United States Naval Research Laboratory
Holmes was born in Portland, Maine. The son of mathematics teachers Cecil T. and Marion C. Holmes, he studied physics at Bowdoin College, from which he was hired in 1951, by the Rocketry Division of the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C, where he spent his entire career, retiring as a GS 14 Government physicist on December 30, 1985.