Appalachian Figures
In February 1974 the Senate Commerce Committee met in Washington to consider two Coast Guardsmen whose careers had begun in the anxious days before Pearl Harbor. One was Rear Admiral Owen W. Siler, nominated to be Commandant. The other was Rear Admiral Ellis Lee Perry, a soft-spoken Tennessean from Lawrenceburg, nominated to become Vice Commandant, the second in command of the entire United States Coast Guard. Both men appeared before the committee to testify and answer questions about their own fitness for the posts.
For the people of Lawrence County the name on that hearing notice carried a different weight. Ellis L. Perry was not simply another flag officer in a town that read about admirals in the papers. He was a boy from Route 1 who had walked the halls of Lawrence County High School, left the hills of southern Middle Tennessee for New London and the North Atlantic, and eventually returned home after a career that helped shape the modern Coast Guard fleet.
Lawrenceburg Beginnings
The Coast Guard’s official biography gives the outline in a single sentence. Ellis Lee Perry was born on September 29, 1919, at Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and graduated from Lawrence County High School in 1937.
At the time Lawrenceburg was a small county seat town near the Alabama line, surrounded by farms and timber country. The Tennessee Valley Authority had not yet reshaped the rivers to the south, and the young men who left Lawrence County in the late 1930s tended to head for industrial jobs in northern cities, the CCC, or the armed forces. A Treasury Department press release compiled in 1938 and preserved in the FRASER digital archive gives one of the few surviving contemporary federal references to Perry’s boyhood. In a list of Tennessee names connected to Treasury business it notes “Ellis L Perry, Rte 1, Lawrenceburg,” placing him on a rural route rather than inside town limits.
Like many Depression era students who managed to finish high school, Perry looked beyond his home county. In August 1938 he entered the United States Coast Guard Academy as a cadet, beginning a naval engineering career that would stretch over three and a half decades. The Coast Guard’s own summary of his promotions notes his appointment as cadet on August 5, 1938, the first rung in a ladder that would eventually carry him to vice admiral.
A Cadet At The Edge Of War
Perry’s four years at New London unfolded against a backdrop of global crisis. By his senior year in 1941 German U-boats were already at work in the Atlantic, and the United States was edging closer to open conflict.
The Coast Guard Academy graduated Perry with a Bachelor of Science degree in December 1941. The official historian’s office notes that he received his commission as an ensign on December 19, 1941, only days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The Congressional Record for December 12, 1941 captures the moment when that commission moved from nomination to reality. In a long list of names placed before the Senate under the heading “United States Coast Guard,” the senators confirmed “Ellis Lee Perry” among the cadets “to be ensigns in the United States Coast Guard, to rank from the 19th day of December 1941.”
From that point forward, the young Lawrence County graduate belonged not to a single Appalachian county but to a small cohort of wartime Coast Guard officers who would ride out the worst years of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Convoys, Troopships, And A War Engineer
Perry’s first wartime assignment placed him in the thick of that struggle. The Coast Guard biography records that he served as gunnery officer on board the cutter USCGC Bibb, which was on convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic until February 1944.
The Bibb was one of the Treasury-class cutters that braved winter seas, U-boat wolfpacks, and the long gray monotony that seamen remembered as almost as hard as combat itself. For a young officer trained in both seamanship and engineering, those months offered a brutal practical education in what worked and what failed when ships met ice, storms, and enemy torpedoes.
After Bibb, Perry moved to the Coast Guard manned troop transport USS Wakefield, carrying soldiers to the European theater until August 1944. The Wakefield’s missions tied him directly to the broader Allied war effort in Europe, shifting his work from convoy escort to the logistics of moving large numbers of troops across dangerous waters.
The remainder of the war found him not at sea but in classrooms and laboratories. Beginning in 1944 he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he earned the degree of Master of Science in Naval Construction and Engineering in September 1946. For a boy from a Tennessee farm road, that combination of New London and MIT marked a striking educational trajectory, linking a rural high school, a federal service academy, and one of the country’s premier engineering institutions.
