Ships
- USS Worden (DD-352) Captain, 11 June 1938 – 17 June 1939
Lunsford Yandell Mason Jr. was born on 24 February 1897. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1920 and served as a surface officer in the United States Navy.
From 11 June 1938 to 17 June 1939, as a lieutenant commander, he was captain of the Farragut-class destroyer Worden. The ship had been built at the Puget Sound Navy Yard and commissioned on 15 January 1935 under Robert Earle Kerr. In Mason's year she operated from San Diego with the destroyers of the Scouting Force, drilling in tactics and gunnery, training with the Fleet Sound School, and taking part in fleet exercises that in those years stretched from Alaskan waters to the coast of Peru.
His tour ended long before the Pacific war. On 12 January 1943 Worden was screening a landing in Constantine Harbor at Amchitka when a current set her onto a rock. She lost power, broke up in the surf, and became a total loss. William Grady Pogue, her commanding officer, was swept overboard and pulled from the water; fourteen of the crew drowned.
On 21 December 1940 Mason took command of the destroyer Sampson. He left her on 5 December 1941, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was promoted to commander on 18 June 1942 and later held the temporary rank of captain.
After the fighting ended he commanded the battleship California, from 12 October 1945 to 28 March 1946. California had been salvaged after Pearl Harbor, rebuilt, and returned to the fleet, and Mason's months in her fell in the first season of peace. He retired as a rear admiral and received the Legion of Merit. He died in 1973.