Everything about lifelong Warsaw resident Bruce Whiteneck spells steadfast commitment.

The 77-year-old Air Force veteran served from 1961 to 1965 at air bases in Louisiana and Michigan, working in the personnel department with computer punch cards and applying his personal credo: “You do your job to the best of your ability.”

Having learned strict discipline from his mother and Culver Military Academy, Whiteneck described his time in the service as “a piece of cake, especially compared to what the other men went through.”

He grew up “a block from the train depot” in “an upper middle class” family.

He remembers the time when “you could drive through Winona Lake and see license plates from almost every state.”

He would watch trains stop “with black kids from Chicago” on their way to the Chicago Boys Club on the south end of Winona Lake.

“There was a grassy area next to the station,” he said, recalling how the boys would reach down in wonderment and feel the grass. “They had never seen grass before.”

He worked at his father’s laundry and dry cleaning service on Buffalo Street, pressing shirt collars.

“When I was a little boy the men would wear white shirts for several days,” he recalled, “but they had button-on collars that got dirty before the shirts did.”

The laundry cleaned the collars to order, “with no starch, medium starch or heavy starch.” Young Whiteneck operated the machine that put the crease back in the collars.

He also ironed and folded the handkerchiefs ubiquitous among the local gentry in those days.

That was a long time ago, he said. The business’s phone number was 3; the family’s party line home number was 517W.

When he returned from the service, he commenced selling “stainless steel, waterless, lifetime guaranteed cookware” for VitaCraft. He sold door-to-door, “mainly to the Amish and Mennonite.”

Among the communities in his territory: Nappanee (where he made his first sale in 1965), Topeka, Shipshewana, Grabill, Middlebury, Bristol and Centerville, Mich.

He worked “five to six days a week for years,” has long outlasted the “four or five” competitors pitching similar products and still plies the business, “selling cookware to girls now that I sold to their grandmothers.”

He doesn’t know how many sets he has sold in his 51 years. “Thousands,” he shrugged, “but I’ve kept a copy of every order sold.”

Among that sizable stack is the order of one Virginia Mary Ruth Monroe.

Whiteneck was smitten by “Ruth” when he showed her the cookware. He sold her a set (“she got a discount”) — then provided a home for her to use it in by marrying her in 1968.

The Whitenecks have two grown children, a son who works as a financial advisor in Warsaw and a daughter living in Naples, Fla.

Since 2010 Bruce and Ruth have followed a decidedly family-centered annual routine.

“We have Thanksgiving dinner here with our son and then go to Cape Coral, Fla., about an hour from our daughter. Our son and daughter come over with their families for Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day we go to her place.”

Whiteneck has since scaled back his workload to enjoy the companionship of his fellow servicemen during his half century with the American Legion.

Last year, on his golden anniversary of membership, Warsaw Post 49 waived his dues for the remainder of his life.