From Cutters To Headquarters
With the war over, the Coast Guard faced the task of adjusting from global convoy duty to peacetime missions that still required seaworthy ships and sound engineering. Perry’s postwar assignments read like a tour through the service’s technical and operational heart.
He first returned to sea as an engineering officer on the cutter Pontchartrain out of Boston, patrolling ocean stations and flying search and rescue duties in the North Atlantic. In 1947 he became engineer officer in the cutter Mendota, based at Wilmington, North Carolina. Those cutters stood watch along storm-tossed shipping lanes and provided weather reports and rescue services, work that depended on reliable machinery and careful maintenance.
From July 1948 to June 1952 he served in Washington as a naval architect in the Merchant Marine Technical Division at Coast Guard Headquarters. After that he moved to the Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay, Maryland, first as Shipbuilding and Repair Superintendent and then as commanding officer of the Field Testing and Development Unit. Those posts placed him at the point where new designs met real hulls and where existing ships received the overhauls that kept them serviceable.
In August 1955 the Coast Guard sent him back to sea with command of the cutter Bering Strait, based in Honolulu on ocean station patrol and search and rescue duty in the Pacific. After two years in Hawaiian waters he returned to Boston, first as chief of the Naval Engineering Branch and then as chief of the Engineering Division for the First Coast Guard District. By that time he had risen to the rank of captain.
The pattern is striking. Perry repeatedly moved between operational commands and engineering billets, between sea duty and the shipyard, between district posts and headquarters staff. That back-and-forth gave him a rare vantage point on how design decisions in Washington and Curtis Bay played out on the decks of cutters in the Atlantic and Pacific.
Teacher, Planner, And Chief Of Staff
In the mid-1960s the service brought Perry back to the academy that had launched his career. From August 1965 to July 1968 he served as head of the Department of Applied Science and Engineering at the Coast Guard Academy in New London. There he helped train a new generation of cadets who would later confront the demands of Vietnam era patrols, icebreaking missions, and expanding regulatory roles.
After New London he returned to Coast Guard Headquarters for a third tour, this time as chief of the Planning and Evaluation Staff and then as acting chief of the Office of Research and Development. For that work he received the Coast Guard Commendation Medal in 1969.
In June 1969 he assumed command of the Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay. On January 25, 1970, the President nominated him for promotion to permanent rear admiral, with rank from June 5, 1970, and he took over as chief of the Office of Personnel at Headquarters.
The next major step came the following year. In April 1971 Perry became Chief of Staff of the Coast Guard, a position that made him the senior uniformed adviser to the commandant. The Military Times Hall of Valor notes that he received the Legion of Merit for exceptionally meritorious service as Chief of Staff from April 1971 to June 1973, a citation that praised the way his work “culminate[d] a long and distinguished career in the service of his country.”
In June 1973 he assumed command of the Eighth Coast Guard District at New Orleans, which oversees the Gulf Coast and inland waterways stretching up the Mississippi River system. That assignment anchored his career firmly in the maritime world of the South, from refineries and offshore rigs to river towboats and hurricane-prone coastlines.
Vice Commandant Of The Coast Guard
On February 4, 1974, the White House announced the nomination of Rear Admiral Ellis L. Perry to become Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard. A Coast Guard change-of-command document notes that his promotion to three star vice admiral was tied directly to that appointment and took effect on July 1, 1974.
The Senate Commerce Committee’s daily digest entry for February 25, 1974 confirms that the committee completed its hearings on the nominations of Rear Admiral Owen W. Siler as Commandant and Rear Admiral Ellis L. Perry as Vice Commandant, with both nominees present to testify. The Coast Guard Historian’s list of vice commandants now records him as the service’s twelfth Vice Commandant, serving from 1974 to 1978 between Thomas R. Sargent III and Robert H. Scarborough.
