Karen L. Adams was born on the Fourth of July in the rural midwestern town of Nevada, Missouri. Upon graduating in 1975 from Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, she went to work in radio but quickly moved into television news.
KOAM-TV in Pittsburg, Kansas was the first stop in her television career, where she was initially hired as a reporter but later advanced to anchor and news director. Read more >
Born in 1797, the youngest of the three surviving children of Nicholas Brown II and Ann Carter, daughter of John Carter, the noted Providence printer, John Carter Brown was raised in a family tradition of public leadership and philanthropy. While at Brown University, he joined an undergraduate society to provide needy students with free books.
Upon graduation in 1816, John Carter Brown joined the family firm, Brown & Ives. Though lacking his forefathers' enthusiasm for business or politics, he cheerfully undertook his commercial responsibilities, especially after his older brother Nicholas III defiantly left the family firm to settle in New York. Read more >
Records say that architect James C. Bucklin was a native of Pawtucket, but in view of his family's Rehoboth origins, the place of his birth on July 26, 1801, was probably on the east side of the Blackstone, an area not acquired by Rhode Island until 1862. His parents were James and Lorania (Pearce) Bucklin. When his father died only a year and a half after his birth, James's widowed mother moved with him to Providence, where he would live for the remainder of his long life. Read more >
Edward Carrington was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 2, 1775, the son of physician Edward Carrington and the former Susan Whittlesey. His family moved to Providence after the Revolution, and here Edward embarked upon a career in maritime commerce.
Carrington zealously embraced the commercial opportunity to engage in the exotic China and East India trade, an enterprise begun in 1787 by Providence's Brown family. In 1802, after serving as a clerk for three local merchants, he went to Canton, China and soon was appointed United States consul, a position he held until 1811. Read more >
Dr. Walter Channing (April 15, 1786 - July 27, 1876) was born in Newport, the younger brother of the Reverend William Ellery Channing. Like his brother he studied at Harvard and made his career in Boston, but as a noted physician and professor of medicine. After graduating from the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania in 1809, he became Harvard's first Professor of Obstetrics and Medical Jurisprudence and, from 1819 to 1847, the dean of its medical school. Read more >
Reverend William Ellery Channing (April 7, 1780 - October 2, 1842) was born in Newport, a grandson of William Ellery, a Rhode Island signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was also raised in Newport prior to graduating from Harvard in 1798. Thereafter he often visited Rhode Island, but he made his career in Boston as America's foremost minister of Unitarianism, a sect that rejected harsh Calvinistic theology in favor of a gentle, loving relationship with God.
From 1803 until his death Channing was pastor of Boston's Federal Street Church. Read more >
Aram G. Garabedian was born in Providence and raised by his Armenian parents. He graduated from Hope High School. After losing an athletic scholarship to attend the University of Maine, Aram decided to hitch-hike there anyway with just $35 in his possession. Read more >
Rabbi Leslie Y. Gutterman, the son of David and Winifred Gutterman, grew up in Flint, Michigan. He received a B A degree from the University of Michigan and a Doctor of Divinity degree from Hebrew Union College. In 1970, he completed his graduate studies and was ordained a rabbi. Read more >
Howell, David, 1747-1824 |
David Howell had a distinguished legal and academic career that extended from the Confederation Era through the Early National Period. He was born in Morristown, New Jersey, on January 1, 1747, the son of Aaron and Sarah Howell. He received his early education at Hopewell Academy in Hopewell, New Jersey, a Baptist school established by clergyman Isaac Eaton. Howell then went to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), from which he graduated in 1766. Read more >
King, Charles Bird, 1785-1862 |
Charles Bird King (September 26, 1785 - March 18, 1862) was born in Newport, the only child of Deborah Bird and Revolutionary War veteran Captain Zebulon King, who moved the family to Ohio in 1789 and was killed there by Indians.
When Charles King was fifteen, he went to New York to study portrait painting, and he then journeyed to London, where he was taught by Benjamin West at the Royal Academy.
