SOUTH PORTLAND — Jim Mardin was about to dig into a heaping slice of cake at his 103rd birthday party when a voice shouted out for him to stop.

“Everybody come on! We’ve got to sing ‘Happy Birthday,'” Mardin’s friend Lee Humiston called. “We can’t have a birthday without the song!”

And so the voices of about a half-dozen veterans and their relatives echoed off the walls of the Maine Military Museum and Learning Center on Thursday afternoon. Mardin, whose birthday was Thursday, clapped to the beat.

Smiling with blue frosting staining his teeth, Mardin, an Army veteran of World War II, said he “didn’t expect all this.”

“I’m not that old; I’m only 103,” he said with a laugh. “You really don’t dwell on it, because you’d go crazy.”

Battalion Sgt. Maj. Mardin, whose service brought him to the Battle of the Bulge and as far east as Czechoslovakia, spends most Saturdays at the museum, visiting with guests and answering their questions about his time overseas, said Humiston, the museum’s founder. Humiston and other volunteers lovingly call Mardin the collection’s “living artifact.”

Serving in an anti-aircraft unit, Mardin disembarked onto Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 12, 1944, six days after the initial attack on D-Day. Speaking to reporters at the museum, Mardin recalled German aircraft and American artillery shells whizzing and whirring overhead as he followed, but never reached, the front line.

Upon his return stateside, Mardin continued serving in the Maine National Guard, where he directed traffic during the Great Fires of 1947. Later, he volunteered with fire and police departments and at Maine Medical Center, where he logged more than 11,000 hours of service, Mardin said.

Humiston, who planned the party with his “second in command” Peter Kane, said there are few people who have done as much to help Maine and its people.

“He’s a true World War II hero and a great Maine individual,” Humiston said. “He’s a special, special guy, and that’s why I wanted to do this for him.”

Mardin bristled at the word “hero,” repeatedly insisting that there were others more deserving of that title.

“There’s all kinds of books that were written about the guys who did the shooting,” Mardin told those gathered. “I was just there.”

‘JUST THERE’

Mardin was born in 1922 and graduated from Deering High School in 1940 before enlisting in the National Guard. For several months, he worked at Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth, manning 12-inch guns, he said.

“But we were not allowed to fire those guns because they broke the windows of the people that lived around there,” Mardin said. “The war is going on over there and I’m doing nothing here.”

The young man enlisted, but was on leave the day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, he said.

His unit arrived less than a week after the first D-Day invasion of Normandy, working its way east.

At one point, Mardin was hospitalized with trench foot, but he escaped the infirmary and hitched back to his squad for the Battle of the Bulge. Though he was temporarily considered AWOL — “absent without leave” — Mardin’s superiors forgave him once they realized he was running toward the fight.

“They sent me down the lines to some place nothing was going on,” Mardin said. “I hitchhiked back to the front where my outfit was.”

Mardin said he was too focused on day-to-day survival during the war to think about the future, but “I hoped I would” be telling that story for decades to come, he said.

After the war, he returned to Maine and attended two years of school at Northeastern Business College, where he met his wife of more than 60 years, Bettie. The pair adopted and raised a son and daughter before she died in 2011.

After decades of volunteer service with the Civil Air Patrol, Maine State Police, Hills Beach Volunteer Fire Department and Maine Medical Center, Mardin began offering his time to the museum, Humiston said. The veteran cataloged its collection and put together binders of reference materials for future visitors.

A LIVING HISTORY BOOK

As Mardin recalled his service, about a half-dozen visitors stood in a semicircle around him, nodding and smiling widely as they listened to his stories for the umpteenth time. Some jumped in to offer details Mardin left out.

Among them was Manchester resident Chris Montagna, who first met Mardin about a year ago. He said guests seem drawn to Mardin because of his willingness to open up without intimidating others.

“He’s just warm and nonjudgmental. He just likes to share his experiences in a positive way,” Montagna said. “It’s easy for people to embellish about what they did, and he doesn’t embellish.”

A collector and historian, Montagna said he is the only one of the museum’s volunteers to have never served in the military. And at 62, he’s the “young guy,” tasked with keeping up stories like Mardin’s after those who recall the war firsthand have passed away.

Maine was home to just 328 WWII veterans in 2024, according to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. That’s less than half a percent of the roughly 66,000 remaining nationwide.

“My responsibility is to remember that story,” Montagna said.

Kane, who helped plan the party, noted that Mardin left out some of “the horror” when recalling his military stories, focusing instead on good times with his unit and his later work in Maine. Kane said he almost jumped in to offer new details.

“I was going to help him about it but I thought, ‘No. Remember what he said about a long life?'” Kane said.

Earlier, Mardin said a key to his longevity was not focusing on the hardest and most-scarring moments of his service.

“I didn’t really damage my body by worrying too much, which is what happens to some people. They wear their body out,” Mardin said. “That’s why I’m so healthy.”

That and dark chocolate, Mardin quipped.