Few who saw Robert J. Yered, the weathered, aging groundskeeper in faded jeans at a local Massachusetts high school, thought he was anything more than a kind retiree trying to stay busy. Yered never offered clues to his past, but this quiet man, who passed in 2009, was a hero in the Vietnam War. The […]

The United States Coast Guard honored William C. Hart, a Philadelphia native born in 1898, for heroism with its most significant rescue accolade, after he saved a crewman from the Tug Thomas Tracy which was stranded on Absecon Bar, New Jersey, on Nov. 16, 1926. 

The Coast Guard’s sixth Commandant, Frederick Billard personally conveyed the Gold Lifesaving Medal of the First Class in a formal ceremony at the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore, on Nov. 29, 1927. During the 70 years from 1874 to 1944, only 600 Gold Lifesaving Medals — the Coast Guard’s highest merit for rescuing personnel — were issued to heroes from all walks of life. These rare medals were awarded “upon any persons who shall hereafter endanger their own lives in saving or endeavoring to save lives from perils of the sea, within the United States, or upon any American vessel.”  

In an unassuming burial plot in a rural cemetery in Pueblo, Colorado, the grave of a Coast Guard hero, Joseph Doyle, remains unadorned — no marker, stone, or flag. Joseph Doyle was born in New York on April 17, 1836. When he was 42 years old, he led two famous rescues during his tenure as the Keeper of the U.S. Life-Saving Station in Charlotte, New York, a post to which he was appointed on July 11, 1878.

To this day, Webber’s crew is referred to as the “Gold Medal Crew” involved in the greatest small boat rescue in Coast Guard history.