Navy veteran Rick Moore lives a life of service to others

By the time he finished the second grade, Rick Moore had lived in the nearby towns of Hickory, Claremont, Denver and Norwood, as his father changed high school teaching jobs.

The family then moved to Englewood, Colo., his mother’s hometown, in 1966, when Moore entered the third grade. After graduating from high school in 1975, he joined the Navy and was trained as an engineman at Great Lakes, Ill.

From there, Moore went to Naval Facility Barbados, where he serviced diesel power plant generators that kept the base in electricity.

Meanwhile, his high school girlfriend, Karen, who was a year behind him, was waiting to graduate and turn 18, the mandate her parents had given before she could be married.

Moore came home, married her on her 18th birthday, and took her to Barbados where they lived for the next two years.

While stationed in Barbados, Moore took a tour on a visiting Spruance-class destroyer, the first U.S. Navy ships to use gas turbine propulsion. Impressed by what he saw, he asked to change his rating to gas turbine systems technician and went back to Great Lakes for additional training.

From there, Moore was assigned to the USS Wadsworth, a Perry-class frigate (FFG-9), going on sea trials prior to the ship’s commissioning in San Diego in 1980. The following year, Moore became an instructor at the gas turbine school at Great Lakes, where his first daughter, Kristina, was born.

The frigate USS Hawes (FFG-53), homeported in Charleston, S.C., was Moore’s next ship. While there, his second daughter, Ashley, was born. Moore sailed twice to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which is separated from the rest of Cuba by a mine-infested strip of no man’s land known as the Cactus Curtain.

In 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war, the USS Hawes was two months into a Mediterranean deployment when the aircraft carrier group it was attached to was diverted through the Suez Canal into the Persian Gulf to protect Kuwaiti tankers. As the main propulsion chief petty officer, a critical position on any ship, Moore was responsible for maintaining operational readiness around the clock while escorting tankers.

Moore then went to the Naval Training Systems Center in Orlando, where he helped design and test propulsion control simulators that were used in the Navy’s Surface Warfare School. While there, he visited his youngest sister, who was only four years old when he left home, at the Navy recruit training center, also in Orlando.

The guided missile cruiser USS Thomas S. Gates (CG-51), based in Norfolk, was Moore’s next assignment. In the early 1990s, he participated in NATO exercises in the Mediterranean and then went to the Caribbean as part of a joint task force in the international war on drugs.

Highlights of his deployments on the USS Gates included a port visit to Cartagena, Colombia, and traversing the Panama Canal in both directions in order to refuel at the Rodman Naval Station on the Pacific side of the canal.

Prior to retiring as a senior chief petty officer in 1996, Moore offered the choice of Colorado or North Carolina to his wife. She chose Burke County, so they could be near his grandmother and father’s relatives in the Hildebran area, whom they had visited many times over the years.

Despite having lost half of a lung in 2009 due to lung cancer, Moore is still an avid runner and has participated in numerous half marathons.

In 2013, Moore went on a mission trip with the N.C. Baptists on Mission to Honduras, where in one week they built a cinder block house for a family.

In 2020, Moore became a volunteer through his church with Hearts with Hands, a disaster relief ministry based in Swannanoa. That year, he went to Chattanooga for several days distributing food, water, and emergency supplies to those affected by a major tornado.

Moore went to Canton in 2021 and helped run a commercial-sized food service truck, on the scale of a tractor-trailer, feeding relief workers responding to flooding.

Also in 2021, Moore went to Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, where Ida, a Category 4 Hurricane, made landfall. He helped prepare and serve food to emergency workers, where the days began at 3:30 a.m. and continued into the night, with only a couple of half-hour breaks between meals.

The day before Hurricane Helene arrived in western North Carolina, Moore was at the Hearts with Hands warehouse in Swannanoa, helping to prepare the building for use as an emergency shelter.

During the night, they were ordered to evacuate due to the threat of a mudslide. Moore was stranded at a nearby motel for several days, passing out food and supplies, before the roads were safe to return home.

In 2025, Moore returned to Cuba, spending eight days there on a mission trip as a volunteer with Jaime Torres Ministries, a nonprofit based in Morganton. He carried a separate suitcase filled with generic prescription medicines, medical supplies and toiletries that were delivered to churches and doctors in Cuba.

On the second Saturdays, Moore helps prepare and deliver sandwiches and hot meals to the homeless in downtown Hickory for the Tables of Grace ministry at the Open Door Baptist Church, where he is an elder.