Eighteen days after Paul Roberts’ home burned, rendering it uninhabitable, he sat at his neighbor’s dining table in Ship Bottom, playing cards and answering questions about how he had managed to keep calm when he saw white smoke in the bathroom mirror while shaving after taking a shower shortly after 9 p.m.

Roberts, 94, a World War II U.S. Marine Corps veteran, had tried to inhale as he was met with pitch blackness in his 28th Street home March 14.