After returning to America in 1812, he eventually settled in Washington, D.C. Read more >
George S. Lima, Sr., the son of immigrants from Cape Verde, spent his adolescent years in Harlem, Fall River, and Providence with his Cape Verdean family. His life changed dramatically when he enrolled at North Carolina A&T State University in 1939 on a football scholarship. Read more >
It was 1952, and Royal Little's idea was to buy Burkart Manufacturing, a producer of cushioning materials for the automotive, and eventually, the furniture and bedding industries. Read more >
Quality traits such as curiosity, courage, and counter-intuition have characterized key moments of Royal Little’s life. A natural inquiring mind led him to insights others missed or thought not possible, most notably his invention of the business conglomerate, Textron, a company comprised of separate, unrelated, diversified manufacturing enterprises.
Dealt a harsh blow in early life by his father’s death and the relocation of his family from Wakefield, Massachusetts, he faced the grim possibility of attending a rural, one-room school in California, Little was rescued by his uncle, Arthur D. Little, enrolled in a private Boston-area school and then sent on to Harvard. Read more >
Martin, Albert, 1808-1836
Captain Albert Martin (January 6, 1808 - March 6, 1836) was born in Providence, the son of prominent merchant Joseph S. Martin and his wife Abby. He received a good education, including a short stay at the U.S. Read more >
Patch, Sam, 1807-1829 |
Sam Patch was born in North Reading, Massachusetts, one of six children produced by the stormy union of Samuel Greenleaf Patch and Abigail McIntire Patch.
Following several family moves to northeastern Massachusetts towns, the Patches arrived in the mill village of Pawtucket at the falls of the Blackstone in 1807. Shortly after their arrival Sam began work in Slater's “White Mill,” where he rose to the coveted position of mule spinner--one of the first American-born workers to achieve this status. Sam's fame, however, would be made not in the mill but at the falls outside it: he eventually leapt feet-first from the six-story “Stone Mill” into a deep hole called “the pot,”a descent of 100 feet. Read more >
U.S. Minister and Congressman Jonathan Russell (February 27, 1771 - February 17, 1832) was born in Providence and graduated in 1791 from Brown University.
After several years in the mercantile business, he was appointed by President James Madison as American diplomatic chargé d'affairs in Paris in 1811 and then the chargé in London, a position he held when the War of 1812 began. Read more >
Eileen Gillespie Slocum was born in Manhattan on December 21 1915, and during her ninety-two years of life left an indelible mark on Newport society and the world of Republican politics.
Educated at Miss Hewitt’s Classes now the Hewitt School in New York City, Eileen became precise in vocabulary and diction. She made her debut at a dinner-dance hosted by her family at the Hotel Pierre in 1933.
At 17, she became engaged to John Jacob Astor V, whose father died on the Titanic. Read more >
Howard G. Sutton II of Portsmouth, publisher, president and chief executive officer of The Providence Journal Company, began his career at the Journal as a circulation statistician thirty-nine years ago, rising through the ranks before being named publisher, president and CEO in 1999.
A Rhode Islander since the age of eight, Sutton’s record of public service in his adopted state has been exemplary and diverse.
In 2011, he was honored by Crossroads Rhode Island for his longtime commitment to serving the state’s homeless. Read more >
Joe Walsh is a leader, a public servant, and a humanitarian with a thoughtful manner and a big heart. His passion for people, desire to serve his community, and popularity in his days in government led The Providence Sunday Journal Magazine to ask: “Doesn't Anyone Out There Hate this Man?” (Sept. 9, 1979). The newspaper that he delivered as a boy, was then writing stories about him. Read more >
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, March 4, 1754 - October 2, 1846, was born in Newport to Timothy Waterhouse, a chair maker, and his wife Hannah.
At age twenty-one he left Newport to study medicine in Europe. After his return to the United States in 1782, he joined the faculty of the new Harvard Medical School as one of its first three professors. Read more >
Mary Colman Wheeler (1846-1920) the founder of Providence's Wheeler School, was born on the family farm in Concord, Massachusetts, May 15, 1846. The Wheeler family, direct descendants of one of the first families of Massachusetts, was friends and neighbors of the Transcendentalists and literary leaders of their times; the Alcotts, Thoreaus, Hawthornes, Peabodys and Emersons. Miss Wheeler is buried along with these Concord notables on Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
An appreciation for the value of the arts and education came naturally to Mary Wheeler. Read more >
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