For this teenage baby boomer, every leap year birthday is four years of fun

If you see Linda Myers around town on Thursday, don’t forget to wish her a happy birthday. You won’t get another chance until 2028.

The snowbird from Wisconsin is a leap-year baby. She will be celebrating her 19th birthday on Feb. 29, even though she was born in 1948.

“The calendar has a lot of special days, and leap day is a pretty special one I think,” said Myers from her winter home in Tucson, where she sported a purple T-shirt that read “It’s my birthday finally.”

“You just have to have fun with it,” she said.

Over the years, Myers has become something of a crusader for what she calls “leap day awareness.”

She likes to share trivia and some of the challenges associated with being a leaper. Though her birthdate is a nice conversation starter, she said it comes with its own unique set of annoyances.

For example, Myers had the wrong DOB printed on her driver’s license for years, because her actual birthdate “wasn’t in their system,” she said.

Leapers also run into occasional complications and confusion when dealing with doctor’s offices or the Social Security Administration. In some cases, the birth certificates of Feb. 29 babies were filled out incorrectly, either by accident or on purpose.

Things seem to have gotten better since the whole Y2K computer scare was sorted out, Myers said, but “the date issue is still a problem” on certain websites.

Her unusual birthdate and her advocacy on behalf of leapers everywhere has landed her in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In 2008, she was one of 200 leap day babies invited to a taping of “The Martha Stewart Show.”

Myers was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa.

She said her grade-school classmates used to pick on her about her strange birthdate, sending her home crying.

“As a child, I was really tormented,” she said. “I also had red hair. I don’t know which was worse.”

Her parents tried to make it up to her with “un-birthday” parties each Feb. 28 and special celebrations during leap years, featuring her favorite chocolate cake.

In 1968, the year she turned 5 (or possibly 20), Myers sent in a dollar to join the “Order of the 29ers,” a club for leap day babies founded in 1928 by a newspaper in Pittsburg, Kansas. She still has the membership letter and plaque the club sent her.

A year later, on Feb. 28, 1969, her friends tried to take her out for a drink on what would have been her traditional 21st birthday, but the bar wouldn’t serve her because she was still underage. She and her friends had to come back a few hours later at 12:01 a.m. March 1.

Myers met her husband, Bill, through mutual friends in 1967, and the two of them hit it off. She said she considered proposing to him on leap day 1968, but she decided against it because she was afraid it would jinx their marriage.

He finally popped the question in November 1969, and they’ve been together ever since — first in Iowa, then in the Milwaukee suburb of New Berlin, where they both retired in 2012.

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For the past 13 years, they’ve divided their time between Wisconsin and Tucson, arriving here each year in mid-October and staying until mid-April.

Bill, who turns 80 this year, doesn’t bat an eye when someone tries to tease him about being hitched to an 18-year-old.

“She was 5 and a half when I married her,” he said.

In the late 1990s, at about the time that eBay became a thing, Myers started collecting leap year memorabilia, mainly cards, pins, jewelry and other trinkets.

Her collection now includes about 2,500 items, enough to fill three large file boxes and several photo albums she usually keeps tucked away until February.

Among her keepsakes is a stack of early 1900s postcards marking — and, in some cases, mocking — a centuries-old tradition originating in the British Isles in which women would propose to men on leap day.

She also has a few commemorative pins from that other every-four-years tradition, the Olympic Games.

Then there are the less-festive events with which Myers must share her precious leap years: presidential elections.

“I wasn’t going to bring that up,” she said.

When she isn’t on eBay, Myers likes to network with other 29ers online, where she goes by the nickname Leapin’ Linda.

The internet has made it easier to connect, with several websites and social media groups made by and for the leaper community.

She hasn’t met any fellow leap-day babies in Tucson yet, she said, but two of her closest friends back in Wisconsin are her leap-day sisters, Sue the Leapette and Leone the Leaprechaun.

For the last birthday of her teens, Myers said she will be going out to lunch with her local group of friends, followed by whatever surprise her husband might be cooking up for her.

“Who knows what Bill Myers might do?” she said.

On leap day 2020, he took her to watch the horses run at Rillito Park, then convinced the racetrack’s bugler to come up into the grandstand to play the birthday song for her on his horn.

It’s too soon to say how she might ring in her 20th birthday in 2028 or her 21st in 2032, though Las Vegas isn’t out of the question.

This much she does know: “I plan to be around,” Myers said with conviction.

Call it a leap of faith.