A large old house sits at the end of Plum Lane. Long-time neighbors believe it has been there at least a hundred years, maybe more. For as long as anyone can remember the same old fellow has lived there alone. No wife, no kids, no family. Lucius Ball seemed nice enough when others meet him out in public, but that’s a rare occurrence. Despite frequent guesses at its age, the 1907 Tudor and Gothic style residence had been custom designed by the Wing & Mahurin architectural firm and remains in pristine condition. The style and the low, wrought-iron fence around the perimeter did make it look a little like an old cemetery causing adults to avoid the place while local kids usually declared it a haunted mansion.

Some had noticed the wire aerials strung between several of the trees on the property with open wire feeders running from them back to the house. ‘Old Man Ball’ was apparently an amateur radio enthusiast though he never attended club meetings or related events in town. The general consensus, he was just some lonely old geezer, though those who had actually met him swear he didn’t look a day over sixty. If he owned an automobile no one had ever seen it. Bart Peterson, the neighborhood mailman, will tell you he delivers a monthly social security check to Lucius along with frequent colorful postcards — QSL cards verifying his many global radio contacts.

There was at least one person in town who knew a lot more about the life and times of the old man. Clint Ross was fifteen years old and an excellent student in his sophomore year at Mill Valley High School when he first met Lucius. Like his grandfather, Clint was a ham radio operator and had taken an interest in the house at the end of Plum Lane when he realized those wires must be aerials. Undaunted by rumors about the place being “haunted”, he bravely walked up to the door one day, rang the bell, and introduced himself as a fellow radio ham. The odd couple were instantly bonded by their shared hobby interest and quickly became friends.

The radio shack was an eclectic mix of antique and more modern radio equipment in a large room that contained built-in bookshelves on two of the walls. On another hung dozens of photos, mostly of old radio gear though there were also plenty of photos of operators, all in black and white. On the fourth wall was a large double-set of windows that looked out over the back of the property. In front of that window sat a large wooden desk that held several radios, Morse keys, a microphone, and an old manual typewriter. This was the main operating position and it incorporated all the equipment currently in use. Equally impressive was another room that held all the “spare” gear, a lot of it, of all vintages.

One afternoon while Lucius was busy working someone on the west coast, Clint explored the wall of photos. They looked very old, almost like they were taken in another era. Clint thought they looked like something out of his history books at school. Several included Lucius, or someone who looked an awful lot like the ‘Old Man’, perhaps his father or grandfather, he wondered. In one of them, it looked like Lucius standing in front of a sign that said, ‘1893 Chicago World’s Fair’.

Now the gears in Clint’s head began spinning as he attempted to work the math. That Exposition took place 58 years ago and the fellow in that photo looked to have been fifty or sixty. That means whoever it was had to have been born nearly so long ago it obviously couldn’t be Lucius. While trying to decide if that timing would have been right for his Dad, he was startled back to the future when his host asked, “what are you thinking so hard about Clint?”

For a moment he could only point at the photo with a puzzled look on his face. He took note that Lucius seemed to be remembering something as though it was a warm memory from just yesterday when he said, “that was the 1893 World’s Expo, it took place in Chicago, and boy, what a fair it was! I had a great time there, just a pity I didn’t have an iPhone in those days or I would have had a lot more photos to show you!” he joked. Clint was startled by the blatant admission that, as he had started to suspect, it was Lucius in the framed photograph.

“But how…?”, Clint stammered.

“Maybe we should sit down for a bit, and I’ll explain as much as I can about it”, Lucius offered.

“I was born in Saratoga Springs, New York in June of 1801”, he began, “at least that’s what I was told. I grew up in an orphanage and never knew my parents. I started my own life adventure when I ran away in 1817. I got a job in a print room setting type for a newspaper in Scranton. Life was good in Pennsylvania for a young man and I had about decided to make it my forever home and career. But then 1848 rolled around and gold was found in the hills of California. That changed everything. With no family, my job was my only connection to Scranton. I booked passage on a westbound train and didn’t look back. For awhile anyway. It was probably silly, but I was a 47 year-old man living in a world where the average life expectancy for Americans was 38 years. Still, stories about finding gilded nuggets was strong motivation”, Lucius explained.

“Twenty years panning for gold in California mountain streams paid off well enough, but it was about then I began to notice my contemporaries were all in the grave. Yet there I was, alive and feeling pretty good after nearly 70 years of life. You can’t pick when you die, so I stopped thinking about it. I would live until I didn’t and that was that. I spent twenty-years in California before moving back east. I collected a tidy-sum of gold money and began to think about retirement as I assumed I must be nearing the end of my unusually long life”.

“That was more than a 150 years ago and, here I am”.

The friendship with Lucius began in 1951. Clint had been born in 1936 and the two were celebrating his 90th birthday today. He sat up in his nursing home bed when Lucius walked in the door. The two shared a knowing glance then nibbled on a few celebration cookies left by the facility staff. Clint spoke first, “we’ve been friends for a long time, haven’t we? I can’t believe I was just a teen when we met and now I’ve got one foot in the grave while you don’t look a day over fifty”.

“Now you know why I never married or started a family. And why I have avoided making friends as best as I could. I end up burying them all”, Lucius replied, “and I don’t like anything about it. It’s just not fair…”

“Let’s not waste whatever time I have left”, Clint suggested, “tell me again about the time you met Hiram Maxim”.