By CHRISTOPHER TUFFLEY
christopher.tuffley@newssun.com
SEBRING --This is a story of living life to the fullest, embracing new opportunities and simply having fun.
Laura Bourland was born in Mt. Vernon, Ill., in November of 1906.
Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States, the Panama Canal was under construction, the Chicago White Sox beat the Cubs in six games to win the World Series and the San Francisco earthquake took place in April.
Things were a good deal quieter on the family farm, where Bourland grew up the youngest girl in a family of three boys and three girls.
Life was hard on the farm, Bourland said the other day, and just as difficult when she married and she and her husband began farming for themselves. They had no telephone or electricity and Bourland's youngest, a daughter Jean Reed, jokes that the dairy cows had running water, while the family did not.
They milked their cows by hand and raised pigs, corn, oats and soy beans. She did her own canning.
And while she drove many a horse and mule, Bourland never drove a car.
In fact, she said, with a wicked twinkle in her eye, the fastest she had ever been was about 85 miles an hour -- when she was taken by ambulance to the hospital after a heart attack.
"I was sent to St. Louis," she said. "We went so fast my husband and son, who were following us, couldn't keep us in sight." It was the most fun she'd had while fighting for her life.
It proved to be just a beginning.
With four surviving children, 22 grand and step-grandchildren, and too many step-great-grandchildren to count, she has long been surrounded by a loving family who know just what she wants when holiday or birthday time comes around -- adventure, preferably while moving fast.
Bourland has been up in a hot air balloon, a cherry picker and a helicopter. She has a friend who takes her for occasional trips in his small plane. One day he turned to her and told her to take the controls and fly the plane, then he took his hands off the wheel trying to startle her. She laughed.
One of her step-grandsons borrowed a Harley-Davidson with a side car to give her a ride to her 100th birthday party.
One of her granddaughters, who works for a NASA contractor, arranged for Bourland to have a special tour of Cape Canaveral during a shuttle launch for that same birthday. She got to see the shuttle's bathroom and where the astronauts sleep.
Unfortunately, at the two-minute point in the countdown, bad weather scrubbed the launch.
Then came this spring, when Bourland was diagnosed with colon cancer. She entered the hospice program and the sorrow was that her adventuring days were done.
Except they weren't, as it turned out.
Bourland discovered that just because she had a terminal illness and was in hospice care didn't mean her life had to come to a screeching halt. In fact, her caregivers with hospice were anxious to continue making her dreams come true.
So when she mentioned to Cecil Kent, her hospice chaplain, that she wanted to ride in a race car his immediate response was, "I think we can do something about that."
He promptly called Steve Kearney, the chaplain for Motorsports Ministries, who made the arrangements.
Which is how, one sunny Saturday morning in October Bourland was out at the Sebring International Raceway with her youngest daughter and eldest son, leaning forward in her wheelchair excitedly waiting a 100 mph spin around the track.
At the last second adjustments had to be made. Bourland, who is both frail and has already broken her hip once, couldn't get into the passenger seat because she couldn't crawl over the support bars bolted to its side. The pacer car was brought around instead and Jack Ragaglia took her through the turns as fast as he could. While they didn't approach 100 mph, it was still fast enough for the gravitational forces to pull her first one way and then another.
"I liked the curves best," she said with a grin afterwards.
When asked if she has other adventures in mind, Bourland quickly said she hopes to take a train trip next, maybe to Miami and back. Then she paused a moment, "Well," she drawled, "I might think of another (adventure)."
Kent explained moments like this were exactly what hospice is all about.
He told of a man in hospice care who only wanted to go fishing one last time. Arrangements were made to take him deep sea fishing in the Gulf where he caught three grouper. He died about a week later, but his family said they hadn't seen him as happy in three years.
Sunday, November 02, 2008 - www.newssun.com/1102-ct-race-car-ride