For Bill Rowberry, living to celebrate your 100th birthday might very well come down to good genes. And also, drinking Coors Light beer.

Earlier this week, the longtime Overland Park resident and World War II Navy veteran officially passed the century mark and celebrated with multiple parties and dozens of birthday cards.

But Rowberry, whose full name is Wilber but prefers to go by Bill, is tight-lipped about wisdom for the next generations.

“I think I’ll let them go and make it up,” he said. “Let them figure it out.”

Rowberry grew up in Idaho, was drafted into World War II

An Idaho native, he grew up in a small city called Payette, near the border with Oregon. However, he was born in Twin Falls, on April 21, 1926, the same day as Queen Elizabeth II of England — to this day, he keeps a picture of the former monarch with whom he shares a birthday on display in his office.

As a kid, he played all of the sports offered to him and worked farming jobs on the side starting at age 8. But he was also a good student, graduating near the top of his class as the salutatorian. Rowberry also served as the student body president of his school.

When the U.S. joined World War II, Rowberry was only 15 years old and too young to enlist. He did try to join up before graduating high school but decided to wait until he finished school in 1944. Before that, at age 16, he joined a local citizens’ group that functioned similarly to the British Home Guard.

In the end, he was drafted shortly after graduation and chose to go into the U.S. Navy.

After months of training at a radio operator school in Indianapolis, followed by more training at Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois, Rowberry was sent to Annapolis, Maryland, to work at the largest radio station in the U.S. at the time. He stayed there through the end of the war, helping to transmit messages to naval ships in the Atlantic Ocean and across Europe.

Rowberry stayed in the U.S. Navy Reserve, but returned to Idaho for college, attending the University of Idaho to study business, followed by law school.

In 1952, he married his wife, Jeanene, with whom he was married for 70 years until her passing in 2021.

He was a government attorney, had cases at the U.S. Supreme Court

After law school, he worked briefly at a firm in Idaho before landing a job at the federal Atomic Energy Commission as an attorney.

That governmental agency eventually became the U.S. Department of Energy and brought him, Jeanene and their two young sons to the Kansas City area so he could work at what is now called the Kansas City National Security Campus.

Rowberry was a reluctant Kansas City transplant at first, but his family didn’t feel the same way.

“I just hated it when I got here, but my kids and my wife just loved it,” he recalls. “So, I was pretty well committed to Kansas City.”

They started out renting a place in Overland Park in 1965 before moving into a home in the Nall Hills area. In the mid-1980s, after their sons were off to college, they moved to the Nottingham Court neighborhood near 119th Street and U.S. Highway 69. He still lives there to this day.

And for many years, he loved the work he was doing.

“I liked my job, really liked it. A lot of guys get tired of their job, but I never did,” Rowberry said.

He thinks the variety helped. Rowberry’s work as an attorney touched on myriad issues from the environment to construction and even personnel issues.

Two of his cases ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court. He even got to sit at the council’s desk in the high court’s chamber and had lunch at the court building.

The government — which he helped represent as an attorney for the Department of Energy — won in both cases, though he remembers it all taking a long time to conclude.

“It’s quite a deal,” he said. “The two Supreme Court cases were very important to me.”

After retiring, Rowberry traveled, kept busy with hobbies and family

Rowberry officially retired in 1989, though he continued to do some work for the Department of Energy and the federal government as a contractor for a few more years as some litigation projects wrapped up.

He also did some work in the private sector but has spent the better part of the last 35 or so years mostly retired. However, he’s kept himself busy.

Rowberry and Jeanene did a fair amount of traveling, seeing Russia, China and Argentina. They also traveled down the Rhine River in western Europe a few times.

To this day, he still likes to travel to visit his sons, who both live in New Mexico; one became a doctor and the other a dentist. His four grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and 97-year-old sister all live in other states, too.

Rowberry has also kept fairly active over the years, playing tennis and then switching to pickleball later in life. He’s also an avid trout fisherman, though he prefers the fishing in Idaho to Kansas City.

He’s also a pretty social guy, said Gregory Betzen, his former coworker and longtime friend.

“With Bill, you can talk about pretty much anything, sports, business, politics; it’s always pleasant,” he said.

All that socializing has probably kept Rowberry young at heart, Betzen thinks. It’s something Betzen, who’s 74 and a self-described introvert, thinks he could do a better job of in his own life.

“He has a positive outlook, and it just kind of shows, with pretty much everything he does,” Betzen added. “I think [it’s] partly why he reached 100.”

Life has changed a lot in the past 100 years

Over the course of his life, Rowberry says things have changed in a lot of ways. However, there are some specific areas where he’s spotted the most evolution. The first is in the medical field.

“People used to die from things that now they treat in the hospital, and you walk out, it’s just amazing,” he said. “You just can’t imagine how much the medical has changed, and what they can do now.”

Technology has changed a lot too in his lifetime.

“That’s left me behind; I can’t keep up,” he said with a chuckle.

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