Life’s no joke for 100-year-old Rotarian on Hilton Head

What did the tie say to the hat?

“You go on ahead. I’ll just hang around.”

Norm Reeves told me that joke as we ate lunch Thursday at the Hilton Head Island Rotary Club meeting.

The whole program was about Norm. It was a celebration of his 100th birthday coming up May 28. And it was a celebration of his 71 years of 100 percent attendance at weekly Rotary Club meetings, the last 24 years on Hilton Head.

Corny jokes are a big part of Norm’s life. For 15 years, Norm has been telling awful jokes every Friday at an old-folks home. He prepares 12 jokes, cataloging them week after week in little notebooks and refusing to tell the same joke twice.

What did one flea say to the other, Norm asks as Rotarians embarrass him with attention.

“Shall we walk, or shall we take a dog?”

Now on Friday afternoons, Norm performs for the day care program at Memory Matters, a nonprofit that helps families cope with Alzheimer’s and all forms of dementia. That’s 12 more jokes — 12 different jokes — that he must find, to total 24 jokes for each of the 40 Fridays per year that he performs.

Norm does this knowing full well his audience will rarely react and certainly wouldn’t remember a repeated joke. He says he is really talking to the musicians who are part of the weekly visits that began with the Island Chaplain.

The musicians presented him at the Rotary meeting with “The Silver Tongue Award, for a century of wit, wisdom and community service.”

A resolution from the mayor was read, and the club gave $4,936 in his name to the Rotary Foundation, which was also born 100 years ago with a donation of $26.50.

Norm was born during a great naval battle of World War I and served his country in World War II as an air base engineer.

His father, also a Rotarian, started a construction company near Philadelphia 98 years ago. Norm ran it after getting a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Now the third and fourth generations are running it, still building churches, private schools and universities, senior-living communities and health care facilities. It was once mostly churches — more than 300 of them — but now it is mostly senior-living facilities, Norm said.

Pillars of life

Norm and Maude Reeves retired to Hilton Head 24 years ago. The man once known as “Maude’s husband” lost his sweetheart 15 years ago. They had four girls and a boy, and lost a daughter to Lou Gehrig’s disease. About 25 family members will be here this weekend to celebrate Norm’s birthday.

Norm’s son Rob presented his father’s life story, including the time in 1927 that he had double pneumonia, mumps and whooping cough at the same time. In high school, Norm was class president, played basketball and ran track.

But the pillars of his life became family, church and Rotary.

Rotarian Marc Stuckart’s roasted Norm, showing a photograph of him using the Rotary Four-Way Test to negotiate the final World War II surrender. He said Norm has attended 3,500 Rotary meetings, while Cal Ripken Jr. set a record with a mere 2,632 consecutive baseball games.

“Norm is the Iron Man of Rotary,” Stuckart said.

Norm whispers that he got medical excuses for absences during three surgeries.

‘God is love’

At First Presbyterian Church, Norm has been an elder and for 17 years taught an adult Sunday School class.

The Rotarians asked me to make a few remarks on Norm. I told them that I, too, teach an adult Sunday School class at his church. I tell my class they’ll have to go down to the hall to Norm’s class, now taught by attorney Otto Ferrene, to understand tricky theology. But Otto told me no matter where they turn in Scripture, Norm gives the same interpretation: God is love, we are to love God, and we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.

When they finally gave the microphone to Norm, he said things that only the 100-year-old member can get away with. “It’s not a luncheon club,” he said. “It’s a service club. Unless you want to serve, I say get out of the club.”

He told me that long life was not up to him. He’s still a little sore that they made him quit driving three months ago. But he said, “The best attitude a person can have is gratitude.”

And he asked if I knew what you call a sleep-walking nun.

“A roaming Catholic.”

This story was originally published May 19, 2016 at 4:52 PM with the headline "Life’s no joke for 100-year-old Rotarian on Hilton Head."