"How did this all happen?" 100-year-old George Baehne asks himself as he reflects on his long and rich life, filled with duty and work, friendship and adventure, kindness and caring. "I just don't understand it. I have accomplished nothing. I've never tried to prove anything. I just tried to be better."
George William Baehne was born a century ago in 1925 in New York City, the son and only child of proud German immigrants. "I don't know where my father got the money, but in 1928, he sent me and my mother to Germany to spend a year with her parents, so my first recollections of life are there. The first language I spoke was German. When I came back from Germany, I walked around talking German to the kids. Somehow I managed. I learned English by osmosis—in school and from the kids on the street.
"We were terribly poor," he remembers. "We lived in the slums in Lower Manhattan's East Side. You couldn't get much lower. We lived a three-story walk-up, two apartments per floor. We had one room with a little kitchen, cold running water, no central heat, just a little pot stove. My room was in a corner, just bigger than a walk-in closet. I had to go down two flights of stairs to get to the single toilet shared by everyone on our floor. There was no bathtub or sink. I was a kid and that was life. I didn't have anything to compare it with."
When George was 12, his family moved to a small house in Towaco, NJ. "I wasn't a great student in school, average at sports. I liked history and geography. I had to pick things to do, so I took up touch typing which I've used all my life. I had no mentor, no prospects, no plans after high school. Two days after graduating in 1943, I was drafted in the Navy. I put down that I typed, so I became a radio man and right away they sent me to radio school. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
"I was 18 when I boarded the USS Custer," an attack transport carrying landing crafts and troops. "We made landings in the Pacific Islands, bringing Marines ashore in Saipan, Guam, Leyte Gulf, Luzon, Okinawa, Sasebo. And we buried the fallen at sea." The USS Custer and its crew received six battle stars for service in the most daring, most ferocious, most deadly battles of the Pacific campaign.
After being discharged as Radioman Second Class in 1946, George returned home to New Jersey. The skills and experience he gained in the Navy helped him get a job as a television installer and repairman, the "electronics expert of his time."
Confucius once said, "Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one." George's second life began when his best friend invited him to go skiing. "Skiing was brutal," George remembers of those early days when the sport was becoming popular. "My skis probably cost $6, my leather boots maybe $10."
One day, he told a fellow skier that when he got better, he'd like to go to Europe to ski. "George, don't be afraid that you're not capable," she said. "You are above most of the people there. When you do go, make sure you go to Kitzbuhel" in the Austrian Tyrol. It became his annual skiing destination for decades.
Looking back, George says he met just about all of his closest friends skiing, people he went on to socialize with and play golf as well—friendships that have lasted a lifetime. "One friend I haven't seen in over 30 years, and yet he still calls me every year. I mean, how does this happen?"
In the late 1940s, George's father had a stroke and was no longer able to work. His mother took a job as a live-in housekeeper with another family, and George lived with his father and went to work for a longtime family friend who had opened a small electronics company. "I started at the bottom and ended up being a semi-supervisor over about 30 women who were doing assembly work."
After George's father's sudden death at age 68 in 1957, George and his mother bought a house together in Clifton, NJ, near where George worked. "I never made the kind of money that I could have my own apartment and she could have her place," he says. As he had for his father, George continued to care for his mother until her death at age 83 in 1973.
When the electronics business owner sold the company and went into the burgeoning computer industry, George went with him. "I go in on the ground floor of computers—these room size things. I know nothing about computers, so I took a two-week course at Burroughs' office in New York and learned the rest on the job."
A few years later, someone offered to buy the business, but with one stipulation—George had to stay with the company. "The business was sold four more times after that," George explains, "each time with the same stipulation. I was dependable. I had all the knowledge that came with the business. I was the only steadfast part of it—always there when they needed me. I'm proud of that. So from then until the end of my working days, I was in the computer business in New Jersey."
By the early 1980s, George could see that the industry was changing from mainframes to "information management," with smaller, personal computers in the paperless "Office of Tomorrow." "I didn't see any future for myself," so he started thinking about where to retire.
Over the years, George and his friends had played golf in Pinehurst. "If you were a nice guy," one said to George, "when you retire, why don't you move to Pinehurst and get a place where we can golf?" "My other alternative was to go to Utah near my favorite ski area," George says, "but I said, no, I'm going to outgrow skiing before I outgrow golf."
In 1986, he bought a condo at the new Pinehurst Manor and moved here in 1987. "Hwy 15-501 was only two lanes. It was very quiet, no traffic jams." He also bought a little plot of land which allowed him to join the Pinehurst Country Club (PCC). He soon met the head pro at Mid Pines Golf Club "and we clicked right off the bat." George worked there for three years before becoming a ranger at PCC in 1990 where he continues to work today. "This is my 36th year 'riding the course.'"
George had been living in Pinehurst for a decade and was no longer skiing when he decided it was time to see the country. "I hadn't been back to the West Coast since WWII. I always liked railroads, so three years in a row in the late nineties, I traveled on Amtrak across the country, east to west, north to south."
In 2000, George entered what he calls his "Expedition Phase." "As a kid, geography and history were always my favorite subjects. On my list were the Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, New Zealand and Australia." Over the next twenty years, he visited them all and more on National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions.
His travels took him to the most remote locations on the planet—from the top of the world inside the Artic Circle to the bottom of the globe, navigating to Tasmania and Antarctica through the infamous Drake Passage; to the Orkney Islands in the North Sea and the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific. He explored Central America and the Mayan ruins; cruised up the Amazon and sailed down the Nile; and stood where Lewis and Clark first saw the Pacific Ocean. He traveled through the fjords in Norway and those in New Zealand; and rode a train across the Australian Outback.
Perhaps his most memorable experience was in 2003, when at the age of 78, he "tandem skydived from a perfectly good airplane from 10,000 feet above the Great Barrier Reef."
Today, at age 100, George stays closer to home. "I joined the FirstHealth Center for Health and Fitness when it opened in 1995. It's been part of my life for the past 31 years. It's important for me to keep moving, and I'm thankful for this facility that helps people like me stay active and engaged." And he continues to work several days a week as a ranger at the PCC.
Last year, George considered moving into a retirement community, but "something just hit me one morning. No!! I don't want to be with those old people. When people ask me, 'Why do you keep working?' I say, what am I going to do? Go home, sit here and wait to die? What's the alternative? That's why I keep working and being with younger people."
There's a saying, "There are two ways to be rich: one is to have a lot of money, the other is to have few needs." "I've been very fortunate for a guy without an education," George says. "I don't call myself illiterate. I'm smart, but I'm not book learned or anything like that. I never had a high paying job. Generally, I didn't deny myself anything. I didn't splurge. I think I was generous enough.
"Years ago, the Foundation of FirstHealth advertised an informational meeting on annuities. I had just received a bequest from a lady who worked for me and who I cared for until she passed away. There wasn't anything I needed. I don't have any relatives to pass on to, so I figured what better could I do than to take out an annuity with the Foundation and keep the money 'in the neighborhood.'"
"Around twenty years ago, my broker suggested I consolidate my various savings and put them into a life insurance annuity. Upon my death, the Foundation of FirstHealth would get the money. But I didn't have the decency to die before the annuity matured. So now I pass the monthly payment on as a contribution to FirstHealth. It's something that belongs to the community, so to speak. What else am I going to do with the money? At least give it to somebody who's doing good."
George's generous gift in support of the Foundation and FirstHealth's mission "to care for people" is his way of "being better."
