After graduation and service in the U.S. Army, I attended Boston State College for two years, met and married my wife of forty-three years (a registered nurse who probably cares for several WRHS graduates at Wachusett Family Practice), and became the father of a son and daughter, both graduates of WRHS and former US Marines. I am the proud grandfather of three teenagers. I completed my college education at the University of Massachusetts, graduating in 1993.

After several years working in banking, warehousing, and the beer industry, I retired in 1992 and devoted myself to researching the history of the United States Marine Corps, culminating in the publication of some sixty journal articles and the four-volume The United States Marine Corps in the Civil War (1997-2000). I subsequently wrote Biographical Sketches of the Commissioned Officers of the Confederate States Marine Corps (2001), and co-authored The Civil War Uniforms of the United States Marine Corps: The Civil War Year (2010). I was the recipient of the Naval Order of the United States’ 1998 Captain Emile Louis Bonnot Award for Naval Writing and the 2003 Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s General Oliver P. Smith Heritage Award. I continue to write journal articles and am currently working on a biography of the nineteenth century Marine Corps icon Archibald Hamilton Gillespie, the officer who played a pivotal role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War of 1846-1847.

In 1999, I became the editor of Military Collector & Historian, the journal of the Company of Military Historians and, in 2000, was made Administrator of the organization, positions I still hold. I was elected Fellow of the Company in 2001 and received its Distinguished Service Award in 2010. In 2003, I became the business manager of the International Naval Research Organization and in 2007 assumed the presidency of that organization with the added responsibility of editing and producing its journal Warship International.