By Rod Lee

A little over two weeks before Memorial Day, Raymond F. “Ray” Gero, a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War, was playing cribbage with some fellow elders at the Oxford Senior Center, and talking about a life that has been good to him.

  Mr. Gero is eighty-six years old. He lives on Homestead Ave. with his wife Joan. The Oxford Senior Center, which is operated by the Oxford Council on Aging and run by Laura Beth Wilson, provides him with companionship he enjoys, although this is not always apparent in the innocuous insults that are hurled back and forth between men and women friends over a deck of cards.

  “I enlisted at seventeen in December of 1953,” he said, after breaking away from the cribbage table for a more private conversation. “I was one of those crazy kids who was always asking ‘what are we going to do today?’ I underwent basic training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky (located on the Tennessee border, Fort Campbell is home to the 101st Airborne Division and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment). I wanted to see action. I served in Korea for fifteen months. I was very lucky. God was watching over me. Two days out of Pusan, I got word the war was ended. I landed in Fort Hood, Texas.”

He was discharged in 1955, his three-year tour of duty complete.

He still wears his “Army veteran” cap with pride.

 Mr. Gero admits to a little difficulty remembering certain facts from yesteryear, but he had no trouble recalling, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, that “I got two GEDs, one at the expense of the government.”

  He also has vivid recollections of his days in the meat-processing industry in the Worcester area, where he worked for a number of companies including, he says, “Gardner Beef, on Summer St.

  “I was out of work and had twenty-six dollars in my pocket. I went into this place and a guy said to me ‘do you want a job? Go in and grab a piece of meat and bring it out to a freight car.’ I did loading, delivery and then breaking down the beef before it went to the meat cutter. I worked for every meat house in Worcester. I became a boner, which paid more money,” he said, as he described the various parts of a side of beef he dealt with: the hind quarter, the rump, the loin.

An affable and approachable man—notwithstanding a crusty disposition—Mr. Gero still possesses the massive hands that one can envision having served him well in the vocation of his choice.

Cribbage and pitch are two of the pastimes he indulges in at the Oxford Senior Center. There are many to choose from, Ms. Wilson says, pointing to two lovely flower arrangements in her office that had been made in-house.

The “menu” for this particular Friday, she said, was “cribbage, lunch and a movie. We have two big bus trips coming up too. Both are sold out. We have a couple of different knitting groups, they make hats, scarves, lap throws, baby blankets, and they donate a lot of stuff.”

Like Mr. Gero, Ms. Wilson feels at home at the Oxford Senior Center, two years after taking on the post of director for the COA.

“I worked in the town clerk’s office for three years and was furloughed when Covid-19 hit and (Town Manager) Jen Callahan asked me to take this on. Little did I know that, two years later, I’d be here,” she says.

Like many other Senior Center buildings in South County and Central Massachusetts, Oxford’s looks from the outside as if it could use updating.

But her seniors are not complaining, Ms. Wilson says.

“Our seniors are happy. They don’t like change.”

    

Contact Rod Lee at [email protected] or 774-232-2999.