100-year-old still in the game
At 100, Tony Hehn is still very much in the game – the Bingo game, that is. For more years than he can remember, Hehn has helped out with Bingo games sponsored by the American Legion Post 3 in Salem.
Tuesday night Hehn was greeting early-comers to the game, and preparing to sell Bingo “papers,” as Bingo sheets are called now.
Tony Hehn, who will turn 100 Friday, volunteers two nights a week at American Legion-sponsored Bingo games. Waiting for the start of the games Tuesday night are Mary Wray, left, of Glenvar and Judy Houchin of Salem. Photo by Meg Hibbert
Although he doesn’t know it yet, Saturday afternoon he will be back at the American Legion Hall. His birthday is Friday, and his family and friends are throwing him a surprise birthday party at the place which has meant to much to him.
Until a bout of ill health earlier this year, Hehn also tended the gate and sold tickets for America Legion baseball and helped out with whatever was needed by the late Posey Oyler.
“I was Posey’s right-hand-man,” Hehn said. Oyler was the driving force behind the Salem-Roanoke Valley Baseball Hall of Fame.
Hehn received an award from that local hall of fame, too.
One wall of the downstairs study in their home in the Penn Forest neighborhood where he and his 98-year-old wife, Nancy, live independently is covered by sports awards and memorabilia, including Hehn’s bowling trophies.
“I was a good bowler,” he said, recalling how he bowled eight strikes in a row one night in league bowling in Marion where Hehn worked for Brunswick, the sports equipment manufacturer. Their team won the roll off and a three-day trip to a bowling tournament in Washington, D.C.
“I did a lot of things in my life,” Hehn said, smiling.
Those accomplishments include:
• graduating as valedictorian of his high school night school, at age 28;
• being a proud member of the Notre Dame University Class of 1942. Hehn attended his 65th college reunion a few years ago.
• until recently, playing bridge twice a week at the Brambleton Senior Center.
Hehn, who was from Reading, Pa., met his future bride while working in Marion for Brunswick where he was a supervisor. Nancy, who was from Tazewell, was working at Roses there. They dated for a year before they married. This year, they’ve been married for 68 years.
“We got married in a Catholic church in Asheville, N.C.,” he remembered, pulling out the couple’s marriage certificate from his desk drawer of treasures.
They had to keep their marriage secret at first, according to Nancy, because her employer wouldn’t keep married women.
An early photograph shows the couple at the Firestone mansion in Miami, Fla., in 1945, when Hehn was Army Air Corps Tech Sgt. Anthony Hehn.
“They let the services use that mansion,” he remembered. “Ever since then I was partial to Firestone when I bought something for the car.”
In the three-and-a-half years he served, the Hehns lived in Jackson, Miss., as well as Miami, he said, before returning to Marion after the war was over.
Hehn retired at age 65 after working 20 years for Brunswick, he said. “At one time, we made 50,000 pool tables for Sears and Roebuck in a year.”
The couple moved to Roanoke County in 1979, he said, to be nearer their only child, Mary Russell, who teaches at Patrick Henry High School and lives nearby in the Cave Spring area, and their only grandchild, grandson Tony Russell, an attorney with Gentry Locke.
When asked to what he attributes his long life and good health, Hehn said, “I don’t know why it is.”
The couple’s assistant, Sue Rohrer, insists, “It’s because you’re a good man.” And she added, “He’s a doll baby.”
Hehn admitted he never smoked cigarettes, after he and his two brothers tried rolling up corn husks and smoking them when they were growing up.
“I’ve had a good life,” he concluded.
