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Longmore, 65, served community with pride despite pain
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo James Abell Longmore Jr., 65, died Monday from pancreatic cancer. Longmore was a longtime businessman in St. Mary's, running the Ben Franklin store his family owned in Leonardtown before engaging in other ventures, including extensive charitable work.
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James Abell Longmore Jr. died Monday amid treatment for pancreatic cancer after decades of community involvement that persistently triumphed over chronic personal illness from his wartime military service.
Longmore, 65, lived and worked for most of his life in his native Leonardtown, where his roles as a husband and father combined not only with his career as a shopkeeper but also political support and charitable work focused in recent years on Hospice of St. Mary's.
"He was active in community affairs, hospice in particular, … and many other charitable contributions I'll never know about, because he never told anybody," longtime friend J. Ernest Bell II said Tuesday outside the county courthouse. "I always wondered how he had time to work."
Longmore did work for decades running the Ben Franklin store that his family owned for two generations in town, before he sold it in the mid-1990s and took up real-estate property management and an even deeper involvement in charitable work.
‘‘I studied 48 different organizations," he said in a 2006 interview, before he decided to spend his volunteer time with Hospice of St. Mary's.
He did a variety of tasks for the program's terminally ill patients, from getting them groceries to simply keeping them company. ‘‘I had a patient who enjoyed the classics and couldn't hold a book anymore," Longmore said, so he spent hours reading classical novels out loud to the patient.
Longmore also enjoyed discussing political campaigns, and getting quietly involved.
"He loved politics, a lot of behind the scenes [activities] supporting candidates," Bell said. "He let any candidate put a sign in his yard. I don't know that he ever denied anyone. He said you always have to have an opponent."
Longmore's only enduring opponent in life was one from his service as an Army medic during the Vietnam War.
After he graduated from Ryken High School and studied at a Jesuit seminary, intent on entering the priesthood, Longmore joined the Army Reserves. In 1966, at the age of 21, he was called to active duty and ordered to Vietnam, where he worked at a military base on a hilltop within sight of the South China Sea. In addition to caring for American servicemen, he also offered medical aid to the Vietnamese residents of two nearby villages.
Almost 20 years after returning from Vietnam, Longmore began to realize he was suffering a degenerative physical condition from exposure to defoliant Agent Orange, a chemical sprayed from airplanes by the military to kill forest growth and eliminate places where enemy snipers could hide.
The chemical began destroying the ligaments in Longmore's body, and although therapy and multiple surgeries helped, he wore a heavy neck brace to support his head.
Longmore said in the 2006 interview that he came back from the war with a lot of anger and animosity. He realized he was dealing with the situation in the wrong way, and first devoted his time and energy to the political campaigning and then, later in his life, into hospice.
‘‘We're there to relax the patient and prepare them for death," Longmore said.
Bell said this week of Longmore's illness, "It never got him down. He was a real fighter. He never talked about it."
St. Mary's County Commissioner Daniel H. Raley (D), the father-in-law of Longmore's son Christopher, said Tuesday, "We would deeply miss Abell. He was a wonderful member of the community."
Longmore's family will receive friends from 5-8 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, at St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Leonardtown, where a funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Friday. Memorial contributions may be made to Hospice of St. Mary's and the Three Oaks Center.
The funeral arrangements are being handled by the Brinsfield Funeral Home in Leonardtown.
Staff writers Jesse Yeatman and Jason Babcock contributed to this report.
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