Earning a special salute during the ceremony was a man whose length of membership was considerably exceeded by the length of his life.
Malcolm “Gordon” Grahame was celebrating his 100th birthday.
“I’m feeling pretty good today,” Grahame told Southern Maryland News.
Grahame, who moved to Calvert County in 1960 after inheriting a 125-acre farm in Owings, grew up in the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area in Florida. One of two World War II veterans currently with the local Legion, Grahame’s service journey began in 1943.
According to an oral history account written and recorded in 2014 by another honoree, American Legion member Fred Bumgarner, who is the post’s historian, Grahame received a draft notice at the age of 18 while still in high school. He was allowed to graduate from high school before reporting to a camp in Florida.
While he had wanted to go in the regular U.S. Navy, “I had one bad eye,” he told Southern Maryland News, which prompted the Navy to assign him to the Seabees. Members of the Seabees were comprised of enlisted personnel who labored in construction.
According to the details provided in the post’s history account, Grahame subsequently reported to Camp Perry near Williamsburg, Va., for a combined Seabees boot camp and initial training. There, Grahame and others learned the basics of building quonset huts and oil tanks.
Grahame and his 222-man unit were then sent to Camp Parks near Oakland, Calif., and subsequently transported to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the U.S.S. Portland, a heavy cruiser. Grahame told Bumgarner he was later assigned to a dynamite blasting crew at Iroquois Point near Pearl Harbor.
In July of 1945, Grahame and his unit boarded an attack transport for an assignment on Okinawa. The vessel took nearly 40 days to reach its destination, as they made a stop in the Marshall Islands. The delay was due in part to the threat of Japanese kamikaze pilots, who suicidal crashes resulted in the sinking or damaging of hundreds of Allied ships.
By the time Grahame and his unit’s transport vessel arrived in Okinawa on Aug. 16, 1945, the war was over. The Seabee crew spent the next few months repairing damaged airfields.

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