. Years later he and his wife Priscilla would meet and spent time with Valdez’s family in New Mexico while on a hunting trip. They remain in contact.
He served on the ground in the infantry group of the Marines until May 1967 when he was grievously wounded in the chest and shoulders near Danang. He laid wounded in a field for twelve hours before he could be evacuated. First sent to a hospital in the Philippines, Joe was then sent to a hospital in Yokohama Japan where he was given last rites. Not willing to give up, Joe was eventually sent stateside in June 1967, to the Chelsea Naval Hospital right before his 21st birthday.
He spent nearly a year recovering from his injuries. Four months after arriving at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, in October 1967, he married his girlfriend, Priscilla Laurie, who he had started dating before shipping off to Vietnam. They’ve been married for 57 years with three sons: Peter, Joseph “JJ” and Kyle; seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren. One of his grandsons, Joey, currently serves in the US Army. Joe retired from the Marines in July 1970.
After his recovery, Joe enrolled at RETS Electronics School and was trained as a printed circuit board designer, a career he held until his retirement in 1995. He is an avid hunter. “I consider myself lucky because I got to fulfill my life’s ambition of becoming a Marine.”
Ronald Thibedeau, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: 4/12/1947
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Army
Unit: Marine Maintenance Activity, Vietnam
Rank: E-4 Corporal
Dates of Service: 1967-1969
“I was one of the lucky ones to be there for Tet,” Ronald Thibedeau says of his time in Vietnam from 1967- January 1969. For a guy who was declared 4F at his first physical, in 1966, for being nearly blind in one eye, he probably shouldn’t have been there at all. He was called in for a second physical in 1967 and declared 1Y (only eligible in times of war and VN technically wasn’t a war). At his third physical, a sergeant asked how many fingers he was holding up and when Ron answered correctly, he was magically declared 1A, fit for miliary duty, and a short while later, he found himself at Fort Dix for training. He shot expert with the M-14 and M-6 rifles as well as the .45 Colt sidearm – not bad for not having perfect vision.
He wanted any assignment that would put him near water and was sent to become an amphibian engineer. Then it was off to Vietnam as part of MMAVN (Marine Maintenance Activity Vietnam) in Cam Ranh Bay. His unit wasn’t technically authorized to be in Vietnam, so his unit always had Vietnamese minders in tow. He would be assigned TDY (temporary duty) for the 458th Transportation Company that operated heavily-armed PBRs (Patrol Boats) running river patrols and transporting Special Forces teams. His job was to make sure the boat worked. “I never saw anyone get killed and only one wounded. We never broke down while we were out.”
Born and raised in Gloucester, his mother Mary was a fish cutter and his father Elmer worked for Clarence Birdseye first as his gardener and then at the Birdseye plant in refrigeration. Ron had a sister, Collette who passed away in 2021. He graduated from Gloucester High School in 1966 and married his high school sweetheart, Julie Selig, in February 1967, thinking that his 4F status at the time meant he wouldn’t be drafted. The Army had other plans.
On his return from Vietnam, he got a job at Gloucester Engineering. He worked his way from being an assembler, to the machine shop, took night classes to learn programming and became a manufacturing engineer. He worked for Gloucester Engineering for 38 years before being laid off. He worked as a VP at Kenco and then Spincraft in Billerica, retiring for good in 2009. Julie was a hairdresser and now too is retired. The couple have two sons, David (Ronald Jr.) and Scott and three grandchildren. They’ve been married now for 57 years.
James “Duke” Donnellon, 81
Gloucester, MA
Born: 5/12/1944
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Army
Unit: Company C, 720th MP, 18th MP Brigade
Rank: E-5 Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1967-1969
James “Duke” Donnellon has a classic 1960s Gloucester pedigree: dad James worked at Gorton’s; mom Eileen was a registered nurse at Addison Gilbert Hospital. A member of the GHS class of 1962, Duke was a football & baseball player and a member of the school’s ROTC. An only son, he grew up on Harrison Avenue. After high school he went to Parsons College in Iowa.
“We had blood coming from out of our fingers from being dragged,” Donnellon said of his and his friends Chris Larsen & Jimmy Robertson’s experience being drafted into the Army in 1967, but they went. He trained first at Fort Dix and then MP training at Fort Gordon before being shipped off to Lon Binh, Vietnam to serve as an MP with the 720th – considered a combat tested brigade and the first to utilize Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs). He spent 15 months in Vietnam before coming home at the end of 1969.
On his return to Gloucester, he married “the love of my life” Christina Catalina and the pair have been together for more than 55 years - “I married up.” They have a son, Shamus Patrick. Duke followed in his father’s footsteps for a while, working at Gorton’s, before joining the Gloucester Police Department. He served the city in that capacity for 30 years before retiring in 2004.
Brad Currier, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: 8/14/48
Born/Raised: Salem/Gloucester
Service: US Army
Unit: 82nd Airborne/101st Airborne
Rank: E-5 Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1968-1971
Brad Currier played football, was captain of the baseball team and was a pretty good hockey player as a young man. Good enough, in fact, to play for Salem State along with five other guys from Gloucester High School. Brad was born in Salem, but his family moved to Gloucester in the sixth grade and he grew up in Lanesville. His dad Clarence was a machinist at United Shoe and his mother Margaret “Jiggs” was a nurse at Addison Gilbert Hospital. He has a brother Ed.
Three years into his college education, he grew unhappy with the program he was pursuing so left school to join the Army in 1968. “I wanted to find out what was really going on.” After signing up, he volunteered for the 82nd Airborne and went to jump school. With 21 jumps under his belt he also became a trainer for a while at West Point. He also trained at the MP (Military Police) school in Fort Gordon. In 1970 he was reassigned to the 101st Airborne and sent to Vietnam.
There wasn’t a lot of call for parachuting into conflict zones in Vietnam “it didn’t work out very well,” so his unit was assigned to guard troop and supply convoys out of Da Nang. He would sit in his Jeep manning an M60 machine gun leading a convoy of 5-8 ‘cattle cars’ with newly arrived troops on their way to Camps Eagle and Evans. In addition to the convoy duty, they would often be called on to engage in assaults dealing with drug interdiction. “Heroin was a terrible problem. We were sending troops home who were addicts. Our goal was trying to stop it from getting to the bases. The enemy was trying to kill you, and sometimes the troops were trying to kill you. They were making a lot of money off the troops.”
After spending the entirety of 1970 in Vietnam, Brad shipped home and spent the remainder of his enlistment at Fort Hood in 1971. Returning to Gloucester meant a return to Salem State and a degree in Counseling and Psychology. This led to a 40-year career as a SPED teacher in Peabody. He met his wife, Cindy Bibbo, also a SPED teacher at the Lakeside School. They married in 1982 and have one son, Brad Jr. an attorney with the State of Alabama, and two grandkids. He retired in 2015.
John Bell, 82 & Janis Bell, 81
Gloucester, MA
Born: 1/29/1943 (John) & 6/10/1944 (Janis)
Born/Raised: Gloucester (John)/Various (Janis)
Service: US Army & American Red Cross
Unit: Quartermaster Corps, 8th Army South Korea
Rank: Captain (John)
Dates of Service: 1966-1968
The son of Mighty-Mac company treasurer, and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, landed in Korea during the Vietnam war under very different circumstances, but their meeting would lead to a 56-year marriage, three children, five grandchildren and a lifetime of service to their community.
John Bell, son of Harold & Elizabeth, grew up in Gloucester, graduated from Gloucester High School in 1961, was in the ROTC program and captain of the tennis team. He graduated from William & Mary College where he studied political science and continued in the ROTC. Janis Rose’s family moved up and down the Eastern Seaboard where her father, the Rev. Cecil Rose, established new churches, eventually becoming the Dean of Curry College. She graduated from Maryville College in Tennessee.
John was called up for service in 1966 and stationed at the ASCOM Depot in Bupyeong District near Incheon, Korea as part of the Quartermaster’s Corps. The depot was responsible for testing gear/equipment and providing critical resupply to troops in Vietnam. As a captain, John oversaw a section of the Depot.
After graduating from college, Janis wanted to see the Far East. A friend’s mother suggested the American Red Cross where she signed up to be a “Donut Dolly.” She originally volunteered for Vietnam, “I was trying to be a hero,” but her mother, Helen, intervened and she was routed to Korea instead. She was struck by the abject poverty in Korea.
There were 38,000 troops in Korea at the time. Janis and the other three dozen Dollies lived in Quonset huts and would travel throughout northern South Korea visiting various troop locations and hospitals with jeeps full of donuts and hot coffee. They met and talked with soldiers flown in from Vietnam recovering from physical and emotional wounds. “I began to realize that the wounds were deep.”
