Travel Vets Westminster MD

Richard W. Stem will receive his diploma belatedly from Westminster… (Amy Davis / Baltimore Sun )

Richard Stem left Westminster High School before graduation to join the military at the start of World War II, and he never returned to pick up his diploma. Now, the 93-year-old is set to become one of the earliest graduates of the class of 2014.

On Wednesday, the Carroll County Board of Education will award Stem a high school diploma under a 2000 state law that allows World War II veterans who left for service as seniors in high school before graduation to be awarded diplomas. He will coincidentally receive his diploma the same week he and other current and former military personnel nationwide observe Veterans Day.

Carroll County officials said such diplomas do not designate which school the graduate attended and make no mention of the recipient's original graduation year. Still, it's a welcoming milestone for Stem, who inquired about getting his diploma after reading a story about another veteran recipient.

"It took 75 years to get it, " Stem said in a phone interview. "I'm 93 years old. I figure if I was ever going to do it, I better do it now."

He will receive his diploma at the school board's regular meeting in Westminster. Carroll County school officials said he is the second veteran to receive his diploma this year.

Stem said he left school when he was in his late teens — he can't recall exactly how old he was — and signed up for the Army. He had begun high school toward the end of the Great Depression, and after enlisting in the military, "I ran home and got a couple of things and I never [went] back." After training, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, before the nation's military aviation branch became a separate entity.

He was stationed at training command at Liberal, Kan., in the early 1940s and served as a flight engineer for a B-24 Bomber. He said that toward the end of the war he toured the South West Pacific and was part of a group that took prisoners of war from Japan to the Philippines. He was honorably discharged in 1946.