LAKEWOOD - Reuel Millar looked at his birthday cake and asked the guy lighting candles if there were 110.

"No. It'd be a little dangerous," said Jim White, Volunteers of America director, as he fumbled with a cigarette lighter, igniting a representative 11 candles. "Do you think you can blow them out?"

"I've got enough wind to blow those out," Millar said.

And he did - in one breath.

White and other members of Volunteers of America were honoring Millar, a Meals on Wheels client, at his home in Lakewood, where he has lived about 45 years.

He shares the home with his son, Dick, 78.

Millar was born in North Bend, Neb., in 1897. He started farming young.

He did well at his first try at sharecropping, too, growing wheat, corn, oats and barley.

"I busted out 160 acres," he said. "That first year, it yielded just 40 bushels per acre."

He sold his share for a buck a bushel. The landlord kept his in storage for three years and got 34 cents a bushel.

That business acumen helped Millar in a new career. He managed stores for Safeway in Denver, which transferred him to Montana. When the store closed, he worked at a copper smelter.

He later opened a business, the Town Car, a hangout for teenagers in Anaconda, Mont.

"It's not there anymore," Dick said.

It is just one more thing in Millar's life he has outlasted.

He was asked repeatedly by a TV type for his secret to long life.

"Clean living," he said.

Earlier, he said he had stayed away from tobacco and liquor.

"A couple of years ago I thought I was going to have a drink. But I didn't," he said, flashing his wicked sense of humor.

But don't buy into all the clean-living stuff.

"All the stuff they tell you not to eat, he ate," said his granddaughter, Nancy Nett, of Broomfield. "Gravies, sauces, high-cholesterol stuff . . . He still does. The only medication he takes is aspirin."

He has worked hard at hard work most of his life, he said.

"I practically did the work of two men about all of my life."

Asked when he retired, he said, "I never did."

He was a hard worker but not a hard man. He used to love to grow flowers in his backyard.

And, Nett said, when she was a little girl, she'd curl his hair and put hairpins in it.

"He'd just sit in the chair patiently," she said. "If I could have picked my grandfather, I would have picked him."

He has slowed considerably in the past six months. He did practically all the cooking in the 51 years he and his late wife, Bernice, were married.

His driver's license expired on his birthday.

Nett said she asked her grandfather about his longevity awhile back.

"God has a plan for me," he told her. "I don't know what that is. And I'm not leaving until I find out."

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271

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