Those were the war years and I didn’t get into the service but I worked for several contractors who had war contracts. The last one at the end of the war, I was working for Douglas Aircraft out of Chicago. After that I became affiliated with a firm of consulting engineers in Green Bay, Wisconsin and spent 30 years with them.

They were strictly – well, they were in airport construction, sewer and water systems, and just general contracting.

The name of the company was Firth and Porath I think we were involved in my early years of employed with the airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, out in Illinois, and mostly sewer and water works for small communities that didn’t have any and were just starting out. Other than that there isn’t much I can say.

We only had one daughter. She finished college at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio and stayed out in that area and worked for the Ohio Power Company for quite a number of years as a home economist and married here in Findlay.

As my wife and I became older we finally moved here to Findlay because traveling back and forth to Wisconsin got to be a problem, and the Milwaukee and Chicago areas.

Then I lost my wife in July of 2001, but we were fortunate in the fact that we had celebrated our 65th wedding anniversary and if she had lived a couple months longer we would have made it to 66!

Well, you know, when you look back through history we have probably lived through one of the most amazing eras of time. You know, you include television and all the electronic equipment that has come into existence and the computers and one thing or another.

I was probably a pioneer as far as computers are concerned because I had my own computer back in 1966, primarily because the company management couldn’t see the possibility of the computer. In my capacity with the company I could see the computer would lighten the load the whole way round so I just invested in it myself and saved myself a lot of headaches.

And, I still play around with computers a little bit. I never did any programming or anything like that but I still use – well, the fact is that I bought one of the first portable pocket computers that were put out by Hewlett Packard. I forget what year that was, probably ’67 or ’68, which I still have and which is still operable, but nowadays you get the same thing on any computer, any desktop, that you buy.

I tried to give my old computer to the local museum and oh, they didn’t want anything like that. I suppose now they’d be crying for something like that. So, I think I got about $35 out of the aluminum that was in it. Outside of that, I don’t think my life was too eventful.

I don’t know. That’s something that is pretty hard to justify I guess, because in those days life was a struggle no matter which way. Even the highs weren’t that high (Laughter).

When you think back you try to save as much as you can and hope that you will carry it through your lifespan. As of today I’m, what, about 35 days away from making 94 years. Then you come a place like the Heritage here and we find today that there are a lot of people who are reaching their 100th birthday. Then we had one family here who both the husband and the wife had reached the 100 year mark and they also reached, I think it was 81 years of marriage. The husband had lived to be 105 years old and lived in three centuries, so you run across some interesting things along the way.