COEUR d'ALENE - When he was 8 years old, Orville Benjamin met Henry Ford.

At 92, Orville married his second wife, Ann.

And at 101, which he turned Wednesday, Orville is still driving.

"They gave me a license until 2013," the spry, 90-year Coeur d'Alene resident said at his birthday party at the Lake City Center.

Not at night, anymore, but other than that Orville is comfortable and capable behind the wheel. He's got a 1967 Ford Mustang at home, though it's mostly for show. It's his Nissan he takes out on the road.

"I don't feel any older," Orville said as he celebrated the day with friends and family. "I feel about 60 years old."

But he has a history much longer. Born in North Dakota in 1911, when he moved to Coeur d'Alene in the early 1920s, he could count the number of cars on a couple of hands.

Literally.

"We used to sit on the street corner and count the cars," Orville said, mimicking a count. "Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge. Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge ... "

People have changed too in that time, he said. Locking your doors wasn't even something people considered back then.

But what's the secret to longevity?

It's simple, really.

"Live a normal life," said Orville, who worked for a box company out of high school and as a packaging supervisor at Kaiser Trentwood in Spokane. "I drank beer when I wanted to ... I had a girlfriend. I ate what I wanted. Hell, I lived a normal life."

Wife Ann says there's more to it than that. Honor your father and mother, the Bible teaches, and you'll go on to a long and prosperous life.

"That's what he's done," his bride of 9 years said.

Orville was married 47 years to his first wife Martha. He has one daughter, one step-daughter and "five or six" grandchildren. He's the last of 13 children from his immediate family ("I don't like it either. I want to go visit my brothers or something."), and when asked to estimate the number of fish the avid fisherman has caught over the years, he can't.

"Oh boy," he said, trying to calculate. "A lot."

He admitted that when he was the young age of 8, he didn't realize the significance of Ford's visit until his mom sat him down and explained it to him. Ford swung by his folks' place because the automotive giant and American pioneer was thinking about getting into farming, and wanted to pick Orville's dad's brain, as he managed a big farm back then.

"Afterward, my mother told me," he said of Ford's status. "What a nice man, he was."

But as far as the secrets of living more than a century, don't over-think it.

"May you live 100 more years," musician JJ Dion sang to Orville at the party. "May you drink 100 more beers ..."