At 87 years of age, Bob Naifeh can look back on a life filled with a strong family, good education opportunities, service to his country, and success in his profession. Yes, it has been a good life, he says.

He enjoys reminiscing and can reel off the dates and places, hinting that he isn't telling all that he remembers about life in Norman, where he has lived since he was a child.

Naifeh's parents emigrated from Lebanon and settled near Tulsa. They became naturalized citizens in 1902. Home then was the oil boom town of Kiefer. "There were 17 saloons in the town, and it was a good place to move away from," Naifeh joked.

His father took a business opportunity in Tennessee, where Naifeh was born. He has claimed Oklahoma as his home since his widowed mother moved to Tulsa with her seven children in 1929. In 1931 she moved to Norman and her two oldest sons, Mitchell and William, opened the Naifeh Grocery, a main street fixture for many years. Goodno's Jewelry now occupies that site.

"The whole family worked at the store. I grew up on Main Street," Naifeh said, recalling a town of less than 10,000 when there were nine drugstores and nine groceries in the three blocks from the railroad tracks to Porter. "They all made a living," he said, adding a bit wistfully, "and now there is not a single one."

Those were the days when "everybody knew everybody. If you did anything wrong, your parents knew about it before you got home."

And home wasn't too far from that downtown strip of stores, as the town's boundaries of development were Robinson, the state hospital grounds, Lindsey and Flood. "Pavement ended at Flood."

Another recollection of the early days brings a smile to his lips. "I had an appendectomy in the American Legion Hospital. It was an eight bed hospital," he recalled of the facility run by two doctors. "The two nurses lived in the basement."

A highlight of each day at the hospital was the arrival of the owner of Gilt Edge Dairy. "He would deliver a pint of ice cream as a treat for every patient who could have it."

The youngest of the Naifeh siblings, he was in his third year at the University of Oklahoma when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He volunteered for the Air Force and was trained as a machine gun mechanic. Tapped for Officer Candidate School followed by the Air Force Intelligence School, he ended up as an intelligence officer attached to the 92nd bomber group.

"We were a B17 bomber group stationed in England," he said, They saw action in England, France, North Africa, Italy and Greece. "I went in as a private and came out as a captain."

The bomber group, which received honors for flying the 300th mission, holds annual reunions and he has enjoyed the continued relationships. One reunion was held in England where they gave $15,000 to restore a pipe organ in the church of a village near their air base.

"The little town consisted of a pub, a school, a filling station and an Anglican Church," he said.

The gift was a memorial to the men and women who didn't return from the war. Attendance at the reunions is "thinning," he says, and he had to miss the last reunion due to illness.

While he was able to return home after the war and resume his studies, his brother Alfred, who had graduated from OU Law School in 1940, died in the Pacific. Heroic actions by Alfred Naifeh resulted in the christening of the USS Naifeh, a destroyer that was active from 1944 until 1966. Naifeh attended the christening of the ship when his mother broke a bottle of champagne on the bow. "I am the only honorary crew member of the USS Naifeh," he said as he put on a cap bearing the ship's insignia.