The pair met at the ASCOM Officer’s Club during lunch. John asked Janis whether she’d ever been to Cape Ann. “You mean Cape Cod?” “No, the better Cape.” The pair started dating and after they both returned to the US, Janis in 1967 and John in 1968, they married. Janis taught elementary school in Attleboro and Rockport schools, became a realtor, and a tourism director. John worked as CEO in direct marketing with CPS Direct for 40 years. They raised their children, Robbie, Rebecca and Bret in Gloucester.
John served on the Gloucester City Council for two terms in the 1970s as a Ward 1 councilor and as council president helping to successfully guide the city’s first Charter Commission. In the early 2000s he served three terms as Mayor during which he was a vocal advocate for work-force housing and Gloucester’s fishing community. Both remain deeply committed to service in Gloucester in various volunteer roles. Janis regularly volunteers at the Trinity Thrift Shop, the Middle Street Walk and numerous other groups. John and Janis deliver meals for The Open Door using their “date night” as another opportunity to serve their community.
Gerard “Gerry” Devoe, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born 9/21/1948
Born/Raised: Salem, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: Spec. 5/Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1969-1970
There’s a bit of a spark in Gerry Devoe’s smile, perhaps a remnant of his career as an electrician. Born and raised in Salem, MA, to a pipefitter, Lucien, and a homemaker, Phyllis, he grew up with two brothers and two sisters. He attended St. Joseph Grammar School before heading to Salem Vocational and his initial studies in the electrical department. He carried on that schooling at the Franklin Institute and graduated as a fully qualified electrician.
He joined the Army in 1969. “I felt I had to do something for my country. The recruiter said that at three years (term of enlistment) there was a 95% chance of going to Vietnam. What were my other options? He said that if it were two years there was a 99% chance of going. The difference between 95% and 99% wasn’t worth the extra year.”
Gerry did his basic training at Fort Gordon in Georgia and his advanced infantry at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. He was assigned to the 43rd Signal Battalion in An Khe, Vietnam in the central highlands. As an electrician, he was supposed to be a “power-man” keeping the generators on the base and in the motor pool running. Instead, his first duty was to sit up in the guard towers with M60 machine guns. A month later he was finally doing what he was trained to do – keeping the lights on and keeping the vehicles moving.
Towards the end of September 1970 Gerry came home to Salem. One night at the Starlight, a nightclub on Route One, he met a girl from Gloucester, Linda Orlando. There must have been a spark there as well because they married in November 1971 and recently celebrated their 53rd year of marriage. They have four children, Mark, Vinnie, Katie and Phyllis and 10 grandchildren.
Gerry made a career of being an electrician working for 33 years for Rudolph Electric and another 13 for Interstate Electric. He retired in 2018 and now spends his time divided among his grandkids, playing golf and going to the Cape Ann Veterans Center.
Bertram Ellis, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born 9/3/1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Marine Corps
Unit: 1st & 3rd Marines
Rank: E-5 (Sergeant)
Dates of Service: 1967-1973
Citations: Purple Heart
Bertram Ellis was born at Addison Gilbert Hospital when his family lived on Spring Street. His mother Alice Ellis was a fish cutter and packer at Gorton’s and his father Arnold worked maintenance at the Atlantic Gelatin plant in Woburn. He had three brothers and two sisters and was, but one, the baby of the family. He grew up in Gloucester and attended GHS in the vocational program, “most of the time,” studying carpentry and welding. Like all boys his age, he was in the ROTC program, Company F, and rose to the rank of captain. “I’ve always been patriotic.”
After graduating in 1966, he took a job at Modern Heat working with sheet metal. In 1967 he enlisted in the Marines and by May he was working himself f through Parris Island and Camp Lejeune before Camp Pendleton, Okinawa and eventually Da Nang in Vietnam with the 1st Marines. He spent his time through the beginning of the Tet offensive working in the motor pool and running resupply missions to southern bases. In early 1968 Bertram volunteered to go to Dong Ha with the 3rd Marines where he ran supply missions to all the bases along the DMZ.
On the return from one of those resupply missions, Bertram suffered shrapnel wounds to his neck and hands during an ambush. He was rushed to a field hospital where he as patched up and nearly immediately returned to service. In June 1969 he was awarded the Purple Heart for his injuries. By May the following year, in 1970, the Marines returned him stateside to Quantico, Virginia.
After working in the motor pool and hauling tanks onto the training firing range at Quantico, Bertram left the Marines in 1973 and came home to Gloucester and his job at Modern Heat.
When it comes to matters of the heart, Bertram describes himself as “a hard learner,” but despite five marriages and 13 children and step-children, perhaps things work out the way they’re meant to in the end. He met his current wife of five years, Elizabeth, back in seventh grade when they first became childhood sweethearts. They had planned to get married after he returned from Vietnam, but by then their relationship had moved on. They reconnected five years ago and picked up where they left off.
Bertram retired at 62 and whenever he can he serves as a member of the honor guard, including one that served at the 10-year anniversary wreath laying at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC.
Rick Gonsalves, 80
Gloucester, MA
Born: 7/26/1945
Born/Raised: Gloucester MA
Service: US Coast Guard Quartermaster
Rank: Spec. Petty Officer 3rd Class
Dates of Service: 1969-1977 (6 yrs Reserves)
Rick Gonsalves is the son of Yvonne and Richard Sr., a WWII Navy veteran who served in both the Pacific and Atlantic running convoys. Born and raised in Gloucester along with his brother Dana, on Haskell Street in East Gloucester. Rick graduated from GHS in 1963 and attended Bridgewater State starting in 1966 as an English and Education/History major. In 1969, he went to enlist and put his name on all the various services. The United States Coast Guard pulled his number and it was off to Cape May, NJ, for basic training.
He served aboard the Unimak, a 311’ high endurance cutter out of Cape May, and the Cuyahoga, a 125’ cutter out of Norfolk, VA. They would patrol the length of the eastern seaboard, from Maine down through Florida monitoring Russian fishing activities. He finished his degree from Salem State in 1970 often doing coursework onboard his ships. Upon leaving active service he took a position teaching English, History and Math at the Beverly Trade School, a job he’d have for 15 years. He was married for ten years to Mary Jane Kelso, from Scotland.
In 1985 he took a job with the Gloucester DPW working at the beaches and cemeteries. During his teaching years and onward Rick began a 54-year career as a football kicking coach, both at the high school level and at the professional level collecting stats for the New England Patriots, NY Jets and Cleveland Browns. He has become a recognized expert in football kicking statistics. He wrote two books on the subject, “Specialty Teams” in 1977 and “Placekicking in the NFL – A History and Analysis” in 2014. He has a collection of Superbowl helmets, including a signed Superbowl 36 helmet from legendary kicker Adam Vinatieri. He retired in 2006.
Tony D’Amico, 81
Gloucester, MA
Born: 5/19/44
Born/Raised: Gloucester MA
Service: US Air Force
Rank: Airman 2nd Class
Dates of Service: 1964-1966
Tony D’Amico wanted nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Frank, a decorated US Army 1st Lieutenant serving with the 25th Infantry Division in the Binh Duong Province of Vietnam. Frank had gone to Officer Training School but that wasn’t in the cards for Tony, a 1962 graduate of Gloucester High School. “I was 88 pounds in high school.” He enlisted instead in the US Air Force in 1964.
The two brothers and their two sisters, Ida Marie Chambers and Angela Grace Ciarametaro, were raised on Proctor Street by their Sicilian-born parents, Joseph, a fishing captain, and Mary D’Amico – they themselves were brought to Gloucester as small children.
Off to the Air Force, Tony trained at Lackland Air Station in Texas, and became a truck mechanic with the 363rdTransportation unit. “I loved taking them apart and rebuilding them.” The Sullivan Act prevented Tony from being sent into combat since his brother was already posted in a combat unit. “I didn’t want that, but I could see what my parents wanted.” Instead he was stationed at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina. It was there, in April 1966, that Tony would learn of Frank’s death by a sniper in the Ho Bo Woods while out on patrol just days before his 25th birthday.
Tony had been prepared to be sent off to Germany for the next phase of his enlistment, but Frank’s death triggered Tony’s release from his military commitment and he returned to Gloucester. One of his first jobs was for Keene Associates doing computer programming. He then worked for Gloucester Corporation before taking a dispatcher and service advisor position for 18 years at Herb Chambers. He retired at 64.
Tony and Debra, who despite living across the street from each other met at Tick Tock on Main Street. They have been married for 53 years and have four children: Malia, twins Joseph and Frank, and Lacey. They have five grandchildren, Luca, Gavin, Giada, Rome and Fiona.