As Vice Commandant, Perry served during a period when the Coast Guard was redefining its missions. The 1970s saw the service grappling with environmental protection, expanded offshore oil development, the early contours of what would become the modern drug war at sea, and the need to replace aging World War II era cutters. Much of that work had an engineering dimension. It required new classes of ships, improved maintenance systems, and better planning for the entire floating fleet.
Architect Of A Modern Cutter Fleet
If the official biography traces Perry’s assignments, the testimonial of his professional peers explains why his name still circulates in naval engineering circles. In 1981 the American Society of Naval Engineers presented him with the Harold E. Saunders Award for lifetime achievement. The award citation describes his “distinguished thirty six years as a Naval Engineer and Officer in the United States Coast Guard” and notes that he was “considered to be the primary architect of modern Coast Guard cutter and boat construction, maintenance, and repair philosophy.”
Those are strong words, especially for a profession that tends to spread credit across many hands. They reflect the fact that Perry helped guide both the design and the maintenance philosophy for new cutter classes that replaced older vessels and upgraded the service’s “floating capital plant” during the 1960s and 1970s.
In concrete terms that meant pushing for standardization where possible, planning life cycle maintenance instead of reacting to breakdowns, and ensuring that the engineering realities of shipyards and cutters were heard in policy discussions at headquarters. His Saunders citation praises his ability to apply theoretical engineering to “the entire spectrum of ship construction, maintenance, and repair” and to keep operational readiness at the center of those decisions.
For Appalachian historians that record matters because it highlights a pattern seen in many mountain and upland communities. Young men and women left rural counties for military service and education, then spent careers in technical fields where their names rarely appeared on election ballots or in local newspapers. Yet their decisions, whether in a design office or a shipyard, rippled outward through national institutions.
Writing About Naval Engineers
Perry was not only a practitioner and administrator. In 1978, near the end of his tenure as Vice Commandant, he contributed an article to the Naval Engineers Journal titled “The Coast Guard and Naval Engineers.”
Available today primarily through institutional subscriptions, the piece identifies him as Vice Admiral Ellis L. Perry and notes that he graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in 1941, “a few days after Pearl Harbor.” From scattered references and reviews it is clear that the article reflects on the role of naval engineers inside the Coast Guard, drawing on his experience from Bibb and Wakefield through the Yard at Curtis Bay and into the vice commandant’s office.
For researchers it serves as a rare primary source in which Perry speaks in his own professional voice about the intersection of engineering and service. It also captures a moment when a Lawrenceburg native who had seen both North Atlantic convoys and Gulf Coast hurricanes tried to set down what he had learned for younger engineers.
Home, Arlington, And Memory
Perry retired from active duty in 1978 after completing his term as Vice Commandant. The Coast Guard biography lists his full progression of ranks from cadet in 1938 through vice admiral in 1974 and notes that he held such decorations as the Coast Guard Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Coast Guard Commendation Medal, and World War II campaign ribbons.
Genealogical sources and military award databases help fill out the closing chapter of his life. The Military Times Hall of Valor entry records that he died on March 2, 2002, and that he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. A Find A Grave memorial, drawing on obituaries and family information, likewise gives his dates as September 29, 1919, to March 2, 2002, and confirms his birthplace as Lawrenceburg.
Those entries suggest a life that traced an arc from a rural route in southern Middle Tennessee to the ceremonial slopes of Arlington, then back in memory to the hometown that had sent him out. Local family memorials list him alongside brothers and kin with deep roots in Lawrence County, a reminder that even the highest ranking officers remained sons and daughters of particular communities.
Why Ellis L. Perry’s Story Matters For Appalachian And Upland History
On the surface Ellis Lee Perry’s story belongs to the institutional history of the Coast Guard rather than to the better known narratives of Appalachian coal camps, mountain politics, or labor struggles. Yet for the broader Appalachian and upland South, his life illustrates several themes that recur across the twentieth century.
