MISSING - ONE DAY I know people who happened to have been born on February 29th and I don't know why I have always expected them to be different from the rest of us. They are not ,of course, even the least, little bit, unless it be that they are rather hardened to hearing jokes about their extended childhood.
By definition the term means any year which can be evenly divided by four. In actual application that doesn't quite work out. The non-official formula now on wide use replaces the "four" with "four hundred".
I find there seems to be no central theme which might tell me which persons were born Leap Year , and try as I might, I can think of only one person I know, personally, who has a February 29th birthday. I thought I could recall the names of others who did so. Nothing.
You can find them in all manner of occupational or social divisions. U.S. band leader and trombonist was Leap Year born in 1904 and the Italian race car driver Mario Andretti is another in the year we called 1940. Certainly those selected at random are occupationally far removed from another year leaper born February 29th, 1732 - Ann Lee. She was the lady who founded the American Society of Shakers. Others on the list include John Holland (1792) the American inventor of the submarine; Gioacchino Rossini, the Italian operatic composer and American writer named Tim Powers whom you may not know.
I saved Tim Powers to last on the list because, of all of those named, strikes me as bring more of what a real 29ers. His writing is somewhat specialized and usually read only by dedicated science-fiction and other-world fans. Tim Powers has been praised as being the current literary world's Edgar Allen Poe. He is that and more and his dozen or so novels and numberless short stories glisten with glamorous, spirited and meaningful monsters; often diabolic, half-human and half otherwise involved in embryonic situations from which, one might suppose, chaos and void concepts might well have been fashioned.
There are others, of course, who belong on such a list of men and women born on Feb. 29th.
Try examining the life patterns of other people such as Pope Paul - 1468, Pepper Martin - 1904, Dinah Shore - 1916, Tempest Storm - 1928, or rapper star 'Ja Rule' born in 1976.
Then, if you really want to get involved - explain what might or could occur with those who died on February 29th. Is Ludwig of Bavaria who died February 29 , 1868 dying in an intermittent series of four years at a time?
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net May 26, 2006 [c454wds]
