Paul Gibfried wanted the person on the phone to know he wasn’t born yesterday. What did I want? “This is a nursing home,” he said, not rudely, and added that you have to watch these days.

Indeed. This is no longer 1924, the year Gibfried was born, which makes him 100-plus years old.

He talked about being the young guy, rather than the old one. Back when he was 18 and newly a Navy man, Gibfried, a native of Illinois, was assigned to a unit of mostly 30- or 40-year-olds. He’d ask questions and they’d say, “Who is this kid?” he recalled recently.

Hardly a kid now, Gibfried celebrated his own centennial on Sept. 8.

He’s surprised by it, too. “I never expected to be 76,” Gibfried said, referring to the turn of the millennium. “I expected by then to have a jumpsuit and rockets and flying automobiles.”

The kid who asked a lot of questions ended up having a lot of answers. He became a master sergeant and had a hand in some of the seminal moments of World War II.

One of his first days in the Navy would be a different sort of victory: He met a woman who would be in his same unit and would end up being his wife. Dorothy’s portrait occupies a 5-by-7 frame on a side table in his bedroom at Moorings Place, where he has lived since 2011.

Paul outlived Dotty. She died in 1999. Dotty was in the WAVES, or Women’s Naval Reserve, as a communications technician. After working together for two years, they had to ask permission from the Navy to be married. Gibfried smiled at the thought. “I told her when we got married, ‘We won’t be very wealthy, but we’ll have an adventure.’” Gibfried also outlived his girlfriend of 25 years, Isabel, who would have been 100 in September, as well. They had planned on celebrating that milestone together, but she died in April.

He showed pictures of a cruise with Isabel’s family—one of several. He seems to have lived several lifetimes. None of them, however, included higher education.

“I didn’t get a chance to go to college,” Gibfried said. “Then when IBM got in trouble, they looked around for some help. Friends insisted I answer an ad for scientists to build the first computers.” Out of 60 test takers, he said, he ranked third. “That’s when I started working with engineers” who were much older than he.

He left IBM in January 1980 after 25 years with the company. Then he got to do what he wanted to do all along, he said, and that was to be a cowboy. He bought a farm and had a herd of cattle for 12 years.

Meanwhile, he started coming to Naples as a snowbird in 1987 with Dotty. In fact, Dotty introduced Paul to Isabel at the condo in which they eventually lived.

“Isabel McDuffie was her name. She was wonderful at birds, at fish, at shells. She knew every shell,” Gibfried said.

Talking to Gibfried is a continual surprise at the places he’s been and the people he’s met. It’s a walk through not only history but also geography: His computer skills took him to Russia on behalf of the State Department; to South Africa, where he was nearly charged by a bull elephant and met with guerillas with AK47s; to Washington, D.C., and to meet Franklin Roosevelt three times; to London, where he lived in Chelsea and attended a reception for the queen; to Bentonville, Arkansas, where “Sam Walton was my student” in setting up his early computer operation. “Sam used to meet me in his old pickup,” Gibfried recalled. He also met President Truman, who “was kind of a crabby guy,” he said.

Gibfried is proud of earning a citation for helping solve a problem for the Bureau of Naval Aviation. The Navy was losing too many pilots—they were getting careless after a certain number of missions. Gibfried worked with psychologists and psychiatrists to develop a system to manage the personnel and cut down on losses.

That was part of his job as operating manager of the data center for the Navy: He kept track of the “assets of the Navy,” he said. In such a capacity he had a hand in the D-Day invasion.

According to World War II oral history archives, to which Gibfried contributed: In May 1944, Gibfried was asked to put together a report while working in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and take it to the Pentagon. It was a top-secret report. He was brought to a room and presented to several high-ranking officers. Two days after he made his report, D-Day occurred.

That was a lifetime ago. Today, his advice is: “Work hard, do the best you can, and you’ll survive and do well. Be trustworthy and do a good job. Life will come to you.”