Federal Building to be renamed for World War II hero
Marine Pvt. 1st Class Richard B. Anderson
By Paul Gottlieb Peninsula Daily News
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Now the 12,400-square-foot edifice is days away from being named after the Sequim High School graduate who died on a Pacific island in 1944 after he tucked a grenade to his stomach to save his comrades.
The brick government building at 138 W. First St. in Port Angeles will be renamed the Richard B. Anderson Federal Building at 2 p.m. Tuesday.
Scheduled speakers at the hour-long dedication at the building will be Port Angeles Mayor Gary Braun and the North Olympic Peninsula's congressman, Norm Dicks.
Master of ceremonies will be Robin Graf, the federal General Service Administration's assistant regional administrator for public building service.
City Hall spokeswoman Teresa Pierce will sing the national anthem.
Legislation
Earlier this year, Dicks, D-Belfair, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Freeland, sponsored legislation in the House and Senate to rename the building after Anderson.
President Bush signed the legislation into law July 15.
Anderson was born in Tacoma in 1921 and was raised in Agnew, where he attended Macleay School before graduating from Sequim High School.
He was living in Port Angeles when he enlisted in the Marines, becoming a mortarman and ending up in the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific.
His first day of combat on Feb. 1, 1944, was on the island of Roi-Namur on the Kwajalein Atoll, 2,100 miles southwest of Hawaii, in an area now part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
That day, with three other Marines in a shell crater with him, Anderson "hurled his body" on a grenade, according to Anderson's medal citation, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt.
"Anderson was preparing to throw a grenade at an enemy position when it slipped from his hands and rolled toward the men at the bottom of the hole," the citation said.
Remembers with gratitude
The lone Marine still alive from blast that took Anderson's life cannot attend Tuesday's ceremonies.
Harry Pearce, 87, of Hanover, Kansas, is too ill to travel — though he's expecting a letter that he wrote about Anderson to be read at next week's ceremonies.
The dedication is "a very worthy honor," Pearce said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
"It's going to be there long after you're gone and I'm gone.
"I think it's a good permanent record as to who he is, what the boy did.
"He gave his life so that others could live."
Pearce said he saw Anderson try to throw the grenade out of the crater and over his shoulder.
It rolled back.
"He gathered it into his belly and yelled, 'Oh, my God,' and those were his last three words, and that was it," Pearce said in an earlier interview with the Peninsula Daily News.
"He gave me a chance to live."
A Navy destroyer named after Anderson and launched in 1945 had among its first crew members Machinist's Mate Robert L. Anderson, Richard's brother.
It was sold to Taiwan in 1977 and decommissioned in 1999.
Plaque in 2001
But Anderson's memory was absent in an visible way from Port Angeles until a memorial plaque was dedicated in Veterans Memorial Park on Memorial Day 2001.
Terry Roth, a Marine veteran and owner of the Northwest Duty Free shop in the Landing Mall, was behind the effort.
Roth is currently seeking a Clallam County commissioner seat. Running as a Republican, he is challenging incumbent Mike Chapman, an independent, in the Nov. 4 general election.
Roth raised more than $5,000 for the memorial. He is the custodian of Anderson's medal, given to him by Anderson's late sister, Mary Roderick-Anderson.
He had proposed renaming the federal building after Anderson several years ago.
But his plan got nowhere with the Government Services Administration.
Last fall, Roth tried again, charting a more indirect course by e-mailing his frustrations to Mike Doherty, D-Port Angeles, one of the three Clallam County commissioners.
Doherty, the commissioners' liaison for veterans' affairs, discussed the matter with other Peninsula veterans.
Then he forwarded Roth's e-mail to Murray and spoke with Cantwell's office, actions that Roth credits with Anderson finally being on the verge of getting his due.
"The Marines have a history of not leaving anyone behind, and that we honor our heroes," said Roth, who is active in the Marine Corps League.
"We were able to see that he has gotten the recognition he earned, and that he is part of our community."
Building history
PORT ANGELES' FEDERAL Building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The federal government purchased the land in the 1860s during Abraham Lincoln's presidency.
The building was constructed in 1933.
The post office was located there until 1991.
Offices there now include U.S. Customs and Homeland Security.
Other medal recipients
THREE OTHER NORTH Olympic Peninsula residents are in the pantheon of 3,460 military personnel awarded the Medal of Honor:
After the war, he lived in Port Angeles among hundreds of other veterans whose military pensions helped keep the city afloat.
When his outpost came under attack in June 1965, he carried a critically wounded man to safety, was himself wounded, then helped knock out a Viet Cong machine gun emplacement before he was killed.
He was the first member of the Navy to earn the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War — and the only Seabee ever honored with the medal.
He is buried in the small, rural Gardiner Cemetery.
The marker says: "He died as he lived, for his friends."
________
Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 and paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
Last modified: August 26. 2008 9:00PM