John Clement was born the same year that the Toledo Club built its posh downtown headquarters on 14th Street.

At age 99, he’s still an active member, frequenting the club three or four times a month.

“I’m so busy these days that I can hardly get through the day,” Mr. Clement said Friday during an interview at his Sylvania home.

A retired Toledo businessman, Mr. Clement turns 100 on Monday.

If there’s any such thing as a typical centenarian, he isn’t it. He tracks his daily exercise with a Fitbit and carries an iPhone.

“The number six,” he said. “I always get the latest one.”

Mr. Clement grew up in To-ledo and studied engineering at Cornell. When he finished his degree in 1938, he came home to work with his father at the Bock Laundry Machine Co.

He would later run the business with his twin brother, Carl Clement, and spent more than 30 years as the firm’s president, retiring in 1985.

“We had a good business,” he said. “It wasn’t quite like Libbey-Owens-Ford or Owens-Illinois, but it was a comfortable business for us.”

The Bock Laundry Machine Co. was founded in the early 1920s by W.E. Bock, a local inventor who developed a highly efficient machine that could quickly spin the water out of wet laundry. Mr. Clement’s father took over the business when Mr. Bock died in the early 1930s.

Mr. Clement said Friday that his father steered the business through the Great Depression, but war soon came and put things on temporary hiatus.

A ROTC member in college, Mr. Clement was called to active duty as a second lieutenant. He spent the war in Michigan, overseeing manufacturing plants that had been converted to produce war materials such as machine guns and artillery shells.

When he returned, he went back to Bock, where he’d spend his entire career.

Bock primarily sold its spinning machines to commercial laundries, coin laundries, hotels, car washes, and other businesses that washed a lot of linens. It also dabbled in other industries.

The company also for a spell made boats, something Mr. Clement said had been the dream of his twin brother, Carl.

“He wanted to start up making fiberglass boats, but his enthusiasm got so big we had to cut it out. It was breaking us in our other company,” he said. “It wasn’t too successful.”

Overall, though, things were good. The company went from about 25 employees when his father took over to 80 in 1959, when the brothers moved into a new plant.

However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of lawsuits had been filed, alleging the products weren’t safe. At the time, the company said many reported injuries happened because safety components had been removed.

“That was terrible,” he said. “I was going to depositions and trials for three or four years. It just wrecked the business, and it wrecked me too.”

The business eventually filed for bankruptcy protection. It reorganized and re-emerged, with Mr. Clement’s son eventually taking over. Later he joined with Glassline Corp. in Perrysburg.

After he retired in 1985, Mr. Clement thought he might embark on a second career. He got a real estate license but after selling one house, he decided it wasn’t for him.

These days he’s taken up carving wood figurines.

“They’re not genius looking, they're not very good. But nevertheless, I carve them,” he said. “Some guy told me if they can recognize what it is, why it’s probably all right.”

He’s also working on perfecting a fun, snappy answer for when people ask what’s kept him going for so long.

For the real answer?

“I think life is all what you make of it. If you’re happy and enjoy life, why not live a little longer?” he said.

Contact Tyrel Linkhorn at tlinkhorn@theblade.com or 419-724-6134 or on Twitter @BladeAutoWriter.

First Published June 27, 2015, 4:00 a.m.