He is photographed holding a portrait of his brother Frank.
Charles Nicastro, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born 2/28/1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester MA
Service: US Army, 10th Transportation Unit
Rank: Spec. 5/Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1968-1970
Charles Nicastro met his wife Marianne Lograsso in 1958 outside of a Gloucester High School football game when he was ten years old. She said to him, “why don’t you get outta here and leave me alone,” and with that, he turned to a friend and said, “I’m gonna marry that girl someday.” That “someday” came ten years later when he pleaded before the local draft board to get permission to marry her before getting shipped out to Vietnam. They granted him 30 days and on June 2nd 1968 they wed. On July 10th, he was at basic training at Fort Gordon, GA.
Charles is the son of John M. and Rosaline Nicastro. His father was a WWII US Navy veteran who was an engineer on fishing vessels, Serafina N. and the Rockaway out of Gloucester. Charles fished the same boats for five years. He has four brothers (Jerry, John, Bruce and Michael) and one sister, Serafina “Joy” Balzarini.
Following basic, he was sent to Fort Polk, LA, for advanced infantry training. Once in Vietnam, his pre-military training as a truck driver put him in line to do ammunition resupply convoys out of Long Binh to forward fire support bases. He remembers well his first convoy on July 10, 1969. Before setting out, one of the other drivers asked him, “you going to wear that helmet?” Two and a half hours later, the convoy stopped at a set of gates guarded by MPs and tanks on their way to Quan Loi.
“An RPG came down right next to the tank and the guy behind me started driving right up my ass. RPGs and bullets were flying. Two Cobra helicopters took them out and dropped napalm. You could feel the heat.” They bolted from the checkpoint at about 40 mph (their usual speed was 10-15 mph) causing his helmet to bounce wildly off his nose sending blood everywhere. The other driver checked in on him to see if he was alright and said, “It doesn’t get any better from here.”
He would make these treks scores of times over the next eight months. Every day they would load up their trucks at 6 AM and every day the RPGs would come raining down on them first thing in the morning. Eight months into his tour, he secured a job as one of the dispatchers and loved every minute of it.
On July 1st, 1970, Charles returned home to Gloucester. “The first thing I did was change into civilian clothes.” He worked construction for a few years, fished for a few years, worked at Gloucester Engineering and in 1983 took a job with the City of Gloucester’s DPW as a heavy equipment operator. One of his favorite jobs was cleaning Gloucester’s beaches. He retired in 2015.
Charles and Marianne, a daycare provider, have a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Amber Nicastro Driscoll who lives in Hawaii. They have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Charles Williamson, 80
Gloucester, MA
Born: 5/14/45
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Army
Rank: E-4
Dates of Service: 1966-1969
Charles Williamson was born the son of a waitress, Susan (Hadley) and a painter, Charlie, and lived on School Street as a child. His parents divorced and mom married Harold Morrow. He had a brother, Daniel, who died as a baby. He graduated from Gloucester High School in 1965 and went to work for National Advertised Foods, a wholesale food business.
In October 1966, he enlisted in the US Army and after basic training at Fort Dix, and further training in Fort Lee, Virginia with the Quartermaster/Heavy equipment repair, he was sent to Camp Charn Sinthope near Phanom Sarakham in Thailand with the 809th Engineering Battalion.
He spent his time there keeping the batteries charged and the lights on at the generator pad, though one day he found himself awkwardly situated between a Master Sergeant and the base Commanding Officer. The MSgt. ordered him to boost the power so that his television would work and in doing so, the surging power accidentally blew out the CO’s stereo.
He came home from Thailand and while on leave before his next posting with the 809th Engineering Battalion at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, he married his high school sweetheart, Lois Parsons. He was able to secure housing off base and Lois’s parents packed her up in their brand-new Nova and drove her out to join Charles. They returned to Gloucester in 1969 and Charles took a job at a Topsfield grocery store where he worked for a couple of years.
He then took a job with Stop & Shop where he worked for forty years, thirty in Beverly and ten in Gloucester as the night crew chief. Lois worked in the billing department at Addison Gilbert Hospital and the couple have two children, Christopher and Tammy, and two grandchildren.
Ira Malek, 96
Rockport, MA
Born: 2/1/1929
Died: 9/22/2025
Born/Raised: Brooklyn, NY
Service: US Airforce
Rank: 1st Lieutenant
Dates of Service: 1952-1954, NY National Guard ret. 1966
Ira Malek was born nine months before the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression washed across the country. His father, Morris Malek was a bank vice president at the Rugby National Bank in Brooklyn, NY at the time and his mother Tillie worked at the Department of Buildings in the finance department. He had two brothers, Albert and Matthew, and two sisters, Shirley and Florence. He ended up growing up poor as his father went from being an executive to delivering bread during the Depression.
Ira ultimately graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1946. In 1952, fresh from receiving a degree in mathematics from City College of New York (the Harvard of the Proletariat), Ira did as his brother Albert had done before him, enlisted. He was immediately dubbed an Airman 3d class and sent to Officers Training School at Sampson Air Force Base in Seneca, NY.
Following his training in NY, he was shipped down to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas for more training that would carry on until September 1953 and an eventual rise to 1st Lieutenant, however all the training, commitment, time and energy it took to become an officer in the US Air Force ultimately amounted to a hill of beans for Ira Malek and his military career. Shortly after finishing his training, the military initiated a policy of “riffing” (reduction in force) officers owing to the ebbing conflict in Korea.
They sent the newly minted Air Force officer packing, truncating his four-year stint into two and discharging him as a 1st Lieutenant, all without ever having left the continental United States. All wasn’t completely wasted however as Ira became a member of the NY Air National Guard with the Fighter Intercept Squadron and served until 1966.
Back in New York, Ira secured a job as a hospital rep for the Ayerst Laboratories of Pfizer Corporation at Cornell Medical Center. On the Labor Day weekend in 1955, Ira and a friend were at Brighton Beach and Ira latched eyes on Norma. He escorted her home and arranged a second date. They married in January 1956 and remained so for 51 years until her death in 2008. They have three children, Linda Petrino, Jody Grunfeld and Robert Malek, seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren.
In 1963 Ira began the unusual hobby of restoring player pianos. By 1969 he retired from Pfizer and turned his passion into a full-time business. He closed the business in 2000 and in February 2024 moved to Rockport to be near his daughter Linda, a retired GHS teacher.
David Gustavsen, 77
Swampscott, MA
Born 12/13/1948
Born/Raised: Swampscott, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: 1st Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1969-1971,
National Guard: 1977-2003
David Gustavsen is a regular at the Cape Ann Veterans Center despite not being from Cape Ann, but Swampscott, the town he was born, raised and still lives in is close enough for his fellow veterans. The son of Ivar and Barbara, David graduated from Swampscott High School in 1966. After high school he secured a job at Champion Lamp where his mother worked until he was drafted in July 1969.
Basic training at Fort Dix led to his posting at Fort Stewart, GA, where he was trained as a plumber. He was never a plumber for the Army. He was then sent to Binh Thuy, Vietnam with the 34th Engineer Group and ended up transporting and supervising Vietnamese civilian workers. His next round of training was to become a carpenter, but he was never a carpenter for the Army. He did however fall in love.
“It was love at first sight.” David met Thuyet Lam who, at the time, was a house girl. “We just struck it up. I’d never had a girlfriend.” The Army discouraged soldiers from marrying, and when he was sent back to the states, Thuyet was seven months pregnant. He stayed in touch though and with the assistance of the Pearl Buck Foundation, he was able to send money. After the peace treaty was signed in 1973, he returned to Vietnam and was met by Thuyet, her mother and his daughter Kieu Oanh. He returned to the states to begin the paperwork trying to get her to the US as a fiancée, but because of family issues in Vietnam, they were unable to complete the paperwork.
It wasn’t until 1974 that the couple had a civil marriage in Vietnam, and he began new paperwork to bring them to the US as American citizens. In April 1975, the fall of Saigon upended their plans and the couple lost touch. David had no idea where his family was or whether they were even alive. He found them again in 1976 living in Can Tho and redoubled his efforts to get them to the US. In 1978 they succeeded in releasing Tuyet, their daughter and her mother, and another “daughter” Tuyet’s niece, Kieu Em, who was a year younger than Kieu Oanh. Senator Edward Kennedy was at the airport to welcome their arrival in Boston. They had a third daughter, Inga, who was born in the US. They now have five grandchildren. They were married for 31 years when Tuyet died in 2005.
