Aside from his baseball hat displaying the words “It took me 101 years to look this good,” Floyd Severance hides his age well.

The centenarian alternates his days between playing golf at Duston Country Club in Hopkinton, shooting pool at the Concord VFW, spending time with family and friends, or painting – a hobby he picked up in the last decade.

“I feel, in a sense, that I am part of history,” he said, sitting in a blue velvet armchair in his Concord living room.

A nearly-finished painting of a moose in a river rested on an easel in the middle of the room. Framed photos, some in black and white, lined most of the walls, with dozens of faces smiling back at Severance – namely his seven kids, 15 grandchildren, 28 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. In the center of one shelf sat a large frame of him and his late wife, Judy, on their wedding day in February 1947.

In just over a century, Severance has seen 17 presidencies. He’s witnessed the advent of color television, microwaves, credit cards, computers, cellphones, the internet….the list goes on.

“From ‘29 on, a lot of the stuff that took place, I remember,” he said. “Like Lindbergh going to Paris….I remember Amelia Earhart. I remember when she was missing….I remember Dillinger, the gangster there. And his girlfriend.”

He recalls the milkman driving around in a horse-drawn carriage with a box in the back to keep the bottles from rattling around. He can picture signs for the National Industrial Recovery Act hanging in public spaces during the Great Depression. And he can still hear President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice on the radio announcing that the U.S. had joined World War II.

The war initially broke out during Severance’s teenage years while he was attending high school at Pembroke Academy and working on a local farm.

“I’m a country boy, per se. And proud of it,” he said.

In the winter of his senior year, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Turning 18 in April 1942, Severance got classified in the draft as 1-A, or “eligible for military service.”

“It was just a matter of once I graduated from high school, that’s when Uncle Sam called in,” he said. “And so I went in.”

He was designated as a carpenter and joined the combat engineers, with formal induction into the military on March 1, 1943.

“I laughed and said, ‘I don’t think I could even pound a nail,’ ” Severance said.

Serving his country during the largest global conflict in history, he became a machine gunner attached to different units throughout the war.

“We saw action,” he said. “I was in the Ardennes. I was in Central Europe. I was in Northern France. I was in Normandy, and I was in Rhineland. That was your five major battles, and I was in all of them.”

He earned five Bronze Stars for fighting in these places. The stars can still be seen on his uniform today.

“The war ended. But Japan, it wasn’t done yet,” he said. “So they said, ‘What are we going to do with these guys?’ Some, they said, ‘Well, we’ll do a point system. The ones that have the most points go home. We’ll discharge them. The others, they’ll have to stay and go keep battling in a different location.’”

The stars correlated to points – and Severance had enough to go home. He arrived back in New Hampshire on October 25, 1945. Severance recalls walking down Main Street in Suncook and seeing no other men his age. Many hadn’t been discharged yet or wouldn’t be coming home at all.

“That was the good thing about the points that I got,” he said. “Earning those points is another story.”

He lost countless friends and fellow soldiers. Too many to talk about, he said. When the subject of those who didn’t make it back from Europe came up in conversation, his voice grew quiet. His gaze dropped. He shook his head and said he doesn’t like thinking about his wartime experiences.

“They say everything is fair in love and war,” he said. “Well, war, it’s stuff that you do – some of the stuff for me was hard to get over, to adjust, to forgive yourself.”

Settling back into civilian life, he found it difficult to leave the battlefield behind.

“Technically, it’s a matter of survival, and you do what you have to do to survive,” he said. “I was on a machine gun, and you’re not doing anything wrong. What you do is legal. But just think, I was only 18 years old, to be put in this situation like that.”

Meeting Judith Girard changed everything for him.

Growing up in a small town, everyone knew each other, he said. But he’d never seen her until he went bowling with his friends after he returned from war.

“She was with a group of girls, and I was with a group of fellows,” he said. “And the one that wasn’t bowling had to set the pins. So I was bowling in the next alley, and I saw this gal going up and down and up and down.”

Severance was captivated by Girard’s black hair and brown eyes and wanted to get to know her better. They didn’t get to talk much, but their paths kept crossing. One day, he drove down the street where she lived and she happened to be outside. He slowed his car – hard-earned with his farming wages – and struck up a conversation.

“So I said, ‘I’m going down to Whitney’s to get a chocolate ice cream soda,” he said with a wistful look on his face. “She says, ‘That’s where I’m going.’ So she got in the car.”

From that day on, they began going steady. The only conflict they experienced while dating came down to religion. He was Protestant. She was Catholic. They once broke up because he didn’t want to upset her family by not being a Catholic, but they ultimately realized neither one could imagine being with anybody else.

They married in a blizzard on February 8, 1947 and had intended to go to New York but only got as far as Boston because of the snow. Severance described his wife, who passed away in 2015 after 68 years of marriage, as “the greatest woman God ever created and threw away the mold.”

Judy’s father was a contractor, so Severance joined his team as a finish carpenter and even ended up building his own home on School Street in Allenstown. He also created much of his own furniture, some of which remains in his Concord house, which Severance referred to jokingly as his “bachelor pad.”

Later, he became a letter carrier for the Suncook Post Office.

He and Judy shared nearly seven decades of life together before her passing. He still wears his wedding band and runs his fingers over it whenever he talks about her.

Severance remains active in the Concord VFW. He participated in the Hooksett Memorial Day Parade as the Grand Marshal, riding down the street in a red Jeep while wearing his uniform, which still fits him even after all these years.

“I feel thankful to the veterans, even though I was one, because we all depended on each other,” he said.

Often, he’s too busy with his social calendar to think of his age, but sometimes he finds himself looking at a world drastically different than the one he entered in 1924. His residence carries remnants of the past, including a book of Washington Post front pages from his birthday each year for 100 years. People no longer attend one-room schoolhouses like the one on Pembroke Hill where he completed seventh and eighth grade. Milkmen with horse-drawn carts have long since faded into the past.

“We’d be in a conversation, and I’d bring up some subject, and Judy used to say to me, ‘Floyd, they weren’t even born.’ I’d say, ‘Oh, geez, I forget’” he said with a laugh.

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@cmonitor.com