Linda Perham – Those for Whom She Advocates are Legion
By Margaret Michniewicz
“Does anybody see anything wrong with this picture?” asked Linda Perham, holding up an article about the American Legion’s leadership to her colleagues in the organization’s national membership committee. The question elicited only puzzled stares, so Perham answered it for them with a playful rebuke: “You’re all too old, you’re all too white, and you’re all too male!” Perham is recounting this anecdote as we sit in her Westminster kitchen on a gloriously warm Vermont autumn afternoon. As she continues her story, it’s hard to miss her enthusiasm for the 90-plus-year-old veterans advocacy institution – and her belief that it can play a meaningful role in the lives of 21st century veterans and their communities.
“We want to represent – and the American Legion should represent – veterans,” Perham says she told the group. “There’s no Hispanics, there’s no blacks, there’s no women, and our statistics have shown that these are the people who do not join and stay in the American Legion.” Illustrating the alienation these constituencies might feel, she invoked another scenario: “If you’re the only Protestant in the Catholic mass, you feel uncomfortable – so eventually you just leave.” Perham summarizes her colleagues’ reactions with an impish grin. “Some agreed with me, while others said, ‘Well, I’ve been on this committee for 80 years…’”
To which she adds earnestly, “I just feel like we should look like the people we’re representing.”
I haven’t seen Perham in over 25 years since she graduated from the high school we both attended, Bellows Falls Union. The lanky basketball-playing senior I knew then (as Linda McLean) later enlisted in the Army, and was stationed at various locations out of state and overseas before returning to Vermont and earning her nursing degree.
She became a life member of the American Legion in 1999 (having joined the Legion’s Junior Auxiliary while in high school), served as commander of her local Bellows Falls Post 37, and in 2001 became state commander. Her father, Wayne McLean, previously held both positions – making them, to the best of her knowledge, the only father-daughter state commanders in the U.S. Perham went on to serve at the national level, including as national vice commander.
Jovial, gregarious, and exuding fervent optimism, Perham is now making a full-court press on behalf of veterans young and old through her leadership in the American Legion. Continually looking for ways to change the Legion’s old habits and entrenched ideas when she perceives the need, she tempers this drive with a reverence for its traditional ideals and an obvious affection for its members. As a result, she has been a rejuvenating force at all levels of the organization.
The groundswell of support she has elicited augurs well for her future in the Legion. Having been Vermont’s “Legionnaire of the Year” for 2008, Perham has even more auspiciously become Vermont’s candidate for the organization’s national commander. If she is chosen, she will be the first woman and the first Vermonter to attain this honor.
Post-Granola
While participating recently in a function honoring veterans in Chester, Perham noticed a young girl in the mostly older crowd and invited her to assist in a candle-lighting ceremony for POWs and MIAs.
“I asked if she was in the [American Legion] Auxiliary, and she said ‘I’m the chaplain for the Juniors.’ ‘Just do what I do,’ I told her – and she was stellar!” Perham’s voice lowers to the level of urgent enthusiasm. “I always pinpoint a little girl who’s either there with her dad, or is a Junior [in the Auxiliary] – I love those kids!
“I told her, when I was a little girl I used to come to the Legion post and hated it! Smoky, old people, everybody would laugh and I didn’t get the jokes… I’m proud of you for being here and caring about veterans.”
That Perham is a Legionnaire at all is something of a surprise to this potential national leader. While she spent a great deal of time with her father helping out at the post, she had no desire to pursue a military career after high school.
“Oh God, no!” she laughs. “I was the most liberal ‘granola’ you ever wanted to see! The Army would have been the last thing… and I never wanted to be a nurse, either,” she adds. “I wanted to be a history teacher. I wanted to come back to Bellows Falls and coach girls’ basketball and teach history, and just care about kids.”
Having completed a year of college toward that original goal, Perham was unable to continue due to financial circumstances. As a way to resume and pay for her education, she joined the Army. As it turns out, it was the perfect fit.
“I wanted to stay 24/7 in the Army – I loved it, I ate it up!” she exclaims, recalling her time in a combat medical company at Fort Dix, at a clinic in Manheim, Germany, and at Walter Reed Army Hospital when she was called back for active duty during Desert Storm.