David worked for a while at Phillips as a production mechanic making lightbulbs before taking a position at the Swampscott DPW. He retired in 2015. He served in the National Guard from 1977 to 2003. Now he spends his days making the rounds at veterans’ centers in the area and attending Bruins games.
Philip “Lee” Loiacano, 81
Gloucester, MA
Born: 7/10/44
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Service: US Air Force
Rank: Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1965-1968
In January 1965, Philip “Lee” Loiacano and his high school friend Sammy Cuomo received their letters from the government declaring them 1A, fit for service. “We had a decision to make. Are we gonna let the government draft us or are we gonna join?” At 5’5” and 115lbs and prone to seasickness, Lee said, “We didn’t want to join the Army because that probably meant Vietnam right away, I’m not Marine material. I get seasick, so that meant no Navy, so we decided to join the Air Force,” which is what they did under the “buddy program.”
The son of Gloucester fisherman Joseph “Saginaw” and Lucy Loiacano, Lee was born at home and grew up on Beach Court along with his brother William and sister Nina Marie (Peterson). He was a shortstop and captain of his St. Ann’s HS baseball team and played on the basketball team. He graduated in 1963. He studied computer programming in Boston and attended the Salem School for Accounting.
After enlisting in the Air Force, he was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Because of his size, the Air Force had to special order a hat to fit his head. He became a squad leader, graduated from basic and was soon sent to Amarillo Air Base tasked with administration work. He turned 21 at the Airman’s Club with a beer and a cigar. He stayed at Amarillo til December of 1966. Sammy in the meantime had been ordered to France.
On leave for a month before his deployment to Thailand, he endured a 2 ½ day train ride and lost luggage but made it home by Christmas eve. In February 1967 he was sent to the Takhli Airbase of the Royal Thai Air Force Base as a personnel office clerk with the 355th Combat Support which was running bombing missions over Vietnam. In December 1967 he got to lay eyes on Raquel Welch who was performing with the Bob Hope Christmas Special at the airbase.
For his final months of service, fortune smiled on Lee as he managed to secure a posting at Hanscom Air Base in the HQ building as an admin of an all-civilian bunch of engineers. This allowed him to live at home in Gloucester and commute. He would end his enlistment in October 1968. In 1969, he and pal Tony D’Amico were frequenting the night club Sandy’s in Beverly and he was introduced to Christine Grover. The two dated and were married on June 7th, 1970 and have been together since. They have two children, Joseph and Alicia “Lee” Lambert, seven grandkids and two great grandchildren. Christine is a Line Dance instructor.
Lee had a busy career working retail at Mal’s Company and the Building Center in Rockport. He managed C.H. Rich liquors, Fish Pier Liquors and Route One Liquors in Rowley for 19 years. He temporarily retired in 2010. He started helping in the office at his son-in-law’s business, Preferred Auto, and worked for nine years before fully retiring when Covid hit. He remains very active at the Cape Ann Veterans Center.
William “Bill” Loiacano, 85
Gloucester, MA
Born 9/4/1940
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: Private
Dates of Service: 1962-1964
Vietnam and Korea may have been the hot wars of the mid 20th Century, but brewing in the background was the Cold War the United States was waging with the USSR. The coldest place to be on the front lines of this war was Alaska, and that’s precisely where Bill Loiacano found himself as a private in the US Army with the 562 Combat Engineers.
The born and raised kid from Beach Court, down the Fort, is the son of Joseph Loiacano and Lucy (Parisi) and brother to Phil and Nina. Dad was a fisherman and mom cared for the family. He attended and graduated from Gloucester High School in 1959. A member of ROTC, the basketball, football and wrestling teams, Bill would, after his miliary service, become a competitive body building and weightlifting. In September 1962, he took home the trophy for Mr. Gloucester. A photo of him was featured in a body building magazine.
In 1962, after a couple years of painting and carpentry, he was drafted into the Army and sent north, very north. His combat engineers built bridges, log cabins, a bridge over a lake, at times enduring temperatures up to 69-degrees below zero. He was in Anchorage when the region was hit by a 9.2 earthquake in 1964. He sent his mother a telegram that he was okay. After his tour in Alaska, he came home to Gloucester
At a dance at the St. Peter’s Club, he met and danced with Anna Bertolino. They married in 1974, “the best move I ever made. The girl is phenomenal, not good, phenomenal.” The couple have three boys, Eric, Joe and Bill, and six grandchildren between them. His friend Bill Hilche convinced him to take the fire department exam, and he spent 30 years with the Gloucester FD. An errant slide down the firepole one day threatened to end his career, but he continued until 2002. “I was a bull.”
Marcel Donald \"Don\" VandenBosch, 87
Gloucester, MA
Born 1/23/1938
Born/Raised: NYC, NY
Service: US Army
Rank: Spec. 5/Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1956-1960
A New York boy born and raised, Marcel Donald \"Don\" VandenBosch, was the son of a construction supervisor, Emil, and Georgette, a homemaker. He had a twin brother, Emil Robert, and two sisters, Joan and Carol. He graduated from Bayside High School in 1956 and shortly thereafter his family moved to Florida. Don enlisted in the US Army. After basic training in Fort Jackson, SC, he embarked on a 35-week training program to learn radar operation and repair.
In what might be thought of as typical military decision making, upon graduation from radar repair training, he was shipped off to Fort Devens as part of the 4th Regimental Combat Team. There was no radar in sight. He wrote to the chief signal officer asking why he was there. The officer replied, “you want Guam or Korea?” He chose Korea and spent the next 13 months as part of the 1st Cavalry; 13th Signal Battalion attached to the 27th Ordinance Battalion along the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) where he operated and repaired ground radar used to detect movement along the very tense border. “Most of the people coming across were trying to escape North Korea.” “I got to Japan quite a bit. I had a good job.”
By 1958 he was back in New York finishing up his enlistment at Floyd Bennet Field until 1960. “Most of the guys I was with in Korea got sent to Vietnam. I had done two years of Navy Reserve prior to enlisting which exempted me from being sent to Vietnam.” He returned to Fort Lauderdale and got a job as an executive with a major swimming pool construction company building large-scale pools for colleges, universities and hotels. It was at one of these hotel pools where he met Sandy Spangler, a Florida State University student who was working as an extra on the film set of “Where the Boys Are.” The pair dated for a year and married in 1961, a match that has lasted 63 years, four children (Terri, John, Carol and Jill) and seven grandchildren.
Don made a life out of being a pool guy, moving back and forth between various companies in various cities. The family moved multiple times to Albany, NY, Kissimmee/Orlando Florida, Birmingham AL, and eventually to Peabody, MA and the NE Aquatics Company - a firm he joined in the late 1990s and worked at until his retirement in 2010. He and Sandy originally moved to Gloucester in 1999 to be near his daughter Carol Hedges, a 4th grade teacher at Beeman Memorial School. Until recently, their daughter, Jill VandenBosch Cahill served as the City of Gloucester’s Chief Administrative Officer.
Arthur “Artie” Churchill, 76
Gloucester, MA
Born 4/22/1949
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Navy
Rank: EM3 (Electrician’s Mate)
Dates of Service: 1968-1971
The Riverdale Park son of a Gloucester police officer and both World Wars Navy veteran Everett Roderick Churchill and Boston ‘Southie’ Marie Coughlin, Artie Churchill was well schooled in military life. His two brothers Ernest and Joseph also served in the Navy. The 1967 Gloucester High School graduate initially wanted to join the Marines, but the pull to the Navy was too strong, so when he went to enlist, it was the Navy that won out.
The Navy asked him for a wish list of where he’d like to serve and on the bottom of that list was submarine school. So, of course, that’s where they sent him. He began his training at the Great Lakes Chicago Training Center. About seven weeks in he decided being under water for extended periods wasn’t for him and was assigned to the USS Severn (AO-61) a refueling vessel that primarily serviced aircraft carriers. When not on board the ship he toured Italy, Spain and Greece. His two-year service was primarily in the Mediterranean ending with a disability discharge in 1971.
He returned to Gloucester and got a job as a laborer for Ocean Crest Seafood and in 1971 married the boss’s daughter, Maria Parco, whom he had dated in high school. They’ve been married for 54 years. Eventually he took a job with the Gloucester DPW working in the sewer and water treatment department becoming a licensed operator. He worked for the City of Gloucester for 20 years before doing similar work in both the private sector and Essex for another 18 years.
The couple have two children, Jonathan Churchill and Elizabeth Moran, and six grandchildren. Maria worked at The Gloucester House as a waitress before becoming treasurer of two family businesses, Ocean Crest Seafood and Neptune’s Harvest. Artie spends his time now watching his grandkids play sports, golfing and fishing. “I always had someone looking out for me wherever I went.”
