BALDWINSVILLE, N.Y. (AP) – At his age, Fred Hale Sr. doesn’t mind getting a year older.

Hale, recognized as the oldest man in America, celebrated his 113th birthday on Monday in quiet fashion with four generations of descendants at his side.

“It was just a small, quiet party. He cut the cake,” Fred Hale Jr., his 83-year-old son, said Tuesday.

Hale Jr. and seven other family members, including three great grandchildren, gathered for the small party at the Syracuse Home Association. They gave the elder Hale a robe as a present.

The elder Hale was born Dec. 1, 1890, in New Sharon, Maine, and grew up on a farm with his parents and a brother.

He retired as a railway postal clerk in 1957. When he was 100, he bagged a buck while hunting with his grandsons in Missouri.

Until he was 107, Hale lived independently at his South Portland, Maine, home. He walked a mile each day, mowed his lawn, tended a vegetable garden and fruit trees and kept honey bees.

He made the television news that year when a cameraman caught him on his front porch roof shoveling off snow.

He needs a wheelchair but until last year used a walker.

Hale became a celebrity of sorts in 1995 when Guinness World Records named him the world’s oldest licensed driver at age 107.

The Gerontology Research Group at the UCLA School of Medicine, a group that documents people over 100, lists Hale as the world’s ninth-oldest human and second-oldest man behind Joan Riudavets Moll of Spain, who turns 114 on Dec. 15.

The world’s oldest person is Charlotte Benkner of North Lima, Ohio, who turned 114 on Nov. 16, according to the California-based group.

AP-ES-12-02-03 1122EST