Here is a list of notable Fairlingtonians we’ve compiled so far. If you know any more, please reach out to [email protected].
Jim Bregman (born 11/17/41)– Olympian, on the first American team to compete in judo at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. (went to Fairlington Elementary, but did not live here.)
Richard Gabel (1920 - August 1, 2004) - From 1946 to 1949, he was an economist at the Federal Communications Commission. He spent the next decade at the Rural Electrification Administration, where he helped establish the engineering standards for constructing rural telephone systems. From 1959 to 1966, he was director of telecommunications at the General Services Administration. As a Brookings Institution fellow, he wrote “Development of Separations Principles in the Telephone Industry” (1967), a book that explored costs and pricing arrangements of local and long-distance telephone service providers. From 1969 to 1971, he worked in the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy as a senior economist and was on President Richard M. Nixon’s task force on communications policy. After retiring in 1974 from a dual position on the Council of Economic Advisers and as a Commerce Department economist, he began working as a consultant to the Justice Department’s antitrust division. The division was preparing a case that led to the divestiture of AT&T. Much of his language in papers he prepared for the case appeared in the Justice Department memorandum as basis for legal motions. He was a member of Temple Beth-El in Alexandria and a former chairman of Arlington’s Public Utilities Commission.
Libby Garvey - Former member of the Arlington County Board from 2012 to 2024.
Callista (Bisek) Gingrich (born 3/4/66) - is an American diplomat, businesswoman, author, and documentary film producer Former United States ambassador to the Holy See from 2017 to 2021. She is married to former House Speaker and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich (Born 6/17/43) – Republican politician. He was the 50th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. He served as was the U.S. representative for Georgia’s 6th congressional district from 1979 until his resignation in 1999.
Patrick Hayes - Patrick Hayes moved to Washington, DC in 1941. For more than 40 years, Mr. Hayes was the unofficial minister of culture of the metropolitan area. He was the former managing director of the Washington Performing Arts Society, which he founded in 1966, but he had been arranging shows and concerts in the area long before then through the Hayes Concert Bureau, which he opened in 1947. Over the years, he arranged performances in Washington by orchestras from Vienna, London and Amsterdam, the Bolshoi Ballet, and such artists as Arturo Toscanini, Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern, Maria Callas, Sir Thomas Beacham, Van Cliburn, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein. For 26 years, beginning in 1949, he had a regular Sunday afternoon radio broadcast on WGMS, which he called “People and Events in the World of Music.” From this airwaves pulpit, he argued for the preservation of historic theaters in Washington and the building of concert halls large enough for opera and ballet performances. After 1,248 broadcasts, Mr. Hayes went off the air in 1975. In that period, he had missed only one show, and that was because of laryngitis. History of WPAS
Henry Oscar “Hank” Lampe (4/8/27 – 10/28/12) - Federal government official, stockbroker, civic activist and Republican politician who represented Arlington, Virginia, in the Virginia General Assembly for two years.
John McCain, Sr.(8/8/1884 – 9/6/45) – US Navy Admiral and Sen. John McCain’s grandfather. A Naval Academy graduate, class of 1906, Admiral McCain held several commands during the World War II in the Pacific theater. He was a pioneer of aircraft carrier operations. He and his son, John S. McCain Jr., were the first father-and-son pair to achieve four-star admiral rank in the U.S. Navy.
Edwin “Punky” Meadows - (Born 2/6/50) - Guitarist with Angel, Bux, and The Cherry People to name a few.
Doug Mills (Born 1960)- New York Times photographer has covered the White House since 1983. Previously to 2002 he had been the chief photographer for The Associated Press in Washington, winning two Pulitzer prizes for team coverage In 2025, Mills won a third Pulitzer, in Breaking News Photography, for his photographs of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in 2024.
Donald Murtha. Donald M. Murtha, 88, grew up in North Dakota. There he served as Assistant U.S. Attorney. In 1939, he moved to Washington and joined the Labor Department and became Chief of the Wage and Hours division of the Solicitor’s Office. In 1970, Mr. Murtha was named general counsel of the United Federation of Postal Clerks. While serving as general counsel of the postal union, he sued the U.S. Postal Service on behalf of employees for violations of the Federal Salary Comparability Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. The result was a multimillion dollar settlement in favor of 800,000 workers. Mr. Murtha traveled widely as a member of the American Bar Association’s committee on international labor law. He was active in Democratic Party affairs. He also was a member of Arlingtonians for a Better County, the Arlington Committee of 100 and the Arlington Historical Society.
Brigadier General Gail Reals (born 9/1/35) - first woman commander of Quantico and second woman in the USMC to become a brigadier general. General Reals lived in the Meadows in the 80s/90s
Tim Rose (9/23/40 – 9/24/02) – Singer/Songwriter who had a successful music career in Europe.
Joel Siegel (7/7/43 - 6/29/07) - writer, professor, producer and Grammy award winner. Film critic for the ABC’s Good Morning America for over 25 years. Winner of multiple Emmy Awards, Siegel also worked as a radio DJ.
Pete Souza (Born 12/31/54) - Former chief official White House photographer for Presidents Reagan and Obama and the former director of the White House Photography Office. He was a photographer with The Chicago Tribun’s DC bureau from 1998 to 2007
Evelyn Swarthout (1913 - March 2000)- concert pianist, and former music professor at American University. Ms. Swarthout-Hayes championed the cause of inter-disciplinarity in teaching music at a time when such a practice was regarded radical. She was an active musician, giving recitals at the National Gallery and Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. She also created and hosted, “Music in the Schools,” a radio program that featured recorded music, pieces played by Ms. Swarthout-Hayes, and the voices of imaginary characters. In 1997, along with her husband, Ms. Swarthout-Hayes was awarded the Levine School of Music’s Paul Hume Award for contributions to Washington D.C.’s cultural history.
Joseph Volpe - (3577A South Stafford St. Arl. VA) Legal counsel to US Army General Leslie Grove, the military leader of the famed Manhattan Project during WWII. Mr Volpe also befriended and represented no other than J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist for the Atomic Bomb project. Declassified FBI documents recounted an episode on September 1, 1953, where J. Edgar Hoover’s agents “tailed” Oppenheimer on one of his many visits to Washington to both defend his reputation, but also lobby against nuclear proliferation. The declassified FBI report said that Oppenheimer deviated from his itinerary on that Tuesday to visit his friend and personal lawyer, Joseph Volpe, [at his home] in Fairlington.
Gen. Larry Welch (Born 6/9/34)- (Mews) four star Air Force General who served as the 12th Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
William West (7/15/87 – 9/15/53) – Equestrian who competed in three events in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp.
Heather Wilson ( Born 12/30/60) – (4284 S 35^th^ St – Fairlington Glen) Current President of the University of Texas – El Paso. She served as the 24th Secretary of the Air Force (2017 to 2019); prior to that she was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1998 to 2009), representing New Mexico’s 1^st^ Congressional District. From 1989 to 1991, Wilson served on the National Security Council staff as director for defense policy and arms control for President George H.W. Bush during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.