December 25, 1999 Providence Journal, Providence, RI:

In a ceremony in the dining room at Cedar Crest, in Cranston, where Tony Carnevale lives, family and friends gathered in August to watch him receive France's highest national award for his service in World War I. of the National Order of the Legion of Honor, Carnevale was decorated by Ingrid Pantall, the Vice Consul of France, amid the flash of cameras. In 1918 Tony Carnevale enlisted in the
Navy. He wanted to get married before he left for the war, but his sweetheart's father would have none of that. "I don't want my daughter to be a widow. When you come back and she is not married, you can have her," he said. "You go and serve the government first. " Carnevale was assigned to a troop transport, the U.S.S. Agamemnon. The ship was a fonner Gennan luxury liner confiscated by the United States while it was docked in America when Germany declared war. He served as a fireman working in the bowels of the ship, stoking the boilers with coal. Working four hours on, eight hours off, he made 10 round trips between America and Brest, France, during the war. The men worked shirtless, shoveling fuel into the boilers. The fire was so hot it singed the firemen. "It burned all the hair off my chest," Carnevale said. To pass the time, the men sometimes gambled. Carnevale lost a paycheck playing craps on the first trip over. "Then after the second trip, I got wise," recalls Carnevale. The Agamemnon did not make the trips back from France empty. On the return trip, the ship would bring back wounded soldiers. "Some didn't have an arm; some did not have a leg. I was the lucky one," said Carnevale.
When he came back from the war, Carnevale asked his sweetheart, Angela Marchetti, to marry him. They were married for 50 years and had six children. "She waited for me," he said.

Antonio Carnevale