William “Billy” Goulart, 76
Gloucester, MA
Born: Nov. 24, 1949
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: E-5 Specialist 5th class
Dates of Service: 1969-1970, 1977-1981
Billy Goulart was born to William Jr. and Margaret (Mione) Goulart. He has three siblings: Donna, Michael, & Denise. The family home was Hartz Street, from there they lived in Riverdale Park and Washington Square.
He attended local schools graduating GHS 1967. Having a passion for percussion he played with Riverdale Drum & Bugle Corps, St Ann’s CYO Band (marching in Rose Bowl Parade), GHS R.O.T.C. band, & Atlantic Brassmen Sr. Drum & Bugle Corps. He was drafted in 1969 and discharged 1970 having served in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Seven years later in 1977 he enlisted back into the Army and spent 3 years in Frankfurt, West Germany as an executive administrative assistant for the Headquarters of 3rd Armored Division, Drake Kaserne. This was the same unit in which Elvis Pressley served years earlier. For his final year of his enlistment he was assigned to Fort Leslie J. McNair, in Washington D.C.
Billy worked for the U.S. Post Office in Manchester, MA for 25 years. When he retired, he finished his college studies graduating from North Shore Community College (with honors) majoring in Graphic Design. Two months later he met his current partner, Patty Barry, and for the next 15 years successfully operated a mobile food concession, “Nana’s Fried Dough.” Today he gives back by cooking fried dough for The Grace Center, AA Meetings, & the local VA office.
Billy has three children, four grandchildren, and one great granddaughter.
Billy and Patty spend winters as “snowbirds” in Venice, Florida.
Joseph “Munza” Catania, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born 7/10/1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Navy, USS Epperson & Mobile Riverine Forces
Rank: Seaman
Dates of Service: 1967-1971
Joseph “Munza” Catania volunteered for the Navy in June of 1967 as he watched his friends getting drafted. Following his graduation from Gloucester High, he headed to US Naval training at Great Lakes, Illinois. His parents, Gloucester fisherman Michael and Sarah Catania weren’t thrilled with the prospect of his joining the Navy, but “I wanted to decide where I was going to go.”
His first assignment was as a bosun aboard the destroyer USS Epperson off Vietnam. The ship spent two months on the gun line north of the DMZ, two months as fire support below the DMZ and two months as a plane guard in South Vietnamese waters. On his return to their home base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Joe asked for a transfer to the Riverine Forces, river patrol boats that were deployed in the myriad waterways of the Mekong Delta. Five months of training in Vallejo, CA, and two weeks of intensive Vietnamese language training later, he and 57 other sailors were shipped back to Naval Base Bien Tuy. Three and a half months there, then a posting to Nha-Ba for another three and a half months and finally a posting in Saigon teaching English to Vietnamese soldiers. While on the PBRs he said, “I never took off my flak jacket.”
He returned stateside as a member of the Admiral’s staff at Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island. After three years, nine months and 23 days, he left the Navy in 1971 and headed back to Gloucester and a career as a fisherman. He fished aboard the F/V Santa Maria and Virginia Surf. “I had a good bachelorhood, plenty of money.” After he “waited til the right one came along” at 33, he met Debbie (Ranta) at Little Earl’s disco and married in June 1981. They’ve been married for 44 years, have one daughter, Johanna Catania and two grandkids.
After hanging up his fishing boots, he went to work at Cyrk for a while and while watching buses pass by while hanging out at the St. Peter’s Club, he thought he might like to be a bus driver. Bob Ryan encouraged him to apply and Joe drove for CATA for 26 years before fully retiring.
George Drohan, 98
Gloucester, MA
Born 4/28/1927
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army/Army Security Agency
Rank: Master Sergeant (E-8)
Dates of Service: 1945-1968 (WWII/Vietnam)
If you sent military message transmissions in Europe between 1945-1947 or in Vietnam from 1964 to 1965, there’s a good chance that George Drohan was listening in and copying them down to send to Command. George is the 12th of 13 brothers and sisters born to Katherine and William Drohan on Hartz Street. His father, a mill worker, died when he was six years old and his mother died in February 1945. Right after graduating from GHS, the 17-year-old collected his diploma and headed to Boston to enlist in the Army near the end of World War II.
He had spent four years in ROTC in high school and the Army popped him into an engineering program at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana before shipping him off to Italy on the USS Blue Ridge Victory – “everyone said the Mediterranean was smooth, but I was way down in the bottom and every time the screws came out of the water you’d feel it.”
He arrived in Naples with the 88th Infantry, but they didn’t need engineers, so the Army shifted him to the 88thSignal Co. and trained him to listen in to any, and all, radio transmissions from all over Europe. He spent the next 18 months in Italy before leaving the Army in February 1947 as a corporal. He returned home to Gloucester, but there weren’t many jobs available, so two months later he re-enlisted in the Army Security Agency (ASA) and became an intercept operator.
It took him two weeks to arrive at his first posting at the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran. It was supposed to be a two-year posting, but Iranian civilians had set light to the oil wells filling the skies with thick black smoke. The ASA pulled him after nine months and sent him back to Virginia for even more training. What followed, career-wise, was twenty years in embassies in Turkey, Syria, Beirut, Egypt, all assigned to the State Department. By 1953 he was a Master Sergeant serving in Istanbul, Turkey.
In 1964 he was posted to the 8th Radio Research Unit in Phu Bai, Vietnam, listening to North Vietnamese radio transmissions out of Hanoi. At the end of 1965 they shipped him back to Fort Devens where he retired as a Morse code instructor in 1968.
On the personal front, while serving as a courier to the Middle East posted in Madrid, he met Air Force nurse Anne Cummings, from Illinois, at a Moroccan airbase. She left her service with the Air Force as a 1stLieutenant and headed home. She returned a short while later and met up with George in Iraq. She got off her flight with two wedding rings and a wedding dress. “I was lucky there was a Jesuit there.” The two married and set up house until the Army sent home all the spouses. He stayed in Baghdad for another year before joining Anne in Mt. Vernon, Ill, “a dry city with no beer.” They packed up her Ford and drove to Gloucester where they settled while George finished his three-year assignment at Fort Devens.
Before he’d re-enlisted, George had taken the Civil Service exam, so on his return to Gloucester, he secured a position at the Rockport Post Office, a position he held for 22 years. In 1964, they had a son, George, Jr., who died in 2023, and he has a daughter, Kelly, who lives in Gloucester. Anne died in 2007 at 78. George currently lives in a senior complex in Danvers.
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Gloucester, MA
Born: October 6, 1943
Born/Raised: Hollister, CA
Service: US Navy
Rank: Yeoman
Dates of Service: 1962-1963
Michael Calomo, 85
Gloucester, MA
Born: October 17, 1940
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Navy
Rank: Petty Officer, 3rd Class
Dates of Service: 1962-1965
In 1962, the daughter of a California farmer and the son of a Gloucester fisherman met in the Navy and a 62-year marriage, four children, nine grandchildren and a dozen great-grandchildren was the result.
Lavina “Nina” Bisceglia was 18 when she met a WAVE, the United States Naval Reserve for women, at about the time she was graduating from Livingston H.S. in California’s Central Valley. “I was so impressed with her.” Nina investigated joining the Navy but her family was dead set against it. Eventually she convinced them that that was her course and they signed her papers in June 1962. Her flight to Bainbridge, Maryland for basic training was first ever flight on an airplane.
Following basic training, Nina and her friends went to Lancaster, PA, to celebrate the end of bootcamp. She met Michael who at the time was stationed at Bainbridge, MD, at the beginning of his naval enlistment working in security. Nina went back to Bainbridge for school in Naval secretarial and administrative work. The pair dated for about five months.
Michael then took Nina to meet his parents, Captain Joseph and Rose Calomo, in Gloucester, and on the train ride back to Washington, Michael proposed. They married the following June in 1963. Nina wanted to get married in their Navy uniforms, but Michael’s mother wouldn’t allow it. Nina was posted in Washington D.C. and Michael was in Bainbridge. Nina would take “vampire leave” which meant she would donate blood on Friday and get an extra day for her weekend visits to see Michael.
They continued to be posted in separate locations until Nina’s commanding officer, keen on keeping Nina, arranged to transfer Michael to the SeaBees so they could be together in Little Creek, Maryland. It wasn’t long before Nina became pregnant with the first of their four children, Rose Marie. The pregnancy signaled the end of her military career, though her C.O. wanted her to return as a civilian after the baby was born. Instead, they decided that Nina would return to Gloucester, which she did, this time pregnant with her second daughter, Sandra.
