A near-centenarian’s advice: Roll with it

It was no-tap bowling day at Valley Bowl on East Sprague Avenue and Dick Hubbard was stealing the show.

He bowled strikes like his ball was the size of a Hoppity Horse and just couldn’t miss. He bowled spares, leaving just one lonely pin teetering on the gutter’s edge. And on his second try, he nailed that pin, too.

“Alright, Dick!” yelled a woman roughly half the bowler’s age, which for the record makes her 50.

Just days shy of his 100th birthday, Hubbard was on his way to bowling a 178. And it was only his first game of the day. He’d later bowl a 210.

It was the kind of performance you’d have to see to believe, a man born the year Oklahoma became a state blowing over pins like a 60 mph wind.

Hubbard couldn’t see it, didn’t know how the pins were falling because he suffers from macular degeneration. He keeps a pair of binoculars around his neck so he can peer down the 60-foot lane and make out what might be pins, if there are any left.

“I can see the big shapes. When I get about a foot and a half from someone, I can recognize their face,” Hubbard said.

“I can make out the pins with binoculars.”

The secret to his success might well be likened to his trick for triple-digit longevity, which has become a bit of a pesky subject for Hubbard as he approaches the century mark. He just keeps throwing the ball down the lane, so long as the pins keep getting set, so long as the return machine keeps spitting up Hubbard’s 12-pound stone at his feet like some fetch-crazed mechanical hound.

The secret to long life, confided Hubbard, is that there are no secrets. You get up in the morning, and if you’re lucky enough to see your reflection in the mirror, you shave and get on with it. The challenging part isn’t somehow finding a way to will your heart into beating 20 years longer than the average man; it’s finding a way to keep it from breaking as your contemporaries die and your wife passes away.

Hubbard’s wife Patricia died 10 years ago after battling lupus for most of her adult life. It put her in a wheelchair and left her dependent on bottled oxygen.

She was 78, more than a decade his junior, and the illness aged her faster than either one of them could have imagined.

“She was a good-looking young lady, but all of her problems kind of wore her down over the years and she got kind of cranky,” Hubbard said. “We stuck it out and did the best we could. I didn’t realize how much of a load it was until she died.”

Life, says Hubbard, is best taken a day at a time, with a sense of humor and a little bit of drive – this from a man who started adult life as an apprentice brick mason and wound up unexpectedly circling the globe at age 23.

Hubbard grew up in Madison, S.D., where his father managed a restaurant in the depot of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul Railway. As a boy he developed an interest in French and geography. As a young man he developed a wanderlust and set out to see the world.

He hitchhiked to New York with nothing more than a backpack full of clothes and $1,000 he’d saved up working six years in the brick trade. There, Hubbard boarded a steamship bound for Italy, followed by another bound for Singapore. Along the way, he stopped for weeks at a time on every major continent.

The trip’s end could have been disastrous, as Hubbard arrived in Singapore with only a few dollars remaining just as the Great Depression hit. The first mate on an aging freighter crew sympathized with Hubbard and offered to let him work his way back to the United States, though it took months just to find enough cargo to pay for the trip home. In the end, he learned the universal language of hard times.

“I learned that people are people and it doesn’t make much difference where the hell they are,” Hubbard said. “We’re all humans and we all have the same problems.”

Back at home, Hubbard returned to the brick trade. It wasn’t nearly as sexy as traveling around the world, but it thrust him into history when he landed a job on a federal government project in Oak Ridge, Tenn. – one of the birthplaces of the atomic bomb.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re changing the course of the world until the work is long over.

It was only a couple years ago, watching a television documentary, that Hubbard realized what the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was all about.

Before the atomic bomb was dropped, Hubbard had started a family and moved to Spokane.

“My kids say I can look back on a life well-lived,” Hubbard said. “I have no worries in the world. I have nothing to worry about,” which is good. A guy has to stay loose when he reaches the bonus round.