A Pacific Grove man wouldn’t rest until the Veterans Cemetery was ready for him.

Tony Gambale had a pressing and persistent question for Gloria, his wife of 65 years.

“When are they going to open the cemetery?”

It was a very important question for Tony, a proud veteran of World War II, who was injured during the D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy. In 1982 the Gambales moved to Pacific Grove, near where Tony worked at the Defense Language Institute.

When Fort Ord was slated for closure in 1994 and talks in the region about a possible veterans cemetery began, Gambale was excited to think his final resting place could be alongside other veterans in the scenic region the former New Yorker had come to call home.

His battle wounds robbed him of a lung, and he was a sickly man most of his life, Gloria says. Even so, he worked for DLI running the Russian library (though he did not speak or read Russian) until 1996, when he was 80 years old. Only double knee replacement surgeries forced him into retirement.

All along, Tony watched as officials and veterans’ organizations attempted to secure the finances and approvals for what was to become the California Central Coast Veterans Cemetery.

“Before they built the cemetery Tony would say to me, ‘I wish they would build the cemetery. When are they going to start building the cemetery?’” Gloria recalls. “Give them time, they don’t do things right away!” she would tell him. “Of course, he was getting old.”

When officials broke ground for the cemetery in March 2015, on Parker Flats Cut Off Road in Seaside, Tony – then 98 years old – began asking a new question in earnest: “Now when are they going to finish building the cemetery?”

He was still asking the question when the couple, their family, friends and local dignitaries – including then-candidate and now Congressman Jimmy Panetta – marked Tony’s 100th birthday in June 2016. They celebrated in the dining room of Tony’s nursing home, the Windsor Monterey Care Center, with cake, decorations and a display of his many medals.

One of those medals was the French Legion of Honour, France’s highest honor available to soldiers and units who displayed great bravery during wartime. Gambale received the tribute in a ceremony in 2011 at the French consulate in San Francisco, after a friend, Diane Pirzada, lobbied for the medal on his behalf.

“I wrote about 25 emails,” she says, laughing. “The French were joyful and helpful and happy to help him receive the medal.”

Pirzada first met Tony and Gloria in 2009, when she took 12 Central Coast World War II veterans, including Tony, to Washington, D.C. She took “the boys,” as she refers to them, to see the national World War II memorial and submit audio-taped stories about their experiences during the war to the Library of Congress. The group represented all five branches of the military.

Now living in Los Angeles, Pirzada previously lived in Lockwood and was a volunteer at nearby Fort Hunter Liggett. She has since taken other veterans on trips, like a recent visit to New York City where they went to see the Sept. 11 memorial.

Her passion for helping veterans and sharing their stories now extends to what she sees as a companion project to the veterans cemetery, a museum on a nearby parcel of land that will share the stories of the men and women who made sacrifices so that others may be free.

She plans to form a nonprofit organization to raise funds for an eventual museum.

“I want the museum to honor all the people that served, but there’s an urgency in this midnight hour for the World War II generation,” Pirzada says, noting there are only about 600,000 WWII veterans left, and that number gets smaller every day.

Pirzada was in attendance at Tony’s birthday party last June, and she clearly remembers Tony asking when the cemetery would be built more than once during the party.

Several months after his birthday celebration, Gloria had exciting news to share with Tony at the nursing home.

“Guess what? They opened up the cemetery,” she told him. “He had this big smile on his face. He was so happy.”

The cemetery opened on Oct. 11, 2016. Tony died 38 days later, on Nov. 18.

Gloria interred Tony’s ashes in January in the first row of columbariums at the cemetery.

She visits as often as she can.

He rests in a quiet grove of coast live oaks, with yellow yarrow growing nearby. Occasionally there’s the sound of the rope attached to the neighboring U.S. flag bumping against the towering metal pole in the wind. It sounds almost like church bells ringing in the distance.