Robert Gossett holds the bronze medal in the palm of his aging hand. A smile crosses his face.
“I never knew he had it,” Gossett said of his father Edmund Gossett. “He never spoke of it.”
But the U.S. Navy Good Conduct medal engraved with Edmund’s name and the year 1932 is once again, back home with the family that cherishes it.
The journey began several months ago when Silverdale area resident Terry McCue bought a tool box at a garage sale. As McCue was going through the tool box, he found a Good Conduct Medal with the inscription “Edmund Gossett 1932” on it. Not knowing what to do with the medal, he gave it to Tony Laliberte, a foreman at Holmes Mechanical Inc., near Keyport.
“Terry had worked for us and he knew we had a collection of old things that we display on the shop wall,” said Ronnie Williams, administrative assistant at the company. “Most of what we have are old mechanical equipment plates that we put on display.”
But Laliberte took the medal and after looking at it, left it on his desk. It was Williams who picked it up one day and noticed the inscription on it.
“Tony said he had hoped to find who it belonged to but hadn’t had time to,” she said. “So I asked him if I could look into it and he said ‘Go ahead.’”
She went to work looking on the Internet at military websites, hoping she could find the name of Edmund Gossett. All she was able to find was a man by that name who had lived in Snyder, Washington years ago. But Williams wasn’t even sure where that was. As a last resort, she phoned a life-long friend who had just moved to the area to go to work as a veterans representative at WorkSource in Redmond.
That friend, Antonia Martinez, decided to research Ancestory.com and found that the family had stayed pretty much in the Kitsap area.
“I was looking for a registry of families that might help,” she said. “But when I didn’t come up with anything I decided to call the Kitsap Historical Society. I figured they had to know.”
She was put in touch with KHS researcher Bonnie Chrey.
“I recognized the name Gossett,” said Chrey. “I had some friends with that name so I decided to give them a call.”
Her friends, Robert and DeAnna Gossett, were excited to get the call and told her that Robert’s father’s name was Edmund.
“All the pieces just fell into place,” said Chrey.
A meeting was arranged and the Gossetts and Chrey went to Holmes Mechanical and met Laliberte and Williams. Williams placed the medal in Robert Gossett’s hand and they all smiled for photographs.
Gossett said his father was stationed on the USS Tennessee from 1928 to 1934, in Bremerton. He was born in Indiana, but settled in Bremerton after his Navy service. He spent his career working in Shop No. 38, Robert said of his father.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Robert also worked at the shipyard in Shop 99 for almost 38 years, retiring in 1987. He’s actually the third generation in the family to work in the shipyard, Robert’s wife DeAnna said. Robert’s mother’s father, Charles Erickson, worked in Shop 11.
Getting the medal back in family was “a pleasant surprise,” Robert said.
“My Dad never spoke of it,” he said. “But it must have been something that meant something to him because he kept it with him every day at work.”
Robert thinks that when his father retired from the shipyard, he probably checked his toolbox back in, forgetting that the medal was in it. Most likely, the tools were among those that became outdated and were sold off by the shipyard, only to eventually end up in someone’s garage sale.
Now, the medal has a special place in the china cabinet in Robert and DeAnna’s home.
“It’s where it should be,” said DeAnna.
Williams agrees.
“Like my friend Antonia said, this medal had a life of its own,” Williams said. “And we finally got it to the right person.”