Woody: Landing on your 102nd birthday
Tuesday, June 25, 2013 10:41 am By LARRY WOODY Last week a woman in Iowa jumped off a bridge to celebrate her 102nd birthday. Jump off a bridge? I hope when I'm 102 I'm able to blow out the candles on my birthday cake. Not Dorothy Custer (perhaps a descendant of who-me-worry cavalryman George?) Daredevil Dorothy strapped on a parachute and made a 486-foot plunge off a bridge abutment. Of course jumping off a bridge is easy. It's the landing that's tricky. As Lewis Grizzard once said, he wasn't afraid of flying. It's the crashing and burning that worried him. Someone asked her why she jumped off a bridge. No, really. "Oh, I guess I just don't know any better," Dorothy chortled. I once jumped off the high-dive at the Cumberland Mountain State Park swimming pool, trying to impress Martha Sue Wattenbarger. When I eventually surfaced, pop-eyed and dazed, Martha Sue was gone. I asked the life guard where she went. I confess that I'm afraid of heights. I get dizzy climbing a ladder to clean the gutters. I once stayed in a glass-enclosed Tower of Babble in Atlanta that was so high the pigeons on the ledge had nose-bleed. Back to Dorothy: she said staying active was the secret to her longevity. Ms. Custer is one Super Senior. She's an inspiration to all of us sedentary sorts who whine if the newspaper is not thrown on the porch and we have to walk down THREE WHOLE STEPS to fetch it.
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