Sam Seizert wears an Apple Watch, uses ChatGPT and has a fan page on Facebook. That wouldn’t be so unusual were it not for the fact that the World War II veteran is almost 100 and grew up with kerosene lamps and carried drinking water from a well as a child.
I met Sam earlier this week at his tidy Genoa Township condo off Grand River in Brighton, half expecting to be greeted by a feeble man. But as he approached the screen door, I was struck by how little nearly a century of life appeared to have slowed him.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said cheerfully, stepping outside to shake my hand.
A young woman named Zeida was picking cherry tomatoes beside the stoop. Sam introduced us. A native of Honduras, she and her husband, Jacob, are members of Community Bible Church, and they live in the basement of the condo while they build their own house in a nearby neighborhood.
“Our feeling is we own nothing, but God owns all,” said Sam’s wife, Mary Lou.
I caught Sam and Mary Lou at their home in the nick of time.
On Saturday, they set out for Branson, Mo., one of their favorite destinations, with Sam handling most of the driving. They return on Sept. 7, then leave 10 days later for a nearly month-long cruise that will take them to Alaska, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The long drive comes just days after Seizert played 18 holes of golf on Wednesday, something he does frequently.
At 99, Seizert — who turns 100 on Oct. 19 — is not slowing down.
What makes Sam’s story more extraordinary is that he is in rare company. By the end of September, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that only 40,000 veterans of the more than 16 million Americans who served during World War II will still be alive.
When I asked Seizert how he accounts for his long life, I expected him to mention diet or exercise. Instead, his answer came easily.
“I think my long life was a gift from God,” he said.
Seizert was born Oct. 19, 1926, in Adrian, where he grew up on a farm and performed chores before breakfast. Afterward, the family would read from the Bible and Sam’s parents would explain the passage to their four children.
“I will always thank God for my parents, who gave me a great foundation for my spiritual life,” he said.
He attended a one-room schoolhouse before going to Blissfield High School. His family was of meager means, and he and his three siblings – Elaine, Robert, and Garry – used an outhouse and carried drinking water from a well. Before electricity arrived, kerosene lamps lit the house.
Eventually, the family got a telephone and when Seizert wanted to call someone, he would turn a small hand crank that sent an electrical signal to the local switchboard, where an operator would answer and connect the call. Because several homes shared what was known as a “party line,” he could hear neighbors lifting their receivers to eavesdrop, a common practice at the time.
For news and entertainment, the family gathered around the radio and Seizert remembers listening to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, at a time when radio gave individual homes a window to the world.
Seizert, who was 6 when Roosevelt took office, says FDR is his favorite president, and he praised Roosevelt’s social and public works programs that helped millions of Americans survive the Great Depression.
“I saw people getting help from our great country when they had no work and food was short,” Seizert said. “Our great country stepped up and helped them to survive. There was a PWA (Public Works Administration) program to put people to work building dams and roads.”
Seizert remembers visiting Brighton as a junior high student for a church camp near School Lake. Downtown may have had only one traffic light then, he recalled.
“Today, we say a prayer before we get on Grand River,” he said.
Seizert was drafted out of 12th grade after marrying his high school sweetheart, Edna Hockin. The military placed him in the Army and sent him to Fort Knox, Ky., where he trained to operate tanks, tractor-trailers and other heavy equipment.
After his training, he traveled from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines aboard an old cargo ship converted to carry troops. For three days, the ship rose and plunged through a violent storm.
“I said, ‘Thank God I’m not in the Navy,’” he recalled.
Seizert spent about a year in the Philippines. He remembers one serious fight around Ipo Dam several months before Japan’s formal surrender. During his time there, he also entered caves carved into the mountains by Japanese soldiers. One held ammunition and another contained bodies. Some Japanese soldiers, he said, refused to believe the war was over and continued fighting.
As he described what he had seen, Seizert struggled.
“It’s difficult to talk about it,” he said. “I’ve seen some horrible things, and when I talk about it, I’ve had nightmares.”
The explosions inside the tank came without hearing protection, and Seizert believes they caused the severe hearing loss for which the VA now considers him 100% disabled.
“It was a very small price to pay for my freedom and your freedom,” he said.
I told Seizert that people who hear his story today will consider him a hero.
“I’m no hero,” he replied. “I’m no hero.”
Then he told me about the men he believes deserve that word.
His closest Army friend, Clarence, had stood beside him on his wedding day, trained with him at Fort Knox and traveled overseas with him. They were separated when the friend was sent to another island.
He never came home.
Another friend, Don Miller, stepped on a land mine and lived with disabling injuries for the rest of his life.
“These are the kind of men who should be receiving the honors,” Seizert said. “They gave their lives for that and came home crippled, paying a price for our freedom.”
After returning home, Seizert completed high school and continued his education with help from the government. He attended Adrian College for two years, then earned his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University.
He taught high school English and history for two years before feeling called to the ministry.
