HERMANN — For 99-year-old Bob Aston, Saturday’s Wurstfest competition was a trip down memory lane.

One of the original judges of the event from nearly 40 years ago, the current Creve Coeur resident donned a 2024 Wurstfest apron and took his place at a judges’ table to sample and rate this year’s entries in the competition as an honorary judge.

While much of his time seated at the table was taken up with visiting with well-wishers, Aston was able to sample much of the sausage featured in this year’s contest.

The World War II Navy veteran first started judging in 1988. Wursfest, which marked its 43rd version this year after being on hiatus for a couple years because of the coronavirus pandemic, began several years earlier with judges obtained from the University of Missouri Agriculture Department.

The format of the event changed about the time Aston became a judge. At that time, organizers of the event — initially held to attract tourists to Hermann during the off-season, realized from the attendance and the wishes of the crowd that sausage samples could be made available for a fee — money that could be used to help sustain the annual event. The thinking was that visitors were coming to Wurstfest to taste the produce, not just watch a competition.

Aston told the Gasconade County Republican that he was surprised by the size of the crowds during those early years of the event — turnouts that continued with this year’s version as a long line of customers formed to sample the work of local and regional sausage makers.

Aston was a Hermann resident for many years. He now lives in Creve Coeur in West St. Louis County. He’s especially proud of his apartment with what he called “a large clothes closet” in which he parks his motorized scooter. Aston will mark his 100th birthday on June 25.

Much of military service was spent on the golf course, he said.

“I was on the Navy golf team. That was nice,” he noted, adding that his service as a Navy Seabee came about as a result of a golf trip he took. “When I got back” from a golf match, “my ship was sailing, so they put me with the Seabees,” he said. That’s where he stayed during the war, seeing action at Iwo Jima.

His Wurstfest judging was grounded in a knowledge of meat products. His civilian life saw him working for Kroger’s in its meat department and later as as a multi-state representative for a meat company that required him to spend a lot of time on the road.

“My wife said, ‘You’ve got the best of two worlds.’ I was married and I could lead a single life” with all the traveling, Aston said. “When I could I took her with me” on the road. “She liked going to Los Angeles,” he said.

It wasn’t just all work for Aston. For years, he wore a Shriner’s fez. “I was a clown,” he said with a smile. “We’d go to parades and I’d have candy corn in my pocket. The kids would come up and I’d say, ‘Ask for a chicken dinner.’ They’d say, ‘Give me a chicken dinner’ and I’d pull out a handful of candy corn. They’d say, ‘That’s not a chicken dinner’ and I’d say, ‘Well, that’s what chickens eat.’”

Aston Saturday was alongside Steve Mueller of Hermann. It was Mueller’s father, himself a Wurstfest judge, who recruited Aston to help judge the competition.

After folding his Wurstfest apron, Aston and his family will begin planning for his centennial birthday.

“I’ll be 100 years old,” he said, adding, “I don’t know how that happened.”