MINSTER — Ninety-eight-year-old Paul Strobel, of Minster, would like to find a job.
He attributes his longevity to carrot juice, and he’d like to make advertisements for the carrot juice companies. He’d be a good testamonial.
Strobel doesn’t look his age. People regularly guess that he’s in his early 70s. His wife, Rhonola, 74, laughs, “Just don’t say he looks younger than 74.”
For the last 50 years or so, Paul has drunk a half-cup of carrot juice each day. He buys bottled juice now, but he used to make his own, feeding carrots into a juicer. The practice began when a friend gave him a book of recipes for mixed drinks, many of which called for carrot juice.
“I just started drinking it. I liked it,” Paul said. He takes his carrot juice straight.
“We really believe it hasn’t hurt him any,” said Rhonola. “And he doesn’t have to wear glasses.” She thinks that his keeping busy also has contributed to his healthy age. Until two TIA mini-strokes recently robbed him of some of his memory and brought on constant dizziness and fear of falling, Paul fished a lot from the deck of their house on Lake Loramie. He still washes the dishes every day, mows the lawn, exercises, completes Sudoku puzzles on the computer and plays euchre with friends.
The World War II veteran claims he’s lost his memory, but he knows exactly how long he was in the service 70 years ago.
“Two years, four months, 19 days and two and a half hours,” he said. He was a classification expert and learning to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps when the war ended.
“I got to fly little planes,” he said.
He was never sent overseas, and when he was released from duty, he returned to North Ridge, near Dayton. Paul was 26 when he joined the Army. He had married his high school sweetheart, Laverne, three years earlier, and they had a son, Dennis, in 1952. Their marriage lasted 60 years, until Laverne died in 2000.
Following the war, Paul worked as a screw-maker, first for Frigidaire.
“But I quit Frigidaire for 3 cents more on the hour. I went to Ohio Metal Products,” he said. He and Laverne bought a little house on 10 acres in what is now known as Huber Heights.
“I wanted one acre,” he said. Sometime later, he sold part of the land on one side of the house to a church and purchased more land on the other side.
“So I still had 10 acres,” he laughed. The church eventually went bankrupt and Walmart acquired the property. The big box store now sits where the Strobel family home used to be. Although Walmart didn’t arrive until long after the Strobels had left the area, they were there to watch Huber Heights grow up around them. Paul served as chairman of the city council.
He also joined the Wayne Township Volunteer Fire Department and eventually became assistant chief. He battled house fires and was on hand when a call came in that seven little girls had falled through the ice covering a lake on Chambersburg Road.
“We got there and two girls had fallen through,” he said. “Box 21 (a Dayton rescue squad) was there. They had got one girl, who was dead. The guy in the boat was tired; there was ice on his beard. They wanted someone to go in the boat and I went.”
It was just a few minutes before Paul hooked something and pulled up the body of the other child.
“She was about 7. She just looked like she was asleep,” he said, still sad decades later. Recently, the Strobels were invited to have dinner with the current Huber Heights firefighters. On the wall of the fire station were photos of Paul’s crew and their fire engine, which they had adapted from a truck.
“We paid $33,000 for it,” Paul said. “They showed us through there and said they’d paid $1 million for their truck.”
The Greenville native was one to keep busy even when he was younger. During high school, he devised various contraptions. One might have been the first clock radio.
“After my mother died (when Paul was a senior in high school), my dad and I moved back to Greenville (where Paul was born). I slept in the basement and the alarm clock made a raucous sound. I got disgusted with the alarm’s sound. I had a Ford Model A. I took points out of the Ford and attached them to the wires that came from the radio and to the trigger in the clock that would drop down to turn the alarm on. I attached the wires to turn the radio on,” he said.
He created in-line skates by rearranging the wheels from conventional roller skates and, when a friend invented a cigarette lighter, he tried to help him develop it. They never found the small coil they needed to make it work, though.
Years later, Paul got a patent on a gizmo he called the Night Bite, a flashlight that fits on a fishing pole. The fishing line wents through the flashlight and the light came on when a fish bit. Fishermen used it when they were night fishing. And Paul sought a patent for a business card dispenser.
“He’s always thinking,” Rhonola said.
Two other inventions got past him, though. He rejected opportunities to invest in television and in rotary lawn mowers.
“Someone invited him to see a television (when sets were a new idea),” Rhonola said. “It had rabbit ears (as an antenna). ‘That will never go,’ he said.”
He turned down the lawn mower because he thought it would chop off too much grass.
While he was employed by Ohio Metal Products, Paul opened a street sweeping and steam cleaning business and he also cleaned grocery carts. Dennis was interested in making eyeglasses, so after Paul retired they went into business together, grinding lenses and fitting them into frames on machinery Paul kept in the basement.
“It sounds easy, but I stayed up many, many nights, grinding,” he said.
For relaxation, the father and son went fishing in Maine and Canada. They visited Rice Lake in Ontario every August for 46 years.
“Later on, we took my wife up there and it was cold,” Paul said. Laverne became ill and invalid. Paul cared for her for the last eight years of her life.
In 1995, he purchased his current home on Lake Loramie.
“He built the deck himself, when he was 83,” Rhonola said.
Paul is a 50-year, 32nd degree Mason and a was a charter member of the Vandalia American Legion. The first president he voted for was Franklin Roosevelt and he can remember having to shoo hogs out of the Miami River so he and his friends could swim in it. He has fond memories of his grandfather, who was born in 1834, and went with his granddaughter in Greenville recently to see the house in which he was born. The current owners presented him with a box of letters they’d found in a wall. The letters had been written to Paul’s sister in 1918, when Paul was 1.
“Paul has a caretaker who comes in when I’m not here. She’s 55 and he says she’s a nice ‘kid,’” Rhonola laughed.
She and Paul met when he, following the advice of a neighbor after Laverne’s death, visited the Sidney Senior Center.
“They said if I joined the Senior Center, they were having a dance. If I joined it would be $3 to get in. If not, $5. I’m frugal, so I joined,” Paul said. At the dance, he sat at a table and Rhonola and others joined him. They talked of Rhonola’s birthday, Sept. 22. Paul’s birthday is also Sept. 22. That was all the conversation opener he needed.
“I met her the following Sunday,” he said.
“We’ve been together 16 years and we’ve been married for nine,” Rhonola added. She has a son, Ted Jones, who will soon live in Denver. She had lost her first husband after 32 years of marriage.
“We’ve got to take care of each other,” Paul said.
“We’re doing all right. We’re making it,” his wife smiled. “We considered going to assisted living, but I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.”
The carrot juice must be working.
