Editor's note: This story has been adapted from one by former Day Staff Writer Ted Mann that ran in 2008, as U.S. Sen. John McCain was pursuing the Republican Party nomination for president.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, a decorated veteran and mainstay — though also sometimes dubbed a maverick — of the Republican Party, died Saturday night at the age of 81.

It may not be so well known that he had spent some of his formative years right here in southeastern Connecticut.

More than three quarters of a century before his death, the 5-year-old McCain was standing on his family’s lawn in New London when grave news arrived: The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. He learned his country — and his father — would be going to war.

McCain’s family was living at 1140 Ocean Ave. for several years in the early 1940s while his father was stationed at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton. The boy, who one day would be a senator and presidential nominee, attended Harbor School on Montauk Avenue for kindergarten and first grade.

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, McCain often told the story of hearing about the Pearl Harbor attack, and did so again in his 1999 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.” In the book he also told another story of his time here, one in which his father was in command of a docking submarine.

A young officer was at the controls and struggling to navigate the Thames River’s strong currents, McCain wrote. His father stood on the conning tower of the vessel, smoking a cigar, “not paying sufficient attention to his ship's progress.” However, McCain’s father — along with those who lined the Groton shore to watch, including McCain, his mother and siblings — soon realized the sub would crash.

As McCain's father attempted to call “all engines stop,” he choked on the cigar’s smoke. The submarine plowed right into the pier, toppling a lamppost — directly onto the McCain family car.

After order had been restored, McCain wrote, “my father went home with us and began a long and difficult argument with his insurance company over the credibility of his insurance claim for a car destroyed by a submarine.”

McCain found the demands of military family life to be challenging.

“The frequent relocations imposed on Navy families were the chief obstacle to a decent education,” he wrote in the memoir, released as the senator from Arizona was beginning his first run for the Republican nomination for president. “As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings, forced to establish myself quickly in another social order.”

Still, those challenges did not stop him from going on to have a decorated military career of his own.