Century Mark

On the eve of his 100th birthday, Emeritus Member Norman Green looks back on a rich life.

Norman Green was 17 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Following the surprise strike, teachers at his high school in Brooklyn, New York, assembled the students to address the impact and the United States’ intention to enter World War II.

It was a pivotal moment, Green tells INTOUCH, in a remarkable, century-spanning journey that he invites all Members to celebrate with him at the Club on November 25.

“Everything changed right then and there—our lives and mentality. The entire country was gearing up for war and it was full steam ahead. The only thing on the lips of all of us was where you wanted to go when you went to the service.”

By the end of 1942, Green wrote his local draft board and requested to be called up in the next round. He was sworn into the US Army in March 1943, at age 19.

After processing and training at bases in New Jersey, Florida and South Carolina, he was transferred to North Carolina, where he became a member of the 326th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 13th Airborne Division of the US Army Air Forces.

Green was sent with his division to France in February 1945 and stationed in the picturesque cathedral town of Sens, some 120 kilometers southeast of Paris.

It was there, during a visit to an electronics shop to purchase parts for his radio, that he met the shop’s owner Germaine Castets, whose husband Pierre had been a hero in the Resistance. Identified by a Vichy collaborator, Pierre had been captured and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Germaine, who was president of the town’s Resistance wives group, would listen to troop movements on the radio each night in hopes that her husband would be freed.
“She became a very close friend of mine,” Green explains. “I called her my mom. We were very dear to each other.”

Later, Green would be transferred to Melun, on the southeastern outskirts of Paris, to await deployment to Stuttgart, Germany, from where he was expected to be sent to the Eastern Front. But the end of the war in Europe, and some months later in the Pacific, meant that he would not fight, and civilian life was near. And back in Sens, Pierre had returned after Buchenwald was liberated.

After being honorably discharged, Green earned a degree from NYU. He followed a diverse career path, starting with the British Overseas Airways Corporation (now British Airways), and then on to social work and insurance claims, before he moved to Wyeth Pharmaceuticals in Philadelphia. The company sent him on his first overseas assignments. He traveled often to East Asia and lived three years in the Philippines. Later, he worked for Syntex Corporation in Hong Kong.

He saw Japan for the first time in 1961 and was astounded by the country’s dynamism. “Remember, this was just 16 years after the war, and they were still rebuilding,” he says. “The country was in constant metamorphosis, it seemed. The Shinkansen was being built then. There was energy everywhere, and a very positive outlook.”

Green later shifted to medical publishing, working with Excerpta Medica, which finally brought him to Japan permanently in 1980. He and his wife Vickie joined the Club upon arriving, and it quickly became a central part of their lives. He served as an active member of the House Committee and saw the Club change drastically—for the positive—over the years.

Compared with earlier days, he remarks, women now play a pivotal role in the Club’s governance and operation, and that it has become a particularly welcoming place for children. “It is now truly a family-oriented Club.”

Green still comes to the Club four to five times a week. It remains a focal point in his family’s life, he explains, both inside its walls and through the friends and relationships they’ve built with fellow Members—even those who have returned to their home countries.

Reflecting on how he’s managed to make it to such a ripe old age, he attributes his longevity in part to the excellent healthcare system in Japan—but also his diet. He recalls that he failed his first physical to join the air cadets because he was underweight. This led him to go on a heavy diet of bananas to meet the requirement. While he says that he’s never eaten a banana since, he chalks up some of his good health to regularly drinking orange juice and eating smoked salmon every day.

With his 100th birthday coming this December, Green says he could imagine no better place to mark the milestone than the Club, surrounded by his family and the friends he’s made over the decades.