PORT ANGELES — A young man’s act of courage and selfless sacrifice was immortalized 64 years later in the renaming of the Port Angeles Federal Building on Tuesday.
The brick building at 138 W. First St. is now the Richard B. Anderson Federal Building, named after a Sequim High School graduate who died saving others on the Pacific island of Roi Namur in World War II.
Anderson, a Marine private first class, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after he grabbed a grenade that he had tossed and which had rolled back into the shell crater sheltering him and three other Marines.
He tucked it into his stomach, protecting the three other men from the blast.
It was Feb. 1, 1944, Anderson’s first day of combat. He was 22.
Like others among “the greatest generation,” Anderson was an ordinary individual “who performed an extraordinary feat of bravery, dying in the process,” said Port Angeles Mayor Gary Braun at the dedication ceremony.
Said Congressman Norm Dicks, who represents the North Olympic Peninsula:
“I hope that everyone who enters or passes by this building here in Port Angeles will have the occasion to reflect on the ultimate sacrifice that this young Marine instinctively made.”
Harry Pearce, the only man still alive today who was in the shell crater, wrote a letter that was read at the ceremony.
Housebound in Hanover, Kansas, with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the 87-year-old said in a letter read at the ceremonies:
“I have asked myself 1,000 times, ‘Why me, O Lord?’
“Perhaps only to retell the story of his sacrifice so that others might live. Is this not the story of the life of Jesus?”
Signing his name “Hap,” Pearce called Anderson a “gung-ho Marine” and said Anderson, “along with others, have allowed this old man to live a full and useful life . . . “
