104-year-old Hagerstown man says, 'The secret to success is doing what you enjoy doing'
Ben Chlebnikow never imagined he would live to be more than a century old. In fact, there was a time when the 104-year-old Army veteran, who celebrated his birthday at the Creekside Village in Hagerstown on Aug. 17, questioned whether he would live past the age of 25.
Seventy-seven years later, tears well in his eyes when he recounts the moment he and his fellow soldiers returned to U.S. soil having survived enemy artillery fire in Europe at the tail end of World War II and witnessed the aftermath of the Holocaust.
“We kneeled down and kissed the soil. That’s true. We did,” he said. “We couldn’t believe it was over. Many times, I feared I’d never make it back to the United States, but I did.”
Recollections of the end of WWII
Chlebnikow’s year-long tour as a technician with the 177th Field Artillery Battalion was fraught with peril from the start. He vividly remembers boarding a “filthy” British ship in Ireland that was part of a convoy of 50 vessels taking Allied servicemen across the English Channel into France.
“The German submarines, they didn’t know where they were,” he said. “We’re sitting in the middle of the English Channel, the propeller broke and we’re sitting there like dead ducks. They could have picked us off like (we were) sitting on a fence, but God was with us.”
He arrived in the European theater on May 8, 1945, the day German forces surrendered, but he said his unit encountered pockets of Nazi resistance on the way from Austria to Munich.
“We had to set the (artillery) guns up. I guess there was a couple of pockets they missed or something. I was in the 177th Field Artillery, and we had three guns, and I was in Company A, and I was assigned for hooking up the telephone wires for the men on the frontline,” he said. “The guy on the frontline would tell them where the shells were landing, and of course the Germans were shooting back at us. And like I say, if you can hear them, you’re OK. It’s the bombs coming over you you don’t hear that will kill you.
"We set up the guns and fired I don’t know how many rounds. What we were shooting at, you don’t know in the field artillery. When we strung the wires up, you could hear them shooting at us, and thank God I came back safe and sound.”
There were many other times when Chlebnikow felt threatened by the possibility of continued Nazi resistance, such as when his unit ordered German soldiers in Munich to surrender their weapons for destruction, but he did not end up confronting serious problems the rest of the time he served in the Army’s postwar operations.
“We were the victors, and they listened to us,” he recalled. “We had a little trouble now and then, but not much.”
In addition to fearing for his own life, Chlebnikow, himself the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, bore witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.
“The ovens were still warm when I went through the Dachau Prison,” he recounted. “It smelled like fried Crisco. I couldn’t eat fried eggs when I came home for months, a year or more. I kept thinking of that smell. I don’t know how people lived there. … Dachau was the concentration camp where they burned all the people.”
Growing up in the Great Depression
Before the war, Chlebnikow’s life in his hometown, Patterson, N.J., wasn’t especially easy. His mother died when he was 7 years old, leaving his older sister with the primary responsibility of raising him. His father lost the hardware store he owned during the Great Depression, causing his family to subsequently lose their home.
Chlebnikow recalls one or two winters during the Depression when his family ran out of coal to heat their home and had to resort to burning their furniture.
“It was very cold,” he said. “We burned all the chairs in the house; we burned the dining room table; we burned the piano. Anything that had wood on it, we burned in the stove in the basement to stay warm.”
He remembers earning one cent for every newspaper he sold and a nickel for every grocery delivery he completed as a child. During his sophomore and junior years of high school, he worked on a farm milking cows before and after school every day.
Sometime after graduating from East Side High School in Patterson, he saw a newspaper ad from the Curtiss-Wright airplane manufacturing company offering to hire anyone who could learn to use certain engineering tools. He took classes at a local trade school to get up to speed, got hired by the company and started on a career path that would see him become an accomplished machinist and mechanical engineer in the manufacturing field.
His career was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army in April 1944, a few months after he married his first wife.
Mack Trucks job leads to Hagerstown
When he returned from the war, he settled into family and work life. He and his wife had three sons. He was laid off from his job with Curtiss-Wright in 1960, but soon started working for Mack Trucks where he said he was responsible for several inventions that improved manufacturing. He also was a computer pioneer of sorts.
“In 1980, I told the boss we had 85 engineers. I said the day’s coming when the computer will take over and you wouldn’t need us,” he said. “That department’s all done on computers (now). I saw that coming, and I went to Hagerstown Community College, and I took some courses on the computer.”
It was his job with Mack Trucks that brought Chlemnikow to Hagerstown when the company moved part of its manufacturing operations here in the early 1960s. He built a house across the street from Pangborn Elementary School. His wife died a few years later, but he soon remarried and then adopted his second wife’s two boys.
He said raising five boys who each needed something to drive as teenagers led to his decades-long hobby working on Volkswagen cars, which he cited as a factor contributing to his longevity.
“That was my therapy every night. I knew that car inside out,” he said. “I rebuilt over 100 engines, took them apart. I knew every washer, nut, bolt. I had all the wrenches; I had all the tools; I had all the books.” He added that his sons only helped with the repairs by standing by to hand him wrenches.
His granddaughter, Hannah Chlebnikow, said he at one point held seven Volkswagens in his name and “the Volkswagen dealership would call him to answer questions they didn’t know.”
Family meals a treat
In addition to his mechanical interests, Ben Chlebnikow was very involved with his synagogue, the Congregation B’nai Abraham in Hagerstown. For 20 years, he oversaw maintenance for its two buildings and assisted with the upkeep of the cemetery. He said he is particularly proud of installing new computerized natural gas boilers, which he says reduced the congregation’s annual heating bill by about a third.
He retired from Mack Trucks in 1987, then formed his own small engineering company so he could continue working as a consultant for Mack on special projects until he retired for good in 1994.
Hannah Chlebnikow said that in addition to his five sons, he has seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, in all of whom he takes an active interest.
“We always had family gatherings, and he was always there,” she recalled of her childhood. “If he can sit around a table and be in person with his family eating a meal, that is what he did, and he always treated us to it. If we went out to dinner, he was picking up the tab. He would not let you do it.”
She remembers him being present for many of her big moments at sporting and college events, which was especially important to her because her father, Ben Chlebnikow’s oldest son, died from cancer at the age of 64. She also noted that her grandfather paid for her and all his of grandchildren to go to college.
“He’s very generous. I don’t even know a way to describe just how amazing and thoughtful he is,” she said.
A force to be reckoned with at Creekside
Ben Chlebnikow’s second wife died in 1992, but he started dating again, and still does, though he was quick to note he has been dating just one woman that entire time.
At the age of 99, he was featured in Hagerstown Magazine for his impressive workout routine. But within a year of that article, he lost his left leg due to circulation problems, and has been wheelchair bound since.
He did continue his swimming routine after his amputation but had to stop when Creekside closed its pool for budget reasons — a development with which he was none too pleased.
Hannah Chlebnikow said her grandfather keeps himself busy these days by being active in the politics of the care home. Through persistent demands, he arranged for a bus to take residents to the local library once a month, got the rugs cleaned on a more frequent basis and secured snack bowls for the common areas. He agreed with his granddaughter that he’s a force to be reckoned with.
“When I go to a meeting, you know I’m there,” he said.
Since returning from his war service, he’s never made time for putting up with the things in life he didn’t enjoy.
“The secret to success is doing what you enjoy doing. If you don’t enjoy it, get out, do what you want to do,” he said, adding, “I guess the good Lord will take me when He wants me.”
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Hagerstown WWII veteran Ben Chlebnikow turns 104
