Born in Toledo, Ed Krauel likes to reminisce about his childhood, Erie Canal, Buckeye Beer, being an Eagle Scout and a Sea Scout and serving almost 10 years in the Navy.
LAMBERTVILLE — Ed Krauel, who turned 100 Wednesday, has a recipe for a long life: Stay active, don’t smoke and don’t become a couch potato.
“You should not be sitting on your butt all day,” the longtime Lambertville resident advised. “You have to keep active. I’ve been active all my life. I was in scouting quite a few years and served my country” in two wars.
Maybe that’s why he looks so good for someone who’s a century old.
Nicknamed Shorty due to his 5-foot-2 frame, the retired General Motors Corp. worker who looks and jokes around like George Burns without the cigar lives with his daughter, Ruth Gora, in the same four-bedroom ranch home that he bought for $17,000 in 1959 and moved into with his second wife, Betty, and her two boys.
The house is across from Bedford Public Schools’ bus garage and soccer-lacrosse stadium and the former school where Ruth and her sister, Alice (Cookie) Goddess attended.
“This was a model home at the time,” Ruth said. “He lived in Toledo about 50 years before coming here. After the war, he got married to our mother, Jean, and divorced. Dad raised us. He married again — Betty — and they had a son together — Jimmy. Everybody got along great.”
Krauel has health checkups every six months and still suffers with arthritis in his back.
“My heart’s in good shape,” he proudly proclaimed. “I never smoked, except once when I was a kid. When you get old, you got so much up here (pointing to his head). It takes time to remember.”
Cookie from Nashville, Tenn., visited him for the holidays and is staying with them to help celebrate his birthday. She calls him “part Energizer Bunny.”
“For his age, he’s in pretty good health,” Cookie said. “He has to know how lucky he is. Dad still has his mind and has arthritis in his lower back for which he takes pain management shots. Everything on his body is original.”
Krauel does his own bills and balances the checkbook. Ruth makes out the checks for him.
Cookie said it’s a good thing her father got his height from his mother, who was also small.
“Thank God he took after her because his father was 6-foot-tall, but had heart problems,” she said.
Krauel wears glasses and loves playing solitaire, chicken foot (a domino game) with the grandchildren, reading newspapers, stamp and coin collecting and talking about his German and Lutheran heritage.
In the summertime, he works in the garage and putts around in the garden and the yard. Ruth and Cookie trained him to weed the garden with a bracket connected to his walker. Once, he accidentally fell off the roof with a five-gallon bucket of tar and didn’t injure himself.
He’s gotten haircuts from Sandy Lambrix in Temperance for 10 years. She offered to cut his hair for free on his birthday.
Born and raised in Toledo and a 1937 graduate of Libbey High School, Krauel likes to reminisce about his childhood, Erie Canal, Buckeye Beer, being an Eagle Scout and a Sea Scout and serving almost 10 years on PT (patrol, torpedo) boats in the South Pacific during War II and the Korean War.
“Dad’s very patient,” Cookie said. “He’s a character and likes to joke around. Sometimes you don’t know when he’s joking.”
Ruth told the story of when her father was walking on the driveway and wanted to bring the recycling and trash barrels back from the curb last summer. He fell on his side near the end of the driveway. Two motorists stopped to assist him and were surprised he was okay.
As to what happened when he fell off the roof, “I know how to fall,” he said with a laugh.
He can remember when gasoline cost 19 cents a gallon, delivering the newspaper for 2 cents a day and 12 cents a week and swimming in the Erie Canal before it became the Anthony Wayne Trail. His first car — a Chevrolet — cost him $250.
When WWII came, he was drafted and chose the Navy over the Army because he was a Sea Scout, an arm of the Boy Scouts of America that teaches water safety and boating skills. He served as a petty officer and cook on a ship after learning from his mother how to be efficient in the kitchen.
“Scouting taught me a lot,” too, he said. “I knew more about tying knots in the war than my commanding officers.”
An Eagle Scout, he once was a scout leader and spoke at many area schools about scouting.
During WWII, Krauel survived a Japanese aerial attack in the waters near the Philippines. On the wall of his home hangs a portrait of the bombing scene that he witnessed.
He loves to tell the story of how he saved an American pilot whose plane was shot down during an air raid by Japanese.
“We were always the lead boat,” he said about the battle. “The plane crashed into the (Pacific Ocean) and I saw the pilot. I pushed a dinghy off the ship and pulled him out of the water.”
That earned him a medal, one of a half-dozen he would earn during the two wars.
A member of PT Boats Inc. and Conn-Weissenberger Post 587, American Legion, in Toledo, he anchors a military family that includes three generations in the armed forces. His son, Jimmy, who lives in Alabama and who served in the Army, has two sons serving in the military — Aaron in the Army and Ryan in the Marine Corps. Aaron just returned from a tour in Iraq.
“I’m proud of all my kids and what they’ve done,” Krauel said.
Jimmy’s daughter, Emily, also is coming to the celebration along with one of Krauel’s sons — Dr. Gregory Zieren from Tennessee.
In addition to four living children and one deceased son, Michael, Krauel has eight grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren and a great-great-granddaughter born in 2016.