Leap Day birthdays are of course pretty rare because they can only happen once every four years. Since no one nominated a person born on Leap Day for my Amsterdam Birthday Blog, I had to go searching for one. While doing so I happened across a 1956 Recorder article that highlighted all of that newspaper’s reported Amsterdam Leap Day births up to that point in the publication’s history. Though I recognized many of the last names of the parents involved, subsequent searches for additional data on their offspring for almost all of them came up empty. But there was one last name that jumped out at me because I’ve been a huge Amsterdam High School sports fan my entire life.

On Leap Day in 1948, a daughter was born to Mr. & Mrs. Anthony Safran who then lived on Prospect Street. I immediately recognized the parents’ names because they also were the Mom and Dad of two of the most superb athletes in Amsterdam High School history…

I’ve already started work on the second volume of “A Year’s Worth of Amsterdam Birthdays” and the Safran siblings’ complete story will be featured in it. I will be sharing the complete posts of some of the Volume II birthday celebrants in future issues of the Amsterdam Birthday Blog Newsletter. If you are not yet a newsletter subscriber, you can sign up for free here.