Charles Allen Gorday

Charles Allen Gorday was born on the first day of Winter, December 21, 1925, in Jackson, Mississippi, to John Coleman Gorday and Alice Thelma Harwell Gorday. As a youth, he camped and fished on the Pearl River, chopped cotton and contributed to other daily chores on his Uncle John and Aunt Velma Howse’s family farm, rode in Model T’s, watched the Hindenburg dirigible fly over Jackson, and sometimes walked to school barefoot.

Charlie was an avid baseball, basketball, and tennis player. At Jackson’s Central High School, he was a starting guard on the varsity basketball team, which went on to win the 1944 state Mississippi Big 8 Basketball Championship.

Charlie served with the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II in the Aleutian Islands, where they cut him loose driving a jeep without any prior training. He moved to Washington, DC. in October 1949 to study radio and electronics at the pioneering Capital Radio Engineering Institute (CREI). In D.C., he met the love of his life and his future wife, Elizabeth Lalley. They were married on April 28, 1950, and would go on to establish a home and family in Clinton, Md. In 1953. 

After graduating from CREI, he entered employment with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where he stayed until he retired in 1982. His electronics expertise contributed to the success of the Vanguard 1 satellite, the first planned U.S. satellite and currently the oldest human-made object still in orbit. He earned many awards for his work, including for GRAB 1, the first operational intelligence satellite.

After retirement, Charlie enrolled in the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine, where he helped build the Belford Gray, a Friendship Sloop subsequently used for seamanship courses. He eventually used his skills to build his own wooden boat. He also managed to travel—including places such as Hawaii and the Virgin Islands (where he learned to sail) and a comedically disastrous trip to Idaho with his brother-in-law, Chuck Wall. 

In 1998, Charlie returned to his beloved Mississippi, where he had purchased a twenty-acre farm and contentedly enjoyed the life of a gentleman farmer—planting pecan trees and raising blueberries. If the weather was good, you could probably find Dad somewhere out in his fields on his blue Ford tractor. 

Charlie was a quiet, thoughtful person. His ready laugh and giving nature (“Can I do anything for you?”) earned him the respect, friendship, and love of his neighbors and community. He, in turn, thought the world of those same people. He charmed people wherever he went.

Charlie spent his last few years in Maryland, splitting time between his son, Charlie Gorday, in Frederick, and his daughter, Louise Gorday MacIntosh, in Dunkirk, Md. 

Charlie was preceded in death by his parents; brother Robert and sister Jean; Betty, his wife of 31 years, and his grandson John Ryan MacIntosh. He is survived by his son, Charles, daughter Louise (Ray), granddaughter Jennifer MacIntosh, great-grandson Aiden Ball, brother John (Anne), and numerous nieces and nephews.