Freida Boyers celebrated her 105th birthday Oct. 27 with a motorcycle ride
through Ocean Ridge. Neighbor Phil Lambrecht took her for a cruise
on his 1997 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
When Freida Boyers was a little girl growing up in Wauseon, Ohio, two neighbor boys had a motorcycle.
“Floyd and Bill Smith,” she remembers. “I always wanted to go for a ride on it, but they wouldn’t take me, and back in those days a girl didn’t ask.”
She was 13 then.
On Oct. 27, a kinder neighbor gave Freida Boyers a ride on his motorcycle to celebrate her birthday.
She was 105.
It was not her first ride. When she turned 100 in 2010, her grandson, Matt Boyers, took her for a spin on his cycle. That adventure was captured in a framed photo, and when Phil Lambrecht, a neighbor in the Wellington Arms condominium, spotted it, he said, “Want to go for another ride on my bike?”
And so, on her 105th birthday, Boyers donned a crash helmet, surrendered her walker and was helped aboard a black, 1997 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.
At 2 p.m. sharp, with Ocean Ridge police officer Bobby Massimino providing an escort, Lambrecht revved the engine, pulled onto North Ocean Boulevard and headed north with his 105-year-old passenger holding on.
“How fast are we going?” she called to Lambrecht.
“About 22 miles per hour,” he called back.
“That’s fast enough,” she told him.
Lambrecht ventured as far as the Boynton Inlet and then circled back in the park. As they neared the Arms, Massimino turned on his flashers and hit the siren a couple of times.
The cycle came to a stop and Boyers retrieved her walker.
“It was beautiful!” she reported. “It looked to me like we were really flying by!”
Born Oct. 27, 1910, in Wauseon, she remembers when a cousin was given one of those newfangled radios, sometime in the 1920s. You had to use earphones, so only one person at a time could listen.
Today, she Skypes with her seven great-great-grandchildren.
She has eight great-grand-children, five grandchildren and countless razor-sharp memories. She remembers the 1920 presidential election, when Warren G. Harding beat James M. Cox, and she can still recite Harding’s campaign song.
“Mom was a Democrat and Dad was a Republican,” she remembers, “and every election day Mom would say, ‘Goodbye, I’m going to go and cancel out your Dad’s vote.’”
She remembers driving a horse and buggy by herself from Pioneer, Ohio, to Harrison Lake with her 5-year-old cousin at her side.
In 1929, she married Leo Boyers, and they ran a construction company together, building schools and churches around Wauseon. They had two children, Jerry and Barbara. Leo died in 1983 after 54 years with her. She left their condo along Lake Osborne in Lake Worth in 2005 and moved to Ocean Ridge with her granddaughter, Nadine Magee, and her husband, Jay.
“I can’t believe I’ve lived as long as I did,” she marvels. “I feel about … oh, 65.”
Ask her the secret of her long life and she ponders the question.
“Well, there’s this — we were never drinkers or smokers or went out partying. We were more small town. It was the Depression and nobody had any money.”
Yes, she’s heard about that new study that claims bacon and hot dogs increase the cancer risk.
“I think it’s crazy,” she says. “I ate anything I wanted, and I still do. Up to a point. I baked an apple pie yesterday.”
And what has she learned in 105 years?
“If you listen to the TV, everybody is so hateful to everybody,” she says. “But we went out for a birthday dinner the other night, and the waiters sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, and people from the other table came and spoke to me. There’s some lovely people in the world, but these politicians ought to be ashamed of the way they’re talking about each other.”
She attributes much of life’s happiness to her faith.
“I’ve been a Christian all my life,” she says. “Without my church, I don’t know what I’d do.”
But she’s no prude. Two years ago, for her 103rd birthday, Freida Boyers decided she wanted to experience a little gambling.
The Magees took her to a casino, where she worked the slots — and won.
And before that there was the motorcycle ride for her 100th birthday. That one lasted a good deal longer than last month’s little trip to the Boynton Inlet and back.
“Oh, we went all around our little town up in Ohio that time,” she said. “But I was younger then.”
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