By Lauren Wanko
Correspondent
Tinton Falls resident Kathie Taylor is 24 years old today.
How does it feel to be turning 24?
“Well I feel a little bit stiff for a 24-year-old, but otherwise I am happy with both ages,” she said.
She’s actually 96. The South Jersey native is a Leap Year baby, born on Feb. 29, 1920.
What’s it like to be a Leap Year baby?
“Believe it or not, I can remember when I was 1 year old, 1 Leap Year old, because I was at my grandmother’s, we had gone there and all the relatives piled into that house and I wasn’t used to that so I can still remember all those big people and little me,” she said.
“Leap Year is a tradition that emerged with the introduction of the extra day in February,” said Katherine Parkin of Monmouth University. “Leap Year is introduced when Julius Caesar adds an extra day to the calendar so that the calendar doesn’t race ahead. If he didn’t introduce this extra day the seasons would become misaligned that the calendar would no longer match up with March being in spring and June being the summer and so on.”
Parkin says Feb. 29 gave rise to a number of unusual traditions — a girl would ask a boy to a dance. And starting in the early 1900s it became a popular day for women to propose to men.
The Leap Year postcards take off in the early 1900s and postcards are an incredible craze. Americans are sending about 700 million of them a year and they introduce about 250 different Leap Year postcard designs and lot of them are geared toward women proposing to men.
Many or the majority criticize women for asking for a man’s hand in marriage.
“But there are individuals, like a columnist who is incredibly popular in her day name Dorothy Dix, she wrote for about 40 years about the importance of this day for women to be able to propose that she says it as a really important opportunity to chose the husband you were going to have,” Parkin said.
For Taylor, who lives independently at the Seabrook Retirement Community, Feb. 29 is all about the party. And when there is no Feb. 29, “I can choose which day I want to use,” she said.
Usually Feb. 28 or March 1. Either way she says being a Leap Year baby makes her feel pretty special.
“Because people make so much of it when it is the birthday and they try to make me happy when it isn’t,” she said.
This birthday girl will celebrate tonight at a special dinner in her retirement community, 24 candles and counting.