Bob Borders holds his fiddle as his new wife, Mary, plays mandolin and her sister Ginnie Nevin, far right, strums a guitar at an Old Time Fiddlers session.

dean knuth / arizona daily star

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Try. Just try to keep your toes from tapping. Can't be done.

It's Tuesday night at the Southwest Community Center south of town, and Bob Borders is here, chin on his fiddle, sawing away.

Also on stage are a couple dozen other members of the Southern Arizona Old Time Fiddlers Association, including Mary, Bob's bride of two months, who sings and plays mandolin and guitar.

Like just about everyone else here tonight, they'll grab the spotlight for a couple of numbers, then shift to the back, often accompanying others.

But this is far from Bob's only gig. On Thursdays, you'll find him either at the Park Avenue Christian Church or the VA Hospital. On Fridays and Saturdays he plays in Catalina.

"And if there are five Thursdays in the month, I'll play at Tucson Estates," says Bob, 85.

What's remarkable about all this is that up until, oh, 18 months ago, Bob hadn't touched his fiddle in more than 50 years.

"When my wife died in November of 2005, I had to get my mind off things. I started playing again."

The music started early on. "When I was young, they told me I tried to make musical instruments out of rubber bands," says Bob, who grew up in Ohio.

So his parents bought him a mandolin and some lessons. A few years later he played fiddle in the school orchestra.

During the Depression, he joined a group of musicians, hauling his mandolin to square dances and the like.

"People would roll up the carpet in the living room and we'd play from 8 to midnight. They passed the hat around. We usually ended up with about $3 a piece."

Drafted into the Army in World War II, he rolled onto the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. With him went his mandolin.

"The reason I was able to carry it with me was I was driving a truck. If I'd been in the infantry, it would have been out of the question," says Bob, who used to play music with a motor pool sergeant.

"He had a guitar. We'd play in a makeshift tent."

Somewhere between Normandy and Germany he lost his mandolin after entrusting it to another driver.

But he still had his fiddle, one he'd picked up in a shop in Tours, France, during a three-day leave.

"I saw this fiddle in the window. I pointed to it and the fellow said it was for sale." Sold to the Yank for $30.

Home from war by the end of '45, he returned to England to marry Gladys, the girl he'd met before D-Day.

They settled in Dayton, where Bob resumed his job at a General Motors plant. He also took his fiddle to radio station WING, playing with a group at a Saturday night "barn dance," as well as five mornings a week before heading off to work at the plant.

"Jonathan Winters was the M.C., one of the best I've ever seen," says Bob."

But the group busted up about 1950 and Bob put away his fiddle.

In 1975, he and Gladys moved to Tucson, where she died in 1989. He married again, this time to a lady named Anne, who died in late 2005.

That's when Bob got out a second mandolin his folks had bought him years ago, as well as that fiddle from France.

A friend introduced him to a group that plays at Tucson's veterans hospital. That led to his joining the Southern Arizona Old Time Fiddlers, which numbers about 170 folks, a third of them over the age of 80.

"The oldest is 92," says the group's president, Wilbur Welsh.

Only one thing seemed to be missing from Bob's life. Well, two, actually. He wanted an amplified mandolin. Through friends, he found a woman who had one for sale.

"He came to the house to buy the mandolin. We were playing music. One thing led to another and here we are," says Mary Borders, 78, Bob's bride since February.

Like Bob, music seems to be part of her DNA. "I have two sisters and we used to be the West Virginia Sweethearts."

Now she and Bob are tapping out sweet, sweet music together. May it always be so.