As for the source of her unanticipated enthusiasm for military life, she says, “I think it was the camaraderie; it was discipline. Unlike the civilian world where people do things when they feel like it and everyone’s owed something. You have a greater respect for people, and you’re there doing something for other people. And you work hard.”
She built on her Army medic experience by pursuing degrees in nursing – education that the Army ultimately paid for. “I went to LPN school, and then RN school because I couldn’t get enough of that!” Perham explains. Clearly not, as she graduated magna cum laude from Southern Vermont College.
She smiles as she recalls her graduation and her father, who has since passed away, talking to the college president. “He told the president of the school he didn’t know how I’d done it, as I did all my studying at the American Legion Post 37!”
Indeed, since being a kid, the Legion post was like a second home for her, a place where she shared time with her father. “He believed in change for the betterment of others, and I’m just trying to build on [to] that,” Perham explains of their shared commitment to the organization. “I believe my father was a champion for the underdog, including women veterans – and I want to continue that. He loved the organization because it believes in God and country, and those are two things that are extremely important to me.”
Having returned to the southeastern Vermont area following her active duty tenure, she recalls the day when her father called to tell her that the Legion had now become available to those veterans who had served in Grenada, which she had. She dashed immediately to the local post and handed her $20 entry dues to the local membership committee chairman, who hadn’t even been sent the paperwork. “But I want to make sure I’ll be the first Grenada veteran in this post!” she explained to him.
Perham has since been enmeshed in the service activities of the Legion. Describing her commitment, she declares, “I believe if you say you’re going to help a veteran, then you’d better help ‘em.
“There was only one time that I wanted to bag it,” she admits, “and that was when my father passed away, in 2000. I think I always associated it with him; it was my time to be with him; he was my hero.
“I thought, I’m not doing this anymore, he’s not around – I was angry. And then my son came to me and said, ‘But you can’t do that, Mom! That’s not what Grampy would want you to do.’ And so, since two days after his funeral, I haven’t stopped.”
Many people are not aware, says Perham, that “we provide thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours of community service. People need to understand also that the American Legion is not this warmonger thing. We’re wartime veterans. All we care about is that people understand what those kids are going through. And we will help them. We’re not ‘pro-war’ – that’s not us. [Our members] all cry when they see kids deployed. When you see those Legionnaires standing there saying goodbye, their tears are running. They know the horrors of war.”
For a Memorial Day service Perham was to speak at in 1999, she prepared a speech about women nurses and veterans coming home from service in WWII, and relates how some of the state Legion leadership were discouraging it for singling out just one gender, to which she wryly responded, “you give speeches that do that all the time!” And she proceeded to present the remarks she had prepared. “There was an old man sitting in the front row who came up to me in tears. ‘I want to thank you, I wish my wife were here to hear that – she was an Army nurse… she died last week.’
“He was glad that someone validated her service.”
Perham pauses as she recalls that day, the words of this gentleman still clearly with her.
Later, as I prepare to leave, she says with a grin pointing to the copy of Vermont Woman I brought for her, “I’m not a Gloria Steinem, I’m not a ‘women’s libber’!” she says, laughing. “But I do know that for every woman who’s been told she couldn’t be an officer because she’s a woman, every woman who’s felt uncomfortable going to a Legion meeting even though she, herself, really wants to help veterans but feels uncomfortable being in a room full of guys because she doesn’t think they would appreciate her – that’s what I look for.
“For every woman out there who’s a veteran, I’m proud of their service and I hope they will look at me and say, ‘you know what? I can do that.’ They give a different perspective and right now, our women veterans are over 15 percent of the military force – they’re the ones now finding themselves homeless. The V.A. hospital doesn’t always have programs for us – we have to travel long distances to get specialty care – so there’s a lot of things that the women veterans really need to get together on and it would be nice to showcase that a woman veteran is there, caring. Let’s get together and start working on issues that affect our sisters.”
Margaret Michniewicz is editor of Vermont Woman and can be contacted at editor@vermontwoman.com.
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