“I saw the direction our nation was going in,” he said. “What we fought for — morality. And so I went into the ministry to try to change one little bit of our world.”
He was asked to lead a small Michigan church before he had preached a sermon or taught a Sunday school class.
His first service seemed to go well – or so he thought.
At the end, the church treasurer stood near the door with the offering basket. Seizert thought that was a fine idea until the treasurer asked whether the new pastor wanted to be paid.
Seizert said he did; he had a family to support.
The treasurer told the young pastor that it would help if he remembered to take the offering next time.
While attending Garrett seminary, Seizert boarded a train in Durand at 3 a.m. each Monday, traveled to Chicago for classes and returned Friday. Edna taught school, cared for their children and supported him throughout his ministry.
Seizert served churches in Michigan and Florida, including 25 years at Englewood United Methodist Church. He helped raise money to save two Michigan retirement homes from bankruptcy and established an endowment for his church in Florida.
His final ministry position was serving seniors at Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brighton.
He eventually stepped away to care for Edna as Alzheimer’s disease gradually took away her ability to care for herself. Seizert slept in a chair beside her at the nursing home. They had been married nearly 70 years when she died in March 2014.
Mary Lou, who had also lost her husband to Alzheimer’s in 2014, met Seizert the following year through Cornerstone’s Primetimers senior program.
Mary Lou was discussing an upcoming Baltic cruise with her girlfriends when Seizert asked whether he could join the group.
“Sure, it’s a big ship,” she told him, a little flippantly.
Seizert said he fell in love with her immediately. Mary Lou, who had been happily married for 50 years, took longer.
They traveled together as friends for about a year and a half.
Then, in September 2016, something changed in Mary Lou.
“All of a sudden my feelings changed, and I thought, ‘What are these? Is this of you, God?’” she recalled. “So I prayed and asked God for signs, and He did a couple miraculous signs that convinced me that I should tell Sam I was in love with him.”
She did, and two days later, Seizert got down on one knee at the Brighton Mill Pond and proposed.
They married Oct. 14, 2016, during a party Mary Lou’s family had planned for Seizert’s 90th birthday.
Mary Lou’s son, a pastor, concluded the ceremony by announcing that the newlyweds could finally travel without chaperones.
“We’ve been on a honeymoon ever since,” said Mary Lou, who noted that they have visited 63 countries.
Wherever he goes, Seizert wears his World War II cap, attracting the attention of strangers who thank him, ask for a photograph or tell him about someone in their own family who served. One woman asked Mary Lou for permission to kiss her husband on the cheek.
The encounters became so frequent that Mary Lou created the Facebook fan group, “Sam Seizert with people requesting photos,” in which Sam poses with people from all walks of life.
An April 5 post in particular caught my eye: It shows a picture of Sam with a young man named Ferdinan from the Philippines. I couldn’t help but think it was a poignant, full-circle encounter more than eight decades after the Army sent Seizert there as a young soldier.
The upcoming cruise will take the couple to Japan, the country Seizert once fought against. During our conversation, he briefly wondered whether he should wear his World War II cap there, before deciding to wear it proudly.
“They’re good people,” he said. “They’re loving people, and there are good people, bad people all over the world.”
The vast majority of our interview took place over Zoom, which you can view here. Seizert and Mary Lou immediately agreed when I suggested continuing our conversation by video so others could hear them tell their stories firsthand.
On screen, Seizert and Mary Lou appeared in front of a Quilt of Valor that hung on the wall of their home office. The women who made it by hand “worked very hard,” Mary Lou said, and presented it to Sam a year or two earlier in recognition of his military service.
“I am honored to have that,” Seizert said. “I have used this blanket in a very special way.”
The scene itself captured the sweep of Seizert’s life. Here was a World War II veteran seated before a handmade tribute, telling his story through a technology that was once beyond the imagination of anyone of his era.
Seizert grew up walking farm fields behind horses. Today, he sees farmers working from air-conditioned cabs and he boards jets that ferry him around the world “like a magic carpet.”
“What a transition in time,” he said.
He and Mary Lou use ChatGPT to look up information. Seizert also frequently glances at his Apple Watch to track his steps, and averages anywhere from a half-mile to three miles each day.
“I wear a watch like Dick Tracy,” Seizert said. “I can get all the technology on here, and it is amazing to me the development of technology that surrounds me today that we take for granted.”
An optimist, Seizert marvels at how far technology has carried the world during his lifetime, even as he worries that society has lost its moral footing. He is troubled by the country’s political divisions, the damage caused by drugs and the human capacity for war. He and Mary Lou pray every morning for the nation’s leaders, regardless of party.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or Democrat,” he said. “I love my country.”
Before our Zoom interview ended, I asked Seizert whether he liked where the world was headed or whether it frightened him.
He answered as a man who has seen nearly a century of hardship, war, invention, love, loss and renewal.
“We are still working at loving one another in every nation,” he said. “Until we love one another and know that we are all brothers and sisters, we won’t have peace.”
