He sits there in his chair, no whining. As he talks, his hands shake gently. A sign of his years. But his face wears a smile. And he leans in to hear the laughter around him when he talks about his late wife of 60 years.

“I still talk to her,” he says, a gentle grin breaking in his eyes. “But I can’t hear her talking back.”

Just as you think tears are going to well in your eyes — ones too big to blink back — he turns his head and shows off the hearing aide in his ear and then he lets out a little laugh. Part joke, part serious. But his trick worked.

The sad moment has faded.

Then the rest of him comes into view and it is clear what he is doing here. Eighty-five-year-old Joe Pridgen is giving his blood — adding another pint to the nearly 60 gallons of life-giving liquid he has donated his life.

On this day, Pridgen is sitting in a chair at the AnMed Health Blood Center with a needle in one arm and a hose running from it to a piece of equipment sitting next to him. And he remembers the first time he gave blood.

Things were different then.

“My bride of a year, her uncle needed blood,” Pridgen recalls. “They asked me if I could give me some. I said, ‘Sure.’ It was a direct transfusion from me to him. There was no intervention of other technology. From then on, I would donate wherever I was.”

This Honea Path man toured in World War II as a cook and an infantryman in the U.S. Army and went on to serve in Vietnam as a chaplain for the U.S. Air Force. During the Vietnam War, he donated to the American Red Cross when he could and also donated blood at hospitals in England while he was in the military.

Since the mid-1980s, Pridgen has been coming here to AnMed. He has been here before there was a Blood Center, before the staff had a list of regular donors and all without the fears that most people have about needles and the sight of blood.

“He’s been giving since the Korean War,” his youngest daughter, Mary LaVerne, says.

And the staff here love him.

“He always has hugs for us,” says AnMed Blood Center Coordinator Emily Southerland. “How to describe him? Love is the biggest word for me. He’s just about any positive adjective you can think of. He’s like the grandfather to all the donors — the root of this place.”

When his wife, Roselyn, was alive, he always let the staff know when their wedding anniversary was coming up, Southerland says. “He would always talk about where he was going to take her,” she says.

Joyce Edwards, the AnMed Blood Services Manager, says Pridgen comes in singing sometimes and will walk out singing.

And as proof of both their feelings toward Pridgen and of his character, the staff at the center attended Roselyn’s funeral.

“They came to mama’s funeral,” Pridgen’s daughter says. “And they didn’t really know her. But they know daddy.”

So why does this chaplain and man who pastured Trinity United Methodist Church in Honea Path still come to have his arm pricked with a needle?

“Because I think the Lord put us here on Earth to look after each other,” Pridgen says.

Then before I leave his side and let go of his shaky, but gentle hand, I have to ask. So how did he lose his hearing?

It’s his battle scar of sorts from World War II.

“I didn’t get injured like most,” Pridgen says. “My hearing was the only thing I lost. Others came back with legs missing. … ”

Looking through his bifocals to the picture in his mind, he shares what he sees there.

He remembers a day during World War II, one day when he saw bullets fly and watched his squad leader die.

“We were setting up camp in a little hamlet,” Pridgen remembers. “They started raining mortar down on us. That mortar killed our squad leader. We said, ‘We can’t leave him here.’ I was carrying the ammunition and so I said, ‘You take these two cans of ammo and I’ll carry him.’ ”

“So they put him on my back and I carried him.”

A true example of a man with a giving spirit, if you ask me.