WWII veteran Edward Born, of Hicksville, celebrates 100th birthday 'like a hero'

Tuesday afternoon, a few days before his 100th birthday, Edward Born walked out the front door of his Hicksville home and into a party.

His two boys, Don and Rob, now grandfathers in their 70s, hugged him. So did neighbors, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Down the street came a cavalcade of vehicles bearing an honor guard of fellow armed forces veterans. They got out for handshakes and a group salute. Pieces of sheet cake were handed around.

“I feel like a hero,” he said.

“You are,” somebody said from the back of the crowd.

"How do you live to be 100?" a reporter asked. Make your life “stress free,” he said. “Be happy ... share everything with another person.”

Later, in an interview, Born elaborated: He married a woman, Nancy, and they stayed married for 77 years until her death earlier this year. He still lives in the house they bought in 1950.

“It just seemed like a different world at that time. You know, that’s 80 years ago," he said. "Things were different. They were nice and calm and peaceful.”

He doesn’t feel old and doesn’t care much about reaching 100, he said: “98, 99,100, they’re all the same ... I get around. I have to use a cane now. But other than that, I do things around the house. I cook my own meals and I do shopping with a niece of mine that's around a corner and life goes on. I’ve been lucky, oh yes, very, very lucky.”

Born is one of about 800 World War II veterans still living on Long Island, down from the millions who moved here in the 1940s and '50s. He was 19 when the Army sent him to fight in Germany. Near the end of the fighting there, he exposed himself to enemy shelling while pulling a fellow soldier into cover, an action that earned him a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and left him with shrapnel in his leg and back, said son Don Born, a retired computer mainframe salesman from Smithtown.

Asked in a phone interview about his dad’s longevity, Don Born said genes probably had something to do with it. Aside from one health scare a couple decades back, he’d never known his dad to be sick, he said.

Born said his dad liked his work and was good at it. He’d trained as a machinist and mechanic, but gave that up after the war because his injuries made it painful to stand for an eight-hour shift. He moved into contracts, negotiating for Fairchild and Grumman instead.

“He still likes working with his hands,” Don Born said. “He built the top floor of the house, two bedrooms and bathrooms. He likes tinkering ... Back then, he’d look at something like a puzzle, 'How do I fix this?'"

Born said his dad made friends and kept them. He married into a big Sicilian family, many of whose members lived nearby. He and Nancy befriended people they met at church, at weekend antique markets, at cards. They belonged to a group of Grumman employees who traveled the world together on their vacations. Don Born said his dad still plays a weekly, very low-stakes poker game at Levittown Hall, though he is considerably older than most of his opponents.

In a phone interview, Tara Parzych, Born’s case manager at Family & Children’s Association — the Garden City social services agency that helps him with some daily needs like transportation, since he stopped driving earlier this year — said he was, by chronological age, her oldest client. However, she put his effective age at about 75.

Genetics has “a lot to do with it,” Parzych said, along with a “beautiful family, very large, very involved ... They are around him, but they are allowing him to live independently.”

In the big backyard of Born’s house, Rob Born said he remembered the block parties they used to have and the work his dad had done on the house with a neighbor who was a plumber.

Rose Marie Walker, who is another of Born’s neighbors and is also the area’s representative in the Nassau County legislature, said she’d been to several centennial parties for her constituents. Those people shared some traits, she said.

“Many of them, especially the gentlemen, have served in our military,” she said. “One of the biggest traits you see is their love for their family, their love for this country, their love for their community. Not that other people don't have that, but theirs is deep down inside, like that feeling of being a very special part of something, and they hold on to that.”