Michael remained in Washington DC and was for a time assigned to a training ship doing mock landings off Vieques, Puerto Rico. He was charged with deploying pontoon ramps from the ships to land vehicles ashore. The Navy did allow him leave to attend Sandra’s birth. At the end of his three-year enlistment, he returned home to Gloucester, Nina, and two baby daughters.
Two more children would join the Calomo family, Krista in 1967 and Joseph in 1972. Nina cared for the home and children while Michael went to fish with his father aboard the Ida & Joseph. He also got his pilot’s license and became an aerial fish spotter, something he did for about ten years. He would spot for fishing boats up and down the coast from Gloucester to New Jersey. He was also a longshoreman and lumper on the docks, a landscaper and eventually went to work for and retire from Walgreens in both Malden and Gloucester.
Nina returned to the working world when her youngest, Joseph, started school. She studied for and became a hairdresser for about eight years. A girlfriend knew about her office and secretarial skills from her Naval service and helped her get a job at Gloucester Bank & Trust. She worked her way up through the ranks and eventually became vice-president of mortgages. She transferred to BankGloucester and retired fifteen years ago. Of her military experience, “I loved what I did. I loved the guys I worked with. I loved Washington DC. I would have stayed.”
Michael’s brother Sam Calomo served in Vietnam as a combat medic from 1968-1969.
David Oliver, 70
Essex, MA
Born: April 16, 1955
Born/Raised: Essex, MA
Service: US Marines
Rank: Chief Warrant Officer
Dates of Service: 1974-1978, 1978-1993 Active Reserves
Asking David Oliver what he did during his time in the Marines elicits a reserved reply. What he can say is that after a year-long process of getting his top-secret clearance, six months at the Monterey Language School learning Spanish and training in electronics and communications, he found himself at the top of a hill in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a room full of radio equipment, another soldier on the front line of the Cold War.
David was born, and raised in Essex, MA, one of five children. His father Arthur, Jr., had enlisted in the Army during WWII and was on troop transport to Japan for the planned invasion when the atomic bombs were dropped. When he returned, his mother put her foot down that he wouldn’t join the family business as a horse trainer, so she found him a job at General Electric. His father met his mother, Mildred, from Revere, who had been working assembling wiring on the factory floor during the war. He has two sisters and two brothers, including his twin, Mark.
He attended Gloucester High and graduated in 1973. He played tuba in band and enrolled in the ROTC. After GHS, he attended Iowa State University where he played in the Big 8 marching band. Not happy with his time at Iowa, in the Spring of 1974 a friend talked him into joining the Marines. He was immediately offered a place in aviation technology and headed off to San Diego for training. Once he finished boot camp the Marines had other plans and he began his top-secret road to Cuba.
Normally a one-year posting and considered isolated duty, David continued extending his tour every six months until the end of his enlistment in 1978. One of the only perks to being stationed at Gitmo was that soldiers ranked sergeant and above were allowed to bring personal vehicles to the base which often changed hands at the end of deployments. David bought a 1973 Plymouth Barracuda from a departing sailor and eventually brought this car home with him when he returned stateside.
Once finished with active duty, David joined the active reserves and returned, briefly, to college at UMASS Amherst. His first summer back from school, he took a job with JK Systems in Gloucester installing security systems. When the summer was up, he was offered double his pay to stay on. He worked for them for 18 years.
In 1991, as a Chief Warrant Officer, he was called up for Desert Storm as an electronic warfare intelligence specialist. He spent six months teaching signal intelligence and electronic warfare to ensigns in Virginia Beach, Virginia. After finishing his employment at JK Systems, he took a job at Audi in Peabody which he held for 24 years until covid urged his retirement.
In 1983, David met his future husband Mark Nelson who worked for CB Fisk making pipe organs. They started by having a long-distance relationship between Magnolia and Rockport and eventually bought a house together in Essex where they continue to live. David and Mark officially married on their 25th anniversary, 17 years ago. Now that both are retired, David works part time at Angie’s Service in Newbury and volunteers restoring and operating narrow gauge rail cars in Portland, Maine.
“I never felt like a Vietnam veteran, but rather a Cold War veteran.”
Walter Marshall Rich, 77
Essex, MA
Born: September 26, 1948
Born/Raised: Ipswich/Rockport, MA
Service: US Navy
Rank: Petty Officer 2nd Class
Ship: USS Shangri La
Dates of Service: 1968-1972
Walter Rich was the son of lobsterman and firefighter Walter G. and Jean (Cogswell) Rich, of Essex. His father was a WWII veteran who served in Belgium as a motor-pool mechanic after landing on Omaha Beach in the days following DDay. He has a sister, Ethyl Carlson and a brother James Rich. He was raised in Rockport and graduated from Rockport H.S. in 1966. He went on to study as a machinist at Beverly Trade School for two years.
He and his friend Kerry Sullivan decided to join the Navy under the Buddy System. Both had deferments until they finished school, but Kerry lost his and ended up being drafted into the Army instead. Rich continued with his enlistment into the Navy. Already trained as a machinist, the Navy sent him to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to join the crew of the aircraft carrier, USS Shangri-La.
Walter spent two years and ten months aboard the Shangri-La. The first cruise sent the carrier to the Mediterranean for seven months. Following that deployment, the ship was sent to Vietnam where it spent nine months off the coast of Vietnam providing air support for F8 Crusaders and A4 Sky Hawks. Then, various stops in Subick Bay, Philippines and Japan, the ship eventually circumnavigated the globe and returned to its homeport in Jacksonville, FL. The Shangri-La was then moved to Boston where it was decommissioned and mothballed.
After returning from the Mediterranean in 1969, Walter was granted two weeks leave so he headed home to Rockport to visit friends. On Front Beach, he met a nursing student from Connecticut, Sally Ann Bashiloff. They carried on a long-distance relationship and married on July 3, 1971.
After the Shangri-La was decommissioned, Walter was assigned to a sub tender in Holy Loch, Scotland repairing submarines. He was able to find a small cottage in the local village and the Navy allowed him to bring his new bride to join him “for the best year of their lives.” They’ve now been married for 54 years and have two children, Benjamin Rich and Jessica Murphy, and four grandchildren, Jack, Claire, Jonathan and Charlotte.
Two weeks after he left the Navy in 1972, he enrolled at Wentworth Institute of Technology and, two-years later, received an AA in Building Construction. He worked for four years in Rockport before joining up with a friend and fellow student, Bradley Johnson, to form Johnson & Rich Construction in Essex in 1977. Walter retired from the company in 2019 after 42 years. He now spends a lot of time with his grandchildren and does the odd job of construction.
Robert Vinson, 78
Rockport, MA
Born 3/12/1947
Born/Raised: Belmont, MA
Service: US Army, 101st Airborne
Rank: Captain
Dates of Service: 1967-1973
Commendations: Air Medal “V” device for Valor
Raised a devout Catholic in Belmont, MA, Robert Vinson nearly followed a path that would lead him to a monastic life with the Passionists. “I loved the seminary. I loved the monastic life,” but it was 1966 and a year into his training, he realized he needed to get out into the world. He applied for and was accepted to Boston College, but that too wasn’t the right fit, “I hated it.” In 1967, he joined the US Army and after taking one of their entrance exams, he was immediately put on the path to become a helicopter pilot. Before shipping off to basic training, he had never even been on an airplane.
Bob was the third child of nine (three brothers and five sisters) born to John & Louise Vinson in Belmont. His father worked at Standard Thomson in Waltham for 48 years and finished as a supervisor. Bob attended St. Mary’s H.S. in Waltham and graduated in 1965. His brother John was serving in the Navy in Vietnam and his sense of service helped steer him towards the military. His first stop was Fort Polk in Louisiana, a “hell-hole” where “the drill sergeant hated me. I learned a lot about pushups.” Eventually he went to flight school in Texas and helicopter school in Alabama where he learned to fly Hueys. He completed his helicopter training at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was assigned to a new helicopter division with the 101st Airborne – the 158th Aviation Battalion and shipped off to Camp Evans airbase in Vietnam in January 1969.
He spent six months as a helicopter pilot, including flying soldiers and ammunition into hot landing zones and taking out the wounded and dead. He flew during the storied Hamburger Hill battle in the Ashau Valley where scores of American and S. Vietnamese troops were killed, and nearly 400 wounded. Bob recalls that two days in a row, the helicopters in front and behind him were both shot down. Of the 20 helicopters in his company, five were lost in those two days and three pilots killed. He was awarded the Air Medal with a “V” device for valor for rescuing eight crew members under fire.
