Has It Really Been Forty-One Years?

‘Madison Graduates 180’.

One-hundred-eighty, according to the Mansfield News Journal.

Only 180? Can that be right?

Seems like a paltry number when compared to that June day in 1975 when I sat in one of the multitude of rows of green and white-clad graduates. I can’t remember the exact number in my graduating class, but I can tell you this: it was somewhere around four hundred fifty, give or take a dozen.

At that time, we were the largest class ever to graduate from Madison High School, which added ‘Comprehensive’ right after ‘Madison’ soon after we left. I don’t know why they did that, but it was right after they opened the new wing of the high school. The Class of ‘75’s record was broken a couple of years later, I believe by the Class of ’77.

And now they graduate one-hundred-eighty?

I remember these things about graduation: it was a beautiful day, warm but not hot. Big puffy white clouds set against a crystal blue sky. The ceremony seemed to take forever. I just wanted to walk across that platform in the middle of Ram Field, grab my diploma and get into the ‘real’ world. Leaving afterwards in my beat-up blue AMC Rambler, Rare Earth’s ‘I Just Want to Celebrate’ blaring from my 8-track tape player as I drove home with the windows down, longish hair waving in the breeze.

I had no clue what the next step would be.

Well, I did have somewhat of a plan. I knew college wasn’t for me; I’d just kind of breezed through my senior year because I’d only needed 3 1/2 credits to graduate. During one semester I had four study halls. Four, out of eight classes during the school day. I didn’t really apply myself to anything that year and couldn’t see the value of sitting in classrooms for another 4 years in college. That being said, here was the Grand Plan: if I didn’t have a full-time job by July 1^st I would enlist in the US Navy.

I got a full-time job eleven days before my deadline. I worked at Wolf Plumbing and Heating, installing seamless aluminum spouting on houses. Not very glamorous and definitely not a career.

After that I bounced around between a few jobs, got married at nineteen to my high school sweetheart ( we were too young and I was too immature ) before finally taking a position with the Ohio State Highway Patrol as a cadet/dispatcher.

That job set the hook.

Thus began my journey in the law enforcement world. I’d always dreamed of being a police officer, ever since I was a kid; the Blamers, who lived two doors away on Hout Road, had a couple of boys I hung out with…Dean Jr and Dale. If I wasn’t at their house they were at mine, and I’d heard a lot of cop tales from Dean Sr,, who was a Sergeant at Mansfield PD. He would come home from work and talk about things that had happened during his shift, exciting stuff for a thirteen year old to hear. I remember thinking wow, what a cool job! He gets to see everything that most people only read about in the newspaper!

I would find out during the thirty-one years I spent wearing a badge that that wasn’t always a good thing, that some of those things would cause sleepless nights and nightmares, memories that still haunt me to this day.

It’s been a very long journey from that June afternoon forty-one years ago and now, here I am so many decades removed from graduation day, living less than two hundred yards from where that stage sat that I couldn’t wait to walk across, retired.

What a ride it’s been.

Calvin Graham

Calvin L. Graham served aboard the USS South Dakota in World War II, having enlisted in the post-Pearl Harbor surge of volunteers. The brand-new battleship, designated BB 57, sailed from port in New York on March 20, 1942, completed fitting-out at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and then transited the Panama Canal en route to Pearl Harbor. She arrived there September 12.

The South Dakota’s crew were virtually all green sailors, with the exception of the section chiefs and command staff. Graham was the youngest aboard ship, assigned as a loader on a quad-40mm anti-aircraft mount. Once they sailed from Pearl, assigned as part of a task force which included the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, the South Dakota met the Japanese at Santa Cruz Islands, downing twenty-six Japanese planes while protecting the Enterprise.

Eighteen days later the task force engaged in the Battle of Guadalcanal; during fierce fighting the South Dakota had significant damage inflicted from constant Japanese air attacks and ship bombardment. Seaman 2^nd Class Graham, though suffering wounds of his own from shrapnel fragments and burns to his arms, heroically saved several shipmates by dragging them to safety and administering first aid. For his actions Graham was awarded a Bronze Star with Combat ‘V’ ( for valor ) device, along with two Purple Hearts.

Calvin Graham was twelve years old.

That’s right, 12. Graham, one of seven children, had extreme hardship at home because of his alcoholic stepfather’s abuse of he, his siblings and his mother. Graham left the home with one of his brothers and ended up living in a boarding house, eventually joining the Navy by forging his mother’s signature on enlistment papers and claiming to be seventeen. Calvin Graham had told his mother that he was going to live with relatives one hundred fifty miles from their Houston, Texas home when he enlisted; she had no idea that her young son had been a hero in combat off Guadalcanal until she saw his name in the papers. Nora then contacted the Navy and told them what her son had done. Graham was released from service April 1^st, 1943.

Calvin Leon Graham died in 1992, having been the youngest military combatant for the United States during WW II.