A daily dedication

Wilmer Poynor III made a birthday phone call 365 days a year for 50 years.

His life was the insurance business, selling for New York Life, just as his father, Wilmer Jr., had. And each day of his career, he would call whichever client had a birthday that day.

“They were his friends as well as his clients,” his wife, Carol, said.

By the end of his career, he was serving his client’s children as well. He would have never retired if it weren’t for his stroke.

At 71, Wilmer lost the function of the right side of his body. His stroke affected the left hemisphere of his brain, but the same spirit he put into those birthday calls remained.

When he arrived at Lakeshore Rehabilitation Hospital after the stroke, his music therapist immediately recognized him.

“He’s been calling me every year on my birthday,” she told Carol.

A new normal

Since his stroke, Wilmer can understand everything he hears and knows what he wants to say, but speaking is a struggle. He works every day to relearn how to do what had come so naturally for 71 years life.

He was one of the first patients to go through a special speech therapy program at UAB called constraint induced aphasia therapy.

For three weeks, he spent five hours a day working on speaking words, and Carol was by his side for all of it.

“I thought I would drop him off, but the caregiver is as much a part of the program as the participant,” she said.

She would help ask him questions and familiarize herself with the therapy so she could help him with his homework.

“He was always so dedicated,” she said.

His therapy didn’t end there, though. Wilmer is as active as he can be.

“He never gives up and never takes no for an answer,” Carol said. “I have cried a lot of happy tears seeing how hard he works.”

By the end of the third week at Lakeshore, he would walk so fast that everyone started calling him “NASCAR Man.”

Still the same Wilmer

Though he can’t speak more than a few words, Wilmer can still sing his way right through a hymnal. The part of your brain that allows you to sing is on the opposite from the one that controls speech.

He and Carol enjoy singing together at home — something they had never done outside of church before the stroke.

Their favorite is a Doris Day song: “I love you a bushel and peck; a bushel and peck and a hug around the neck.”

They repeat the same two lines over and over, growing louder each time.

The louder Wilmer gets, the more pronounced his voice sounds, like it did before his stroke; and that brings tears to Carol’s eyes.

Each day she sees his dedication to being as active as possible. Wilmer walks Colonial Brookwood Village twice a day, where his friends who work there know him and return his fist pump when he greets them.

Twice a week he goes to Birmingham Country Club with his “workout buddy,” physical therapist Melissa Robinette.

He wears a special glove to grip golf club that enables him to putt the ball, and he will ride the cart around the course with his golf buddies of 30 years, “The Killer Bees” (they each have a nick name that starts with B).

When he eats at Demetri’s BBQ for lunch on Tuesdays and Fridays, waitress Rita won’t bring him his food unless he speaks all five words: “inside pork cut in fourths”

Wilmer still calls some clients on their birthdays. He might not be able to carry on a full conversation, but he can say “happy birthday” and their name.

One of his clients, Byard Tynes, called on Wilmer’s birthday one year. He told him wanted to call because Wilmer had called him to wish him a happy birthday for so many years.

Wilmer & Carol

Carol met Wilmer at a dance when she was in the eighth grade. She attended Brooke Hill School for Girls (now The Altamont School) and he Indian Springs, then a new all-boys school. Wilmer was in the ninth grade.

“I thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen,” Carol said. “It took three years to get him to date me, though.”

Still, he did ask her out, and they married on Dec. 30, 1958. She was 19, and he was 20.

After being stationed briefly in Lee, Va., when Wilmer was in the Army, they bought their first home on Del Mar in Crestline. All these years later, all three of their children are only minutes away from their home of eight years just outside Mountain Brook Village.

They both went to the University of Alabama, but their two sons went to Auburn, making football season “always interesting,” Carol says.

As president of the insurance association the Million Dollar Roundtable in 1987, Wilmer traveled to Israel, Paris, Japan and Australia — always with Carol, who said she was “along for the ride.”

In their 30s, they learned to ski together, and after their children were grown, they hosted friends and family for PGA tournaments, as well as their own version, the “Poynor Invitational,” at their house in Shoal Creek.