If a New Mexico doctor had had his way, Werner Fischer, 100, wouldn’t be celebrating his birthday today with a mouthful of teeth.
“And Daddy never has had a cavity,” said Alice Archer, a daughter who lives a stone’s throw from Fischer and his wife LuElla, 92, north of Le Roy.
His good teeth are just one of the remarkable things about Fischer. He’s up and about every day, has a keen interest in world events — he devours newspapers and seldom misses a news broadcast on his flat-screen TV — and likes few things better than regaling visitors with his life stories.
The story about his teeth goes back to his early teen years in Optimo, N.M., a railroad whistlestop 40 miles east of Santa Fe.
“I came down with rheumatism,” Fischer recalled, in his deliberate and thorough way. “I had pain and swelling in every joint. It hurt like the dickens.”
The local doctor proposed pulling his teeth on the assumption that they were the source of an infection.
Fischer would have nothing to do with the prescription. Soon thereafter, he left for Kansas on crutches where he and his parents, Carl and Bertha, rented a farm near Aliceville.
The move came in March 1928. The man who owned the farm, named Hancock, was taken back by his condition.
“That boy can’t be on crutches the rest of his life,” Hancock exclaimed, and recommended a chiropractor.
“He (the chiropractor) felt my back and said it wasn’t right, did some treatments and by August I had thrown the crutches away for good,” Fischer said.
In 1929, Fischer started high school at Westphalia.
A small but quick lad, he drew attention from the football coach.
“I played football — halfback because I was fast — the next three years and also ran track, where I won a lot of ribbons, mostly blue for first place,” he mused. “I didn’t play basketball because Dad needed help with livestock during the winter.”
He also missed out on football and track his senior year, by then too old at 21 to compete in high school athletics.
FISCHER was born at Nashville, a hamlet a few miles from Wichita.
He was two months early, weighing about four pounds and at first slept in a shoebox, Fischer recalled with a smile that showed his pearly whites.
By the time he was toddling about, the family moved to Valentine, Texas, near the Mexican border.
“It was rough country,” Fischer said.
He soon was old enough to notice rugged cowboys with pistols tucked in holsters and men who patrolled the border riding by the Fischer homestead several times a day.
“A friend asked Dad is he knew how to use a gun,” Fischer reminisced. “He said he didn’t and the friend told him he better hadn’t wear one then.”
The ranchers near Valentine rounded up cattle to check brands. One incident Fischer recalled had to do with a gunfight. A dispute arose over ownership that led to a rancher being shot, as well as his son when he came to help.
Whether the Old West atmosphere of Valentine was a catalyst, the Fischer family took off for Optima, N.M. in 1915. His father purchased railroad land that he worked for the next 13 years, raising corn and pinto beans.
Then came the move back to Kansas, at the behest of an older brother, Arthur, who had been working as a farm hand in Nebraska.
OUT OF high school, Fischer was ready to make his mark.
First, it was in the soil. He had done plenty of field work helping his father and tackled some rented ground not far from where his parents lived.
A young man in his 20s sequestered on the farm can have a little wanderlust.
He noticed an ad for an auto body and fender school in Kansas City. With motor vehicles becoming all the rage, he dashed off for K.C. with another brother, Lorenz, who also had had his fill of farming.
The adventure paid off with jobs for the two country kids. When World War II started they signed on as welders to build searchlight trailers and a little later airplane motors.
Fischer, still unattached, next took a chance with a hydrogen gas company in California with a friend who also wanted to see the West Coast. The job fizzled about as quickly as it started, but Fischer, adept and skillful, didn’t have any trouble catching on with Beech Aircraft and then, still on the move, went to an oil company to work in its laboratory.
One day the lab shook like the dickens. What he first thought was an earthquake turned out to be an explosion in the company’s refinery.
His parents happened to be visiting friends in California then, having made the journey there by train, and were ready to return to Kansas. Sounded good to Fischer. He herded them into this car and they headed east to open spaces and sunflowers.
BACK ON the farm, Fischer went to a church New Year’s Eve party in 1946 and noticed an attractive girl. He struck up a conversation and a little more than eight months later, he and LuElla were married on Aug. 17, 1947.
They had seven children.
He turned to construction and carpentry — seemed like anything he tried, Fischer mastered quickly — and over the next 40 years he worked on a good many buildings, from scratch to remodels to add-ons.
In Iola, Fischer was on the crew that did the first addition to Allen County Hospital and, with a wish-I-could look in his eye, said he’d be eager to help build the new Allen County Hospital.
“THE LORD has blessed you,” said daughter Alice, when Fishcer was asked what he thought contributed to him reaching triple digits.
“A good wife had a lot to do with it,” he said. “She’s been a good helper all these years.”
Grandson Chancy Fishcer, who lives north of Burlington, thought he knew the key to his grandfather’s longevity when the family gathered for a birthday celebration.
“Granddad lived so long because of grandma’s good cooking,” he said.
All seven children — Archer, Glen and Lyle Fischer, Mary Schmidt, Ronda Scott, Twila Theimer and Lynette Bollinger — were at the celebration, along with 15 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and a great-great-granddaughter.
His only health glitch in 100 years has been a slightly irregular heartbeat that prompted doctors to prescribe a pacemaker about 15 years ago. He has cataracts, but still is able to read the fine print of newspapers; no surgery is anticipated.
Heredity is on Fischer’s side. Several relatives have lived into their 90s, including brother Lorenz who died at 96.
He also gets plenty of rest, a luxury that eluded him for years when he arose at 4 to 4:30 every morning to do chores on the farm before going to his day job.
“I sleep until I want to get up now,” he said. “If someone tried to wake me at 4:30, they better watch out.”
