If there's one thing Ben Serber strove for in life, it's having a good time.

"When you're no longer having fun, it's time to move on," he said. Serber's philosophy has served him well. This past spring, he shared his thoughts on his long life with 75 friends who came from near and far to celebrate his 90th birthday.

For 31 years, Ben Serber had fun working for Sears Roebuck & Co. "I was the director of internal communications and their creative director. I worked in the Sears Tower on the 26th floor at the company's headquarters in Chicago. Prior to that, I worked for them out of New York, where I handled all of their television and print advertising for 39 markets," Serber said.

True to form, when Serber was no longer enjoying his job at Sears, he decided to retire to Santa Fe and incorporated all that he knew into the Santa Fe business community.

He moved to Santa Fe in 1978, and a couple of years later opened his own ad agency, Serber Creative Services, where he provided local businesses with both marketing ideas and materials to enhance their companies. The one business that he devoted most of his time to was Susan K's Artwear, which his late wife, Susan Hunt, owned.

"We created a distinctive brand in print for her store that is still being copied by other retail businesses today," he said.

Serber also got involved with the Santa Fe Ad Club and served as the organization's second president, bringing together all of the creativity that the Santa Fe advertising community had to offer.

It was through connections in Chicago that eventually led him to his first job in Santa Fe. "Back then, the Gannett Corporation, which had been one of my accounts, owned The Santa Fe New Mexican. They knew that I was going to move here so they asked me to go work for the newspaper as their ad manager, which I did for two years," Serber recalled.

Serber was born in 1920 in New York in Greenwich Village. As a child, he lived in Washington Heights on Manhattan's Upper West Side and in Brooklyn. He has fond memories of playing in the street with the other kids in his neighborhood and participating in school sports. He graduated from George Washington High School in 1937. "One of my classmates was Henry Kissinger," he said.

Serber joined the Army in 1942, where he served as a sergeant in the Army Air Corps prior to being recommended for the Officers Candidate School. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Ordnance Corps. He served in the South Pacific until 1946 and was called back to duty in 1950 at the start of the Korean War.

Serber has been married three times; two of his wives have died and one marriage ended in divorce. He has two daughters from his first marriage, as well as two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Just about all of his family attended his 90th birthday party. His a special friend, Claire Hardin, who lives in Panama, also came to the party.

Now that he's officially retired, he likes to play golf when the occasion arises and also reads military action novels and goes to lunch with friends.

Through Serber's 50 years in marketing and his years doing community service with organizations like the Santa Fe County Lodgers Tax Advisory Board where he served as chairman for 24 years, he's still perplexed with the way things work here.

"To this day," he says, "the one thing that I can't understand is why people in Santa Fe don't return phone calls!"

Ana Pacheco's weekly tribute to our community elders appears every Sunday. She can be reached at 505-474-2800.