Edward A Gisburne
Edward, or Eddie, was born on the 14th of June 1892, in Providence, Rhode Island, and went to school in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was an only child born into a family with a history of service in the Navy going back six generations. Eddie’s parents died when he was five years old and he went to Washington DC to live with his father’s parents. At 18, he graduated from the McKinley Manual Training School (now known as the Robert Gould Shaw Junior High School) in Washington DC, and since he had an interest in electricity, he worked in Boston for an electrical company before working at the Boston Navy Yard. Eddie enlisted in the US Navy with some friends on the 30th of August 1910, continuing his passion for electricity as a signaler on the USS Wyoming and then on the USS Culgoa. When the USS Florida deployed to support the Mexican Campaign, he was an electrician third class and the chief radio operator when he displayed actions that would later earn him the Medal of Honor. The citation reads:
On board the U.S.S. Florida during the seizure of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 21-22 April 1914, and for extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession during this action.
While the citation is pretty vague, what Eddie actually did was far from simple. He had gone ashore as part of a landing party in order to set up a communications station. When the first Marine of the rifle squad was shot upon reaching the roof of the Terminal Hotel, Eddie crawled through continuous fire to pull Private Daniel Haggerty from the edge and to safety. He crawled not only to prevent himself from being shot, but mostly because he had already been wounded in the legs and was unable to walk. When Eddie was found unconscious, he was sitting with Daniel dead in his arms but Eddie did recover from most of his injuries. His left leg was amputated above the knee and was discharged from the Navy four months after the campaign.
One day before the US entered World War 1, Eddie joined the Navy again, this time as a Warrant Officer, with a waiver from the Secretary of the Navy. Nine months later, on the 12th of January 1918, He was commission as an Ensign and before the end of the year would be promoted to Lieutenant (Junior Grade). He continued in the position of radio operator and handled all communications for all cruisers and transport vessels operating in the Atlantic Ocean. When President Wilson traveled to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference on the USS George Washington, Eddie was on board and the following year, he received a medical retirement with seven years of service.
Eddie had married Ena and they had two sons, John (who would join the Navy) and Edward Jr (who would join the Army Air Corps and be MIA during World War 2). They lived in Milton, Massachusetts and he taught classes about radio, worked as a reporter, and served as a district manager for the Boston Edison Company. Eddie started working for WEEI, a Boston radio station, in 1927 and worked there as an editor and eventually as an announcer.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Eddie once again answered the call to serve his nation despite missing a leg and being almost 50 years old. He was a Lieutenant at Naval Air Station Quonset Point in Rhode Island until the end of the war, when he retired from the military for good. Eddie and Ena moved to Duxbury, Massachusetts in 1950 and on the 29th of August 1955, Edward Allen Gisburne died at the age of 63. He and his wife are buried in a family plot in the Milton Cemetery in Milton, Massachusetts: Circle Avenue, Lot 3485. A memorial marker for their son Edward Jr is there with them as well.
