P. J. Capelotti Papers (Mss. Gr. 45)

Biographical note

Peter Joseph Capelotti, freelance writer and director of The Great Northeast Expedition Company, Inc., attended the University of Rhode Island from September of 1978 to May of 1989, earning a B.A. in history (1983) and an M.A. in history (1989). During this time he wrote over eighty articles, 36 of them for the student magazine/newspaper The Great Swamp Gazette, 25 for The Providence Journal-Bulletin, 8 feature pieces (four of them cover stories) for The Rhode Island Alumni Quarterly, roughly a half dozen for the daily student newspaper The Good 5 Cent Cigar, one feature piece for The Narragansett Times, one political essay for The Boston Globe, and one for the Providence-based publication East Side-West Side. From the spring of 1981 to April of 1982 he was Managing Editor of The Great Swamp Gazette, which won Best Student Magazine in the Northeast Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in both of those years. In 1978 he chartered the non-profit organization, The Earth Research Organization, which subsequently became The Earth Research Group and, on October 1, 1984, The Great Northeast Expedition Company, Inc. It was under the umbrella of this group that he produced, wrote, and directed the 1984 documentary for television, The American Lieutenant and the War in the Air, in which he planned to combine the subject matter of his master's thesis on the history of five twentieth-century explorers with a cross-country flight in an FP-303 ultralight aeroplane. This expedition, from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida, was planned for June of 1985.

In 1976 Capelotti became the youngest person ever to have hiked alone the 2,000-mile Georgia-to-Maine Appalachian Trail in a single season. Another trek, retracing the route of Lewis and Clark, scheduled for the summer of 1979 and featured on the cover of the Rhode Island Alumni Quarterly, was subsequently aborted for lack of funds.