Carla Kauppila, at 15, is a teacher at St. Francis Episcopal Church and she has two daughters.
Carla, of Temple, gets to, this year, celebrate her 15th birthday, on her actual birth day, birthday cake and all. Carla is a leaper.
Leaper is not an everyday word, and isn’t in the dictionary, at least not with the definition that the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies gives it. But it is a word we get to use once every four years.
Leapers are babies born on Feb. 29.
This year she’ll celebrate tonight with her two brothers and on Saturday with her sister from Georgetown. “I am a casual kind of person. Gardening, washing your hands and going out to Ratibor is fun and easy – and the hamburgers are good,” she said.
Carla was born at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in 1948, and the memory is still clear to her mother, Helen Creasey of Temple.
“I didn’t realize it was a leap year until I saw a man saying ‘Please wait! Please wait!’” because he didn’t want his wife to have the baby on leap day. “I said to him ‘oh don’t say that, she is having a baby’ and he said ‘yes, but it’s a leap day.’” Only then did Helen realize what day it was.
“She was born at 8:53 p.m. and she weighed 6 pounds and 3 ounces.”
Carla was the last of three baby girls born on Feb. 29, 1948, at Scott & White.
She has enjoyed being a leaper. “Everyone seems to remember your birthday,” she said. “I will often get a phone call from people I have met in my life and haven’t seen for a while. They just remember.”
It seems most leapers celebrate their birthdays on March 1, mainly because on Feb. 28 of any given year they have not been born yet. Carla has celebrated her birthday on Feb. 28 every year - really a day early.
“I think she has always had special birthdays in leap years,” her mother said. “I hope she did.”
The downside to celebrating early is when you turn 21 you have to wait to have your first legal drink a whole day later.
We can blame the leap year on Julius Caesar’s astronomer, Sosigenes. In 46 B.C., to keep celebrations seasonal, he advised adding a day every fourth year. By astronomical definitions the Earth’s rotation takes about 365.24219 days. If all calendar years contained 365 days, they would drift from the actual year by about one day every four years.
The extra day is called an intercalary day or leap day. Intercalarian babies doesn’t sound nearly as fun as leapsters.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII added the rule that leap day would occur in any year divisible by four.
Only 0.068 percent of the population is born at that particular date; that is, one baby in every 1,461.
In the Temple-Telegram in 1958, approaching her 10th birthday, Carla was quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ll ever stop having birthdays. Birthdays are fun.”
True to her word, she still enjoys her birthday.
