By ZACHARY BLOCK
Journal Staff Writer

Frank L. Lennon, 57, a West Point graduate and Green Beret in Vietnam, is the president of the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation and the driving force behind the movement to turn the aircraft carrier into a museum at Quonset Point.

Before starting the Saratoga Foundation, Lennon worked in the airline and tourism industries and ran his own marketing, promotion and fundraising business. In 1996, he joined the National Warplane Museum in upstate New York and led the museum through an $8-million relocation and building project.

Lennon returned to Rhode Island two years ago this December to live with his elderly mother, now 91. The two share the small white colonial, built by Lennon's parents in 1936 and where he grew up, in Providence's Elmhurst neighborhood.

After a few restless weeks at home, Lennon says, he began to consider an offer from a friend to work on a project in California to turn the Hornet into a museum. Then one day, Lennon saw a story in the Providence Journal on the Navy's plans to move the carriers Saratoga and Forrestal and the battleship Iowa from Philadelphia to Rhode Island.

The Navy is bringing a carrier to our backyard and we can't let this opportunity slip away, he thought. And with that the Saratoga Foundation was born.

Lennon looks at the project as a way to honor veterans and educate a new generation of Americans about their sacrifices. He also sees the project as a way to follow the advice his father, now deceased, had repeated to him years ago: leave your mark on the world. Lennon says his life in the past had been geared toward living in the present and now it is time to look toward the future.

"This may be my big opportunity to leave some kind of legacy," Lennon says.

Because of the foundation's tight budget, Lennon says the Saratoga project wouldn't be possible if he weren't able to live and work out of his mother's home.

"My mother has subsidized this process," he says, also crediting her with giving him advice to navigate Rhode Island's complicated political environment.