March Madness

The current world health crisis has brought great change to all of us.  We’re learning new things every day, and quite frankly, each day is a bit scarier than the last.  One of the first national casualties was the cancellation of the NCAA’s college basketball tournaments and the annual basketball season known as March Madness.

Forty-five years ago, Ruth and I, and a group of our teaching friends started a March Madness celebration of our own.  Ruth, Joey, and Carla had babies born within two weeks of each other.  Amy was born to Ken and Joey on March 16th, Ruth had David on March 30th, and Bob and Carla’s, Jamie, was born during the interim.

The following March, when the three kids turned one year old, the three couples took the kids to Bill Knapp’s for a birthday dinner.  Bill Knapp’s had a tradition of providing a birthday cake to everyone on their birthday.  The three couples decided that it would be a great idea to cash in on the birthday cakes together.  Our first gathering featured the three one year old’s, their parents,  Amy’s older sister, Kim, and a hazmat crew to clean up the cake when the party ended.

A few days prior to our first Bill Knapp’s celebration, John was born to another set of teaching friends, Rick and Lynn.  When the initial celebrants turned two, we gathered for another  Bill Knapp’s birthday party and we were joined by Rick, Lynn and one year old, John.  Two week old Elizabeth Tebo, AKA BZ, joined us too.

The very regular Rick and Lynn Russell’s second child, Sara, was born two years to the day on her brother John’s second birthday, March 13th.  Michael Tebo attended his first March celebration in 1979.  We allowed him to attend even though he was born the prior July.  All of the other kids had been born in March.    And then we stopped – having kids – not parties.  The Klumpps and Russells had two, the Dentlers one, and the over-achieving Tebos had three.  We celebrated our annual Bill Knapp’s March Madness for a total of eighteen years.

If you do the math, most of our kids were born nine months after school  let out for summer break the previous June. It must have been a time of stress relief from the prior school year.

The picture below was taken when the initial three, featured in the front row, turned six

Speaking of doing the math, here’s another example of March Madness.

Barb and Dick Coatta lived across the street and two houses down from my childhood home in Royal Oak.  They, like my family and several other neighbors, were Catholic during a time when artificial means of birth control were verboten.  Dick was a teamster and Barb was a stay at home mom.  They had a total of six children. Suzy was the oldest with a March 25th birthday.  Her youngest sister, Lori, was born twenty-two years later on March 2nd.  During the twenty-two year gap, Barb and Dick had four other children.  Their birthdays fell as follows.  Sandy was March 24th.  Lisa was February 29th (AKA March 1st). Rick was February 25th, and Deana was February 19th.

If you walk back nine months from each of those dates, you’ll note that Barb and Dick were “pretty regular” – if you get my drift.  By coincidence, they celebrated their wedding anniversary about that same time.

Projecting forward, if the citizens of the world follow the self imposed isolation protocols, and government sanctioned stay-home quarantines required today,  I believe that we’ll see another March Madness baby-boom beginning in December of 2020.  After all, you can only read so many books, play so many board games, and watch so much TV.