East Volusia

East Volusia, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA

Leap Year babies jump for joy today

By DONNA CALLEA
Staff Writer

29 February 2004

DAYTONA BEACH -- Walter Brown and Nyeshia Lewis are marking their 5th birthdays today while on the road
performing with Bethune-Cookman College's Inspirational Gospel Choir.

They're hoping someone will sing them the "Happy Birthday" song. They don't get to hear it very often.

Harold Church of Holly Hill already has been serenaded. His children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren got
together a week early to throw a big party in honor of their patriarch's Feb. 29th birthday. According to the cake,
he's either 24 or 96 -- though truth be told, he looks neither.

And Marilyn Benton muses that this is the year both she and her daughter, Hayley, are turning 13. "My husband's
in trouble," quips the Ormond Beach resident.

Call it a quirk of the calendar. Chalk it up to a time warp of the official sort. Blame it on the way the world turns.
But no matter how you look at it, February doesn't have 29 days very often. And for those born on Leap Day,
birthdays are few and far between. Not that they're complaining.

"I like it. It makes me unique," says Brown, who was born in Jacksonville on Feb. 29, 1984, and had never met
anyone who shared his birthday until he went to college in Daytona Beach. There, to his amazement, he
discovered Lewis in the Gospel Choir as well as another student who also have to contend with puzzled stares
when they reveal their vital statistics.

"People say, 'How old are you really?' That's what I get," says Lewis, a Los Angeles native. "I tell them I've been
living 20 years." But when it comes to birthdays she's really only had five, counting today.

Just why Feb. 29 is such an anomaly can make your head hurt, if you don't happen to be astronomically or
mathematically inclined. But here's the short version. According to the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, Feb. 29 is added to the calendar every four years -- with some exceptions -- because the actual
length of a year is 365.242 days, not 365. It doesn't get added to the calendar in century years that are not
evenly divisible by 400. Which is why 1900 wasn't a Leap Year. And 2100 won't be either. Why? Because
over the course of 400 years adding an extra day every four years without exception would simply be overdoing
it, mathematically and astronomically speaking.

Leap Day "celebrates the calendar, keeping the balance between how we keep track of time and how the Earth
spins," says Raenell Dawn, co-founder of the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies, an online group at
www.leapzine.com. with about 5,000 members worldwide. Without Leap Day, the calendar would be "a total mess,"
she says.

So at the very least, contends Dawn in a telephone interview from Oregon, it ought to get as much respect as, say,
Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, which almost always gets officially noted on calendars.

"My mission is to get Leap Year Day written on calendars," says the 1960-born leaper, as they're called, who's
turning 11 today. "I've contacted hundreds of calendar companies and five (U.S.) presidents. But I never heard back."
Which just isn't fair, she says. "That groundhog gets my goat."

Her organization calculates the odds of being born on Leap Year Day at about 1 in 1,461, as opposed to 1 in 365 for
being born on any other day, and estimates that there are about 200,000 leapers in the United States, and about
4 million worldwide.

Babies born today are dubbed "leaplings" by the Honor Society, which has, as its motto: " I leap, therefore I am,"
according to Dawn.

While it's not possible to make generalizations about everyone born Feb. 29, she says leapers do tend to share one
quality. "We're young at heart."

Church can attest to that. The Holly Hill nonagenarian says he considers himself "very lucky" to be as spry as he is,
and attributes his vitality to healthy living. But he concedes that having just one birthday every four years probably
hasn't hurt, either.donna.callea@news-jrnl.com

Did You Know?

The tradition of adding days -- or even months -- to the calendar began long before the Gregorian calendar we use
today was created.

· Ancient Babylonians devised a calendar with 12 months of 30 days and added extra months on occasion to align
the calendar with the seasons.

· The Greeks were the first to use science and math to calculate the addition of extra months at specific intervals.

· The Chinese calendar, based on positions of the sun and moon, adds an extra month every two or three years.

· To fix errors in the earlier Roman calendar, Julius Caesar decreed the year 46 B.C. should have 445 days,
causing it to be known as the year of confusion.

· Some modern proponents of calendar reform support the Thirteen-Month Calendar, with 13 months exactly 4 weeks
long and a leap year day every four years just before July 1.

-- Compiled by News Researcher Megan Gallup