Ary Mossiman begins his life story by asking me if I am aware that “during World War II there was a time when meat was rationed.” He goes on to tell the story of his first boss driving a hearse into Canada and smuggling back fresh meat.

Ary would make the deliveries to all the customers, riding through town on his old bicycle. The next summer, wanting to help in any way possible with the war effort, Ary lied about his age and went to work as a machinist producing instruments that kept ships aligned in a convoy.

His mother was born in Berlin, and his fathercame to this country from Brazil. Ary grew up in a part of Brooklyn where the language spoken by most people was German. At 18, he was drafted, and his knowledge of that language came to great use as he and his fellow troops pushed through the Ruhr Valley. The troops moved east, and the war ended as they meet with the Russians.

After the war, he used the GI Bill to earn a degree in electrical engineering. It was while he was a student and part-time file clerk at the Pratt Institute he landed his first teaching position. His math teacher’s wife was pregnant and went into labor. Ary laughs as he tells me, “The school had no choice! They found me a necktie and told me to go in and deliver the lecture to the night class! It was a lecture I had just heard that same morning!”

Eventually, he was given his own classes and spent the next 23 years teaching — 13 years at Pratt and, later, 10 years at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn as an adjunct professor of management. (“Adjunct” he tells me with that same twinkle in his eye, “is just a scholarly word for a part-time employee.”)

During his 82 years he has had so many amazing careers. He is a trained musician, plays Hawaiian slide guitar, string base, trombone, and the tuba. He spent a summer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard designing the hangar-deck fire water curtain for aircraft carriers — “one touch of a button brought thousands of gallons of water to a fire on the hangar deck.”

Ary created the first plan for the construction of Long Island Lighting’s Shoreham plant. His writing for Electrical World Magazine led to his becoming director of operations for the New York Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications.

Ary quips: “From delivery boy to director, I was a jack of all trades, a master of none.”

When his second wife, Gloria, died, her children inherited the family home in Connecticut. “That gave me two choices,” he tells me: “move into the street or move to Rhode Island, where I would be located within five minutes of my daughter, Bonnie.”

I count myself lucky to have met him during Lisa Starr’s poetry class at Bright View Commons in Wakefield, where he lives. And I can’t help but wonder what Ary’s next career will be.

Poet, perhaps?