It was the same with my grandfather. Born in 1899, he would have been old enough to enlist by 1917 but didn't. Even my father isn't too clear on the reasons. Granddad did have a defense-related job -- he was a tool & diemaker for an automotive company so he probably had a draft deferment. Of course, he would have been too old for WW2 (though it wasn't unheard of to find 40 year old infantrymen).
My family was of German extraction, so perhaps that had something to do with it?
Aha...german extraction.
My great grandfather was german. Actually, he considered himself to be prussian, even though his mother was half swede. As I understand it, a prussian was something between german and danish...or a mixture of the two...and the nation of prussia ceased to exist before WWI. His people came from a town called schleswig. It’s practically in denmark.
Interestingly, this doesn’t quite jive with what I just looked up on wikipedia. It states there that old prussian is something between a german and a lithuanian.
odd