Flying his helicopter wasn’t the only service he was drawn towards; he also made time for more civilian-friendly outreach. He noted that there were precious few schools and medical dispensaries available to civilians in the area, so he, somewhat clandestinely at first, “I begged, borrowed and stole” materials like cement and lumber, to begin helping the locals in the Huong Dien District build new facilities. Six months into his tour, the Army recognized the benefits of Bob’s efforts and transferred him full-time to S5, or civil affairs and pacification, to continue his work with locals rebuilding schools and medical facilities. He received a direct commission from Chief Warran Officer to 1st Lieutenant just before he left Vietnam. His story was told in a 1970 Reader’s Digest article.
When his year was up, he returned home a lieutenant and was sent to Infantry School, then joined the National Guard and attended Advanced Infantry Training. By then however he knew he wasn’t going to stay in the military. He left and went to UMass Amherst in pursuit of a degree in sociology. “I loved it.” Bob eventually earned a Master’s degree in management of human services from Brandeis University Heller School. His career in service continued when he went to work for a housing and human services non-profit in Haverhill and then Goodwill Industries.
Married twice before his current marriage, Bob met and started dating Andrea Coates in the mid 1990s. While Bob was on a 1200-mile biking trip from Hanoi to Saigon in 1997, Andrea flew to Vietnam because she knew the trek might be very emotionally challenging. It was challenging but he also found the trip very healing, helping him deal with the emotional scars of his combat tour in Vietnam. “She came halfway around the world to be with me for less than 24 hours. I knew she was a keeper.” Bob proposed, she accepted. They married in 1997. They have one son, Samuel Peter, “the love of my life.”
For the past 35 years, Bob has worked as a massage therapist. During those same years he has volunteered with the Pan Mass Challenge Cancer Ride organizing volunteer massage therapist for the riders. Bob has lived in Rockport for thirty years.
Westley Burnham, 77
Essex, MA
Born: November 6, 1954
Born/Raised: Essex, MA
Service: US Navy
Rank: EM1-SS (Electrician’s Mate First Class – submarine service)
Ship: Submarine USS Tullibee (SSN-597)
Dates of Service: 1973-1979
“I don’t like heat, don’t care for jungles and I’m allergic to lead.” This line of thinking, along with a lottery number of 14 led Westley Burnham, of Essex, to join the Navy in 1973. Two years of classroom work to learn to operate a nuclear power plant, he trained as an electrician’s mate. He was assigned to the USS Tullibee, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine. Westley would spend more than four years at sea, or rather, under it. “I got a hell of an education.”
Westley lives on land in Essex that has been in his family since the 1600s when three Burnham brothers arrived from England aboard the merchant ship, Angel Gabriel, which was lost off the coast of Maine in 1635. His parents, Everett and Ann Burnham, ran the family business, a service station, in Essex. His father served in the US Army at the end of WWII during the occupation of Japan. He has two brothers, Dana and Michael, Westley is the oldest.
As a student at Gloucester H.S., Westley was a four-year member of the Grenadiers ROTC rifle team. He graduated in 1972. Also graduating in 1972 was class president Dawn Addison who, after attending the University of Maine and returning to Essex as an elementary teacher, ran into her old schoolmate Westley at the Bunghole Lounge. They married in 1977, though Westley wouldn’t be done with his enlistment until 1979. They have two children, Kelly and Erin, and four grandchildren.
Westley returned to Essex, at first, he worked at the family’s gas station, but the training he received aboard the Tullibee soon turned into a position at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant where he worked as a senior reactor operator from 1985-2014.
He also learned about service in the military. He became a member of the Essex volunteer fire department as a firefighter/EMT for 46 years. He served as an elected member of the Essex Planning Board for 28 years and currently serves as a Department of Public Works Commissioner, a seat he’s held for more than four years. He’s a member of the Essex Legion Post 231.
Albert Viator, 78
Gloucester, MA
Born: November 7, 1947
Born/Raised: Quincy, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: Spec. E-5 (Sergeant)
Unit: 4th PSYOP Group, 6th PSYOP Battalion
Albert Viator’s great-grandfather was a whaler out of New Bedford Massachusetts and his grandparents and parents were all born in Gloucester. His parents William & Grace (Nichols) Viator moved to Quincy during WWII so his father could work in the shipyard there. Gloucester would eventually reclaim Albert as her own, but it would take a couple of decades. Albert and his three siblings grew up in Quincy. He graduated from North Quincy H.S. in 1965.
Keen on becoming a filmmaker, Albert enrolled in and finished a two-year program at a school of radio, television and theatre production in Boston. Following this, he promptly enlisted in the Army. “I had always been a news junkie and felt the Vietnam War would be the biggest story of my generation. I wanted to be part of it.” After basic, and advanced infantry training, the Army enrolled him in their Defense Information School (DINFOS) for a nine-month training program in all things broadcast, film and photography related. Then he volunteered for Vietnam.
For the next year of his tour, he was part of a three-man PSYOP field team serving in III Corps. He, an interpreter and a lieutenant, would be assigned to various infantry groups going out on field operations. In addition to his M-16 and all the other equipment carried by an infantryman, he also carried a 25-lb backpack speaker used to blare messages to enemy troops to encourage them to give up. When he wasn’t going out on patrols, he would fly in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft dropping leaflets from the sky over enemy locations or villages, or he’d engage in “pacification programs” designed to win the trust of civilians and degrade support for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army.
During one “eagle flight” – a mission with multiple helicopters, he became separated from the rest of the infantry company. Alone, in the dark and in the middle of enemy held territory, he feared he would be left behind. He managed to locate a helicopter about 100 yards away preparing to take off. Sprinting through a flooded rice paddy in water above his knees and yelling not to leave him behind, he made it to the aircraft and was dragged into the helicopter, face-down on the diamond-plate floor just as it took off. “To this day, I see diamond plate, and I have to pull myself together.”
Following his in-country tour, he spent a year at Fort Gordon, Georgia making training films but not before spending some leave in Gloucester where he had often come as a child visiting family. At a VFW dance in Ipswich, he met his future wife, Lucinda Pata, who was celebrating her 21st birthday. Albert was discharged in June 1970. Instead of Quincy, he returned to Gloucester and enrolled at North Shore Community College to complete his college requirements, then transferred to Boston University where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Broadcasting and Film Production at the School of Public Communication and became a filmmaker/videographer.
Albert received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant to make the film, “Back to School to Live” – featuring the transformation of Gloucester’s Central Grammar (and other schools) into housing. His career as a freelance filmmaker sent him all over the world working for CNN, National Geographic, PBS and covering news, politics and motorsports. He taught filmmaking at Boston University and volunteered with Homes for Our Troops – a non-profit that builds homes for disabled veterans. He retired in 2013. In 2021 he published “An Accidental (PSY) Warrior” chronicling his experiences in Vietnam and his subsequent challenges with ongoing PTSD.
He and Lucinda have been married for 52 years. They have one daughter, Gabrielle Viator, and two grandchildren, Ainsley & Emery.
David Benjamin, 74
Gloucester, MA
Born: 11/4/51
Born/Raised: Gloucester
Rank: E-3 Airman 1st Class
Service: US Air Force
Unit: 590th AF Band, Strategic Air Command, USAF, Westover AFB
Dates of Service: 1972-1973
David Benjamin has been a musician since the fourth grade when he started his lifelong companionship with the clarinet at Beeman Elementary School. Born to Robert and Gertrude, his first family home was a rehabbed chicken coop on Cherry Street. The family eventually moved to Wheeler Street where David grew up with his three sisters: Donna, Joan and Nancy. Their father, Robert, was a WWII Navy veteran who served in the Pacific.
Following his graduation from Gloucester H.S. in 1969, David attended Holyoke Community College for 1 ½ years before he transferred to Lowell State University. He then, “took a semester off for seven years.” He decided to enlist in the Air Force. He knew some guys who were in the band at Westover AFB in Chicopee, MA, and managed to get assigned there as a musician. He and the 35-member band played for various public relations events as well as ceremonial occasions. He served for 14 months before a back injury sealed an early discharge and a return to Gloucester.
In 1970 he started dating the librarian for the Cape Ann Symphony, Sally Knowlton, who he knew from high school. They married in 1974 and just celebrated their 51st anniversary. By 1978 he returned to Lowell University and got his B.A. in Music Education. He taught in Georgetown and Lynn Public Schools before landing a job first at Gloucester High School and then O’Maley Middle School where he taught music to Gloucester children for nearly thirty years. Likewise, Sally taught 1st grade in the Gloucester Schools for thirty years.
