It seems that WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.9, apparently once introduced as a hackish workaround for bug 276054, is no longer needed with net-misc/openrdate-1.2. In fact, I use the ebuild without this option in my local overlay since 2012 (on amd64 and x86, currently with automake-1.15-r2, gcc-5.3.0) and never had an issue with its compilation. When you are at it, perhaps one could also change from EAPI=0 to EAPI=6 and make the runscript->openrc-run update for openrc. I add a trivial patch which includes all 3 changes.
Created attachment 434440 [details, diff] Patch for WANT_AUTOMAKE, EAPI=6, openrc-run
The package is being removed wrt last rites.