Happy 91st Birthday!

Chief Petty Officer Yaeger in his brand new uniform.

It is my father's ninety-first birthday. About a month ago he decided it might be time to give up bike-riding, Seriously. A couple of weeks before his ninetieth birthday, he was hospitalized with sepsis. Lots of people were planning to come to his birthday party ~ and we had every reason to worry they'd instead be coming for his funeral. But Dad is tough. He is an ex-marine after all. And that is part of what makes him fascinating. A year-and-a-half ago, eating in a restaurant with Dad, I learned he liked pickled beets. Hmm, mildly surprising. A year ago, he announced he "might not dislike onions after all." Uh-huh. Maybe the Mayans were off by a year? Dad doesn't dislike onions, he hates them with a fiery passion. In their nearly 57 years of marriage, Mom has never been allowed to put a chunk of onions in anything. She can grate in a teaspoon of onion juice, if he doesn't see it (kind of "don't ask, don't tell" onion policy). Within weeks of turning 90, he changed his mind.

Told you they square-danced ~ now it seems cute.

That openness to new things may have something to do with why he's still going strong. He took up skiing in his fifties. Downhill skiing. He bowled & biked until this year. He comes from a generation that expected to slow down at fifty. Dad was just getting started. In the past forty years, in addition to skiing, and going to casinos (he is old, after all) he took ballroom dance lessons with Mom. They took up square-dancing, much to my horror ~ no teenager wants her parents doing that in public. They joined a hiking club. They joined an RV club. They moved into a two-story house that had Dad on a twenty-five foot ladder cleaning out the gutters until he was 86. Mom finally decided they had to move into an apartment because it was the only way to keep him off that damn ladder.

He always been a go-getter. In the summer of 1941, he decided to join the Coast Guard, but he couldn't find the Coast Guard recruiting office, so he joined the Marines. He finished boot camp just in time for Pearl Harbor. He never saw combat, so he insists he's not a hero. It's not that he tried to avoid it, in fact, he tried to be a pilot. But the Marines put him to work maintaining the runways on the base in Samoa. He left the service after The War. Tried civilian life for eight years and went, again, in search of the Coast guard recruiting office. Found the Navy that time. The Navy put him in charge of big guns. And they sent him around the world. Before he left, he met a girl at party back home in Minneapolis. She told him to look her up if ever got to San Francisco. Months later, he got to Frisco, and she had a boyfriend. She convinced her roommate, Ruth, to go out with him. Dad was so nervous (33, ex-Marine, literal world-traveller) that he showed up with friends. He must have said something right, eight months later she married him. At the end of his Naval enlistment, Dad finally found the Coast Guard office. He loved the Coast Guard, stayed there until he had enough years in to retire. He got so good at what he did that the Coast Guard had him teach at the Academy for two years. After retiring from the military, he drove bus around Minneapolis for sixteen years. Then he learned to play.

Dad ~ on his 90th birthday. The W279 is the Eastwind,
the ship that had him spend a summer in Antarctica
(hence, the penguins).

They retired almost twenty-seven years ago. They've travelled all over the country, to Mexico & Canada. Took a Hawaiian cruise. Spent twenty-six winters in Arizona exploring the Southwest. And now, finally, Dad is starting to slow down. Just a little past fifty. Now that he's in his nineties, he wants to learn to use a computer. Oh yeah, he took up Wii bowling, too.



Happy Birthday, Dad! We'll throw you an even bigger party for your hundredth birthday!