First, he embodies the educational leap made by many Depression era students from small town high schools into national institutions. A Lawrence County teenager who managed to graduate in 1937 could look toward New Deal programs, service academies, and technical schools that had been out of reach for earlier generations. Perry’s path from Lawrenceburg High to the Coast Guard Academy and MIT fits that pattern.
Second, his career shows how people from the upland rural South helped build and maintain federal infrastructure that most Americans take for granted. The modern Coast Guard fleet, with its cutters on ice patrol, drug interdiction missions, and coastal search and rescue, rests partly on the decisions he and his colleagues made about hulls, propulsion systems, and maintenance schedules. The Saunders Award committee was not indulging in exaggeration when it described him as a primary architect of the service’s cutter and boat philosophy.
Third, Perry’s story complicates stereotypes about where Appalachians and upland Southerners “fit” in national life. He did not become a politician, a folk singer, or a famous combat hero. Instead he worked inside a technical bureaucracy, moving from gunnery officer to engineer, from naval architect to yard commander, and finally to Vice Commandant. His influence ran through designs, policies, and maintenance practices more than public speeches.
Finally, remembering his career matters because it anchors the Coast Guard’s history in specific local soil. When students in Lawrence County or elsewhere in the region consider service academies or engineering careers, Perry’s story offers one example of how far a person from a small Tennessee county seat can travel without leaving behind an identity rooted in home.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Coast Guard Historian’s Office, “Vice Admiral Ellis L. Perry,” official biography compiled from personnel records, which provides his birth and education, wartime assignments, postwar billets, promotion ladder, and list of awards and decorations. history.uscg.mil
United States Coast Guard Historian’s Office, “Vice Commandants,” official list of those who have held the office, identifying Ellis L. Perry as the twelfth Vice Commandant and placing his tenure from 1974 to 1978. history.uscg.mil
Congressional Record, Seventy Seventh Congress, December 12, 1941, confirming “Ellis Lee Perry” among the cadets “to be ensigns in the United States Coast Guard, to rank from the 19th day of December 1941.” GovInfo
Congressional Record Daily Digest, Ninety Third Congress, February 25, 1974, summarizing Senate Commerce Committee hearings on the nominations of Rear Admiral Owen W. Siler as Commandant and Rear Admiral Ellis L. Perry as Vice Commandant, with both nominees present to testify. Congress.gov
Coast Guard change of command documentation, 1974, preserved in the Defense Department’s digital archives as “1974_CCG COC Docs,” which records his promotion to the three star rank of vice admiral in connection with his appointment as Vice Commandant effective July 1, 1974. U.S. Department of War
United States Department of the Treasury, Press Releases, 1938, Volume 24, FRASER digital collection of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, whose Tennessee section lists “Ellis L Perry, Rte 1, Lawrenceburg,” providing an early federal trace of his rural route address. FRASER
American Society of Naval Engineers, “1981 Harold E. Saunders Award,” which names VADM Ellis Lee Perry, USCG (Ret.) as recipient and praises him as the primary architect of modern Coast Guard cutter and boat construction, maintenance, and repair philosophy. American Society of Naval Engineers
Ellis L. Perry, “The Coast Guard and Naval Engineers,” Naval Engineers Journal 90, no. 3 (1978), an article written while he was Vice Commandant that reflects on the role of naval engineers in the Coast Guard; accessible through the Wiley Online Library. Wiley Online Library
Military Times, Hall of Valor entry “Ellis Lee Perry,” which confirms his birth and death dates, notes his service as the twelfth Vice Commandant, and summarizes his Legion of Merit and Coast Guard Distinguished Service Medal citations. Hall of Valor
Find A Grave memorial “VADM Ellis Lee Perry,” which corroborates his birth at Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, on September 29, 1919, his death on March 2, 2002, and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery, and connects him to other Perry family graves in Lawrence County. Find a Grave+1
Wikipedia and related reference compilations on “Ellis L. Perry,” “Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard,” and “List of United States Coast Guard vice admirals,” which distill information from the Coast Guard Historian’s Office and other official sources and situate his career within broader institutional history. Wikipedia+1