F E AT U R E
99 years and not a day wasted
S
oldier, pharmacist, poet, author and university English lecturer, BGS Old Boy Stan Mellick ’34 has had several careers over his 99 years. Born in February 1920, Dr John Stanton Davis Mellick OAM has the honour of being Brisbane Grammar School’s oldest known Old Boy, and his visit to the School for the Great Hall Society’s Long Lunch in June 2019 showed he’s still going strong. His secret? “Well, if you put the foolhardy drinking of youth away, it’s moderation in liquor intake. Respect your liver,” Mellick said. “That’s where a lot of people get knocked.” He also maintains an exercise regime he developed almost 60 years ago. “When I was 40 I had a kidney stone, and a doctor friend said if I ran on the spot I might get it out, and it worked. When I was running on the spot every morning, 300 times, I thought, ‘gee, there’s more to this than meets the eye’.” “I’m lifting my whole body with one leg and then the other leg, and I thought, ‘I’ll add half a dozen really deep breaths, and touch my toes 20 odd times’. And that’s it;
four or five minutes each morning and I’ve done it ever since. It’s very simple and I don’t even have to pay for it!” Although he left after ‘Junior’ in 1934, Mellick’s memories of his school days are still sharp. He and his younger brother Sidney (known as Oliver) attended BGS after passing the State Scholarship Examination. “It was the height of the Depression and money was scarce. I lived at Dutton Park and recall the gangs of men working for relief money when Annerley Road was being built,” Mellick said. “The bulk of us left after the Junior Examination and sought jobs. We wanted to go on but couldn’t.” After turning down a job as an office boy at Qantas – according to Mellick, “they’d had an accident a couple of years before, and I didn’t think they’d last!” – he worked at a hire purchase firm and joined a Signals cadet unit at Kelvin Grove Barracks at the age of 16. As war broke out, Mellick was made a Second Lieutenant, undertook advanced staff training at Duntroon in 1942 and transferred from Signals to Intelligence, serving in New Guinea. He described his five and a half years of war service as “a civilised prison. You went where you were sent, and you did what you were told.” Mellick and his sweetheart Letty were introduced by a mutual friend in 1938. He decided not to marry during the war in case he was injured, but Letty had other ideas. “She was of a mind that it would be a good thing if we were married in December ’41. So what day did we choose? The day Japan bombed Pearl Harbour,” he said.
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