Good genes are what it takes to live to 100 according to Anglesea’s Jack Tucker, who celebrated the milestone last week.
Celebrations started with cake and three rounds of bowling as family, friends, Calvary Cordelia Grove staff and fellow residents held a birthday party for the Royal Australian Navy veteran on 31 October.
Mr Tucker said the milestone birthday felt “no different from any other day” and that he believed good genes were the key to living a long life, as his mother lived to 101.
“It has been a good day, and I also won the bowling, which is great as I like to win, but I like to win playing fair,” he said.
“I once asked my doctor when I was probably about 97 or 98, and he was doing my annual medical assessment, whether I was going to live to 100, and he said, ‘if you’ve got the right genes, you will’, so I guess I have the right genes.”
Mr Tucker joined the Navy when he was 18 in 1944 and served two years during WWII, where he became a coder.
“I was a coder, which meant I was putting outgoing signals into code to be sent off and decoding incoming signals that were in code,” he said.
“I met two of the nicest fellas that I spent pretty well most of my waking hours with because I was on what was called watch-keeping duties.
“We were the ones in the signal distributing office with signals coming in and going out…and we got along extremely well, and we kept in touch until they both passed away a couple of years ago.”