He retired in 2011, but that hasn’t kept him from filling his days with music. He managed the Cape Ann Symphony for 35 years and currently runs the Summer Concerts in Gloucester; the Salem Willows Concerts; is the director of the Cape Ann Community Band; the Golden Echoes Big Band, and the director of the Boston Fireman’s Marching Band seen regularly at the Horribles Parade and the St. Peter’s Fiesta. He also performs with the Walker Creek Sax Quartet and is forming the Leverett Street Flute Quartet.
David and Sally have three children, Alyssa Teixeira, Jonathan Benjamin and Jesse Benjamin, and six grandchildren.
Allan Milton “Doc” Goodhue, III, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born: April 4, 1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: Spec. E-5 (Sergeant)
Unit: 25th Infantry, 155th Artillery, Cu Chi
“Doc” Goodhue III’s father, “Doc” Goodhue 2nd was a WWII Navy veteran and his mother, Alma Bouchie from Nova Scotia, was one of 12 children in her family. No one’s quite sure where the nickname “Doc” came from, except that it came from his grandfather, Allan “Doc” Goodhue the first. Allan Goodhue was born in 1948, and grew up in Riverdale Park in Gloucester, “the best place you could grow up in your whole life.” His namesake father was a custodian in Gloucester schools and his mother, Alma, was a waitress at Bob’s Clam Shack.
When Allan was ten, his family lived on Trask Street and his house caught fire. In the commotion, his brother Mark was left in his crib. Allan rushed back into the burning building and rescued his brother.
He attended St. Ann’s and graduated from Gloucester High in 1966. As part of requirements then, he was in the ROTC, “I think Gloucester having ROTC saved a lot of guys.” In addition to Mark, Allan had another brother, Kevin, from his mother Alma. After her death in 1973, his father remarried and he has two half-brothers, Justin and Jeremy, from his stepmother Maryann.
Drafted in 1967, at 19, he was trained at Fort Sill and shipped off to Cu Chi, Vietnam, with the 25th Infantry, 155th Artillery. One day standing in line at the PX, he thought he recognized someone in line. That guy turned out to be Mike Favazza, a Gloucester guy a couple of years older than Allan, but friends with his brother. “We made up a story about being cousins” and got assigned to the same tank. “One Christmas they dropped us in a rubber plantation - the Michelin Rubber Company – we couldn’t see very well. We had to guard it. They lifted the tank with a helicopter crane and dropped us into the plantation.” Mike wanted a souvenir of one of the flare parachutes, “we were screaming at him to get back in the tank.”
Allan left Vietnam in April 1969 and spent the remainder of his tour training soldiers at Fort Hood before coming home to Gloucester. On his return, he took a battery of Civil Service exams and landed a position at Gloucester Schools where he worked for 28 years. He met Gail Parisi at a dance at the St. Peter’s Club and the pair married in 1972. In addition to working for the Gloucester Public Schools, Allan also worked at Greeley’s Funeral Home and managed The Mills apartment complex.
Allan and Gail have been married for 53 years and had three children, Peter, Stacy and Ben. Ben died in 2021 at the age of 46. They have five grandchildren, Emme, Augustave, Allan, Margaret and Charlotte. In retirement, Allan “hangs around with guys in the same boat as me. We meet every day at McDonalds.”
Michael Favazza, 80
Methuen, MA
Born: March 19, 1945
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army
Rank: Spec. E-4 (Corporal)
Unit: Americal 82nd Artillery and the 25th Infantry Division
Mike Favazza was born and lived on Sibley Street until his family moved ‘down the fort’ to Commercial Street when he was eight. His father worked at a Peabody leather factory and drove tankers for Felicia Oil Company. His mother Jennie (Orlando) was a personal care attendant. He has a brother Peter and sister Sarah. He attended St. Ann’s through grammar school and then Gloucester High School from which he graduated in 1963 and then attended a trade school where he learned to be a meat cutter.
Uncle Sam called in September 1967, and Mike was drafted into the Army. Trained as a cannoneer at Fort Sill, OK and additional artillery training Fort Lewis, Washington, Mike was initially sent to Vietnam with the reconstituted 82nd Artillery Division of Americal in July 1968. Six months later he was transferred to the 25th Infantry. While standing in line at the PX on his first day in base camp in Cu Chi, “I saw this big guy, and we just stared at each other like we knew each other.” It turned out to be “Doc” Goodhue and they were both from Gloucester, “I knew his brother.”
They decided to concoct a story about them being cousins so they could get transferred to the same tank battery. Their commanding officer put them in the same tank. “At least I would be with someone I knew, make it easier. Doc was the gunner, I was the assistant gunner. Two Gloucester guys in Vietnam in the same tank. What’re the odds?” They served together for six months before Mike was sent home in July 1969.
Before being sent to Vietnam, Mike took some leave back in Gloucester and was hanging out at Good Harbor Beach when a young woman, with a wide-brimmed, aqua-blue hat walked past. Mike asked Linda Flanagan to walk down to the water’s edge with him and eventually for a date. He told her he was a Boston College hockey player, “I guess I was trying to impress her.” Unfortunately for young love, Vietnam got in the way and they went their separate ways.
Mike looked up Linda on his return to Gloucester two years later. She had married briefly, had a daughter Michelle and was living with a friend in Concord. Mike convinced her to come back to Gloucester and they married on Valentine’s Day 1971. Sadly, Michelle died at age six of brain cancer, but not before the Gloucester community pitched in and sent the family to Disneyworld. “Every day on her birthday, the family sits down and watches the film of the trip.”
Mike called on his meat cutting credentials and made a 40-year career working for various grocery stores: 1st National; Brown’s; Ceratani’s; Lavalle’s Restaurant Supplier; and Stop & Shop. With his brother Peter, he also reopened the Old Timers Bar in Gloucester in 1987 where he tended bar for ten years.
Linda and Mike have three more children: Danielle, Noelle and Ryan, and they have two grandkids, George and Wyatt. He now enjoys working around his house and spending time on his boat, Game Changer. He and Doc remain close friends to this day.
Martin Ray, 79
Gloucester, MA
Born: 10/16/1946
Born/Raised: Westpoint, NY/Various US Army postings
Service: US Army
Unit: Airborne & Ranger School, 538 Engineering Battalion (Thailand), Germany, 525th Military Intelligence (Vietnam).
Rank: Captain
Dates of Service: 1968-1972
When Colonel John Ray felt a need to correct his young son Martin, it was at full military attention. Such was the world of a career military family. Col. Ray, then a military law teacher at Westpoint Academy, came from a long line of military achievers including his three brothers and his father, and his son was going to grow up with the same sense of discipline. Martin’s parents, John and Tova, met in Europe towards the end of WWII. John had been wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, and held as a POW in both Tunisia and Germany before escaping twice. Tova was a Women’s Army Corps nurse from the Boston area serving in England and France.
Their marriage would include raising three children at multiple postings around the country, and the world, including Westpoint, Burma, Japan, California and New York. In high school Martin took correspondence courses from the University of Nebraska and finished his high school career as a senior at the Cambridge School – “It was one of the first big shocks I had.”
The next big shock was his first year as a med-school student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, “I got crushed.” He changed to International Relations and four years later, freshly degreed, he joined the Army Engineers to fulfil his ROTC commitment. “I thought it best to get out in the field and do something with my hands.”
Martin completed Airborne and Ranger Schools and in 1969 was assigned as a lieutenant to the south coast of Thailand and the 538th Engineering Battalion. Fifteen months into his assignment, the Army decommissioned his unit. He applied to go to Germany aware that he was stalling being posted to Vietnam. In 1971, as a captain, he volunteered to go to Vietnam fully expecting to be deployed with the 101st Airborne. Instead, he was assigned to the 525th Military Intelligence Division in Saigon. He spent the next year compiling geographic intelligence studies for upcoming operations, and taking photography classes for himself – “a total life-changer.”
Martin’s return to the world in 1972 was via Lanesville in Gloucester. His grandparents had a place where he’d visited growing up during summer vacations, and his parents retired there from his father’s military career. He got a job as a school bus driver and built a darkroom thinking he was going to be a photographer. He began a Master’s program in History at Salem State, inherited his family property in Lanesville and built a house and a garden setting his roots in Gloucester. Landscape gardening became a career he pursued for 37 years, focusing on the use of granite as a sculptural focus in the design of his landscapes. In 1974 he married folk singer Dorothy Cahill and they had two sons, Marco and Patrick. That marriage ended after 11 years. In 1985 he married Kay Rubin and they’ve been together ever since. They have seven grandchildren. For the past twelve years Martin has maintained a blog called Notes from Halibut Point, his observations of natural and social history on Cape Ann. He’s currently the president of Gloucester Cultural Initiative and is a member of Veterans for Peace.