What could be a typical day for any number of retirees becomes extraordinary when Bill reveals his age: 103.

Though the source of Bill’s energy is a mystery, he’s happy to put it to use. This past year he bought his first computer, an iPad, and has learned how to use the Internet. He regularly emails friends, flips through YouTube videos with ease, and recently signed up for Facebook.

How has this centenarian mastered a technology that baffles people decades younger?

“Nothing’s too complicated if you’re willing to learn,” Bill explains, deftly opening an iPad program with a tap of his finger.

This attitude is in keeping with Bill’s life philosophy, a relaxed creed that guides his decisions. He actively avoids stress, claims to have never held a grudge, and advocates living in the moment.

“I’ve been easygoing all my life,” he muses. “Very seldom have I ever planned ahead for anything.”

He credits his longevity to this low-pressure way of life, so it stands to reason that his closest brush with death in 103 years was at the tender age of three months – before he had any chance to implement it.

His mother was cooking in the kitchen while three-month-old Bill napped on the living room couch of his childhood home in Washington, D.C. A fire broke out between the two rooms, and Bill’s mother, blocked by fire and hindered by her prosthetic leg, was forced to flee the house without her son. Luckily, a stranger on the street saw the flames and rushed in to save the baby’s life.

Since then, Bill has kept himself in good health, with a few small exceptions: He had all his teeth replaced on the advice of a dentist in 1938, and he suffered a bout with pneumonia last year. “My doctor is always disappointed he can’t find anything wrong with me,” he jokes.

He wears a brace to support a weak foot that developed a few years back when he fell on rocks while hiking to a fishing hole. He now uses a cane outdoors to avoid any more falls.

The only crash he’s had since learning to drive in a Model T 85 years ago was a no-fault collision with a u-turning driver in 2008, he says. His license is good until 2015.

He rarely drinks, and says he has never been drunk. Though he smoked occasionally for some years, he quit cold turkey in 1960. “One day I asked myself, ‘What am I smoking for?’ and I never smoked again,” he explains.

He still makes most of his meals, usually combining steamed vegetables with precooked meats, and avoids “junk,” though on rare occasions he’ll have pizza or a hamburger.

And his exercise routine?  “I’ve never exercised, never needed to lose weight,” Bill says. “I’ve always worked.”

Even in his retirement, Bill trained himself as a television repairman, and set to fixing the sets of his friends and family. He kept doing it until people switched away from tube TVs, and then only because he didn’t want to buy a host of new equipment.

From childhood, Bill experienced a century of remarkable social and technological change.

He left school after eighth grade to help support his family, and got a job at the Bell Telephone Company for $7 a week. His family didn’t even have a phone at that point.

In 1926 Bill joined the Army and moved to Fort Bliss, Texas, to serve with his brother, Frank. In doing so, he became one of the last soldiers in the pre-mechanized cavalry. As part of the 7^th Cavalry Regiment, he helped man the mobile radio station they carried, transmitting messages through Morse code. When he wasn’t interpreting code, he sometimes had to hand-crank a generator by hand to power up the radio.

Though he had never ridden a horse before, animal care soon became a huge part of his life. For the next three years Bill rode maneuvers across Texas, slept in pup tents, and took care of his horse. Despite a life dedicated to a single animal, Bill never saw fit to give it a name, though he still recalls its brand: E-213.

“It was just a horse,” he explains, then pauses in contemplation. “A good horse.”

Bill moved directly from one of the oldest forms of transportation in the Army to one of the most cutting edge. He was released from service in 1929, just a month after Black Tuesday’s stock market crash. After three weeks traveling the rails and witnessing the early impact of the Great Depression, he reenlisted, this time in the Army Air Corps.

He moved to Kelly Field, outside San Antonio, and worked as a plane mechanic for the 77^th Pursuit Squadron. While he was never officially taught to fly, the cadets often took him up in their PT-13 trainers, canvas planes on steel frames. When the cadets got tired or needed a smoke break, they would wiggle the joystick, and Bill knew it was his turn to take over.

In this way he learned to fly, though never to take off or land. These are the most difficult moves in flying, made more complicated – and jarring – by rabbit and gopher holes in an era that predated paved runways.

After a year, he was offered the chance to transfer to Sacramento’s Mather Field, and he took it gladly. Though released from duty in 1933, he decided to stay in California, and worked at the Bercut-Richards Cannery until he found his way back into the Army in the 1940s as a civilian mechanic.

The draw of California, besides the sun, was the girls – specifically, Luana Jones. The two married in January 1934 and bought a home in North Sacramento. By November, they had their first and only child, Sharolyn, who is now 76 and lives in Arizona.

Bill’s greatest regret after 103 years is a lonely childhood. Born on March 26, 1908, he was the fourth of five boys, though the older two were separated by eight years and rarely associated with the younger. His father, a carpenter, was away working most of the time.

“It wasn’t like a family should be,” laments Bill, whose mother died of gallstones when he was just 16. “We were never together.”

When Bill and his first wife divorced in 1949, he worried how it would affect his daughter, but his worry was short-lived, as Sharolyn soon married. After six years of bachelorhood in Sacramento, Bill met Gertrude Driver, whose grandfather had settled a vast tract of farmland north of the city. A month later the two were married. They moved to 45 acres in Calaveras County and developed a tree farm there after Bill’s retirement in 1969, happily tending their land and traveling widely until her death in 2001.

Today, Bill shares the property with his stepson, and visits often with great-niece Lorena Newsom and her husband, Jim, who live in nearby Murphys and attend the local Mormon church, which Bill joined last year.

It was Jim who helped set Bill up with his iPad, the latest technology he’s become enamored with. He uses it to read the Bible, check Facebook, and keep up-to-date with the world outside his secluded foothills home.

Most folks might find Bill’s computer savvy remarkable, but the changes in technology he has witnessed only become more pronounced as he recounts vivid childhood memories: construction of the Lincoln Memorial, the planting of Japanese cherry trees in D.C.’s Tidal Basin (where he also learned to swim) and the inaugural procession of Woodrow Wilson, the last U.S. president to travel in a horse-drawn carriage.

Bill lived through World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, though his memories of both are limited. “I was just a kid, I didn’t pay any attention to that stuff,” he explains. To him, the war existed only in his parents’ conversation, and in movie star Douglas Fairbanks coming to town to sell war bonds.

All these memories come to Bill without a pause. In several hours of conversation with a writer 80 years his junior, the only thing he fails to remember is the capital of Portugal (Lisbon). This lapse irks him, though it comes amid perfect recollection of a long string of small cities and towns he passed through in a three-month European tour in the 1970s.

What’s his secret?

“It’s no secret what God can do,” is Bill’s rote response, but if pressed, he figures it could have something to do with attitude. “I was always happy with whatever I was given, with whatever I did.”

While it’s unclear whether this secret will get you to 103, it may just help you with something just as elusive: how to be happy while you’re here.

And Bill’s plans for the future?

“Keep living,” he smiles. “Tomorrow never comes, you know.”

© 2011 Friends and Neighbors