Greenbriar marathon man to run for cancer group.
By: Leon Tovey
MONROE Like a lot of his neighbors at Greenbriar at Whittingham, Spencer Halper likes to play a round or two of golf each week. He’s not particularly good at it, he says, but he enjoys it just the same.
Like a lot of his neighbors, Mr. Halper drops by Greenbriar’s posh clubhouse a couple of times a week for a meal or the odd game of pinochle or poker. Like a lot of his neighbors, he heads to Florida each year with his wife just in time to escape New Jersey winters.
But unlike most of his neighbors, this year when he heads to Florida Mr. Halper, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Monday, will be preparing himself for the 2005 Disney World Marathon.
"I made up my mind to do a marathon at 70," said Mr. Halper, who started running at the age of 49 and ran his first marathon a year later. "I said to myself after that first one that ‘I’m going to try it every five years,’ so I was due."
While mulling over whether to run and if so, where, Mr. Halper said he received a letter from the Palm Beach chapter of the Team in Training program.
Team in Training is run by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a nonprofit health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services. The program provides training tips, fund-raising advice, and logistical support to people interested in participating in a sporting event on the society’s behalf.
Mr. Halper, who will be running for the society on Jan. 9 at Disney World in Orlando, lost his mother to Hodgkin’s disease in 1967. When diagnosed, his mother was given six to nine months to live, Mr. Halper said, but she survived for two years before succumbing to the disease.
In a letter Mr. Halper sent out to his Greenbriar neighbors in order to solicit sponsors for his run, he said that she might have lived to see all of her grandchildren if she had had the benefits of modern medicine.
Mr. Halper said his goal is to raise at least $3,300 for the society. With about 50 percent of the more than 1,600 letters he sent out to his neighbors returned, Mr. Halper said he has raised $2,200 in sponsorship money so far. He also has compiled a list of 17 people given to him by his donors in whose memory he will run. He will wear the list around his neck in a plastic bag on the day of the run. He also will be running in memory of his own mother and father.
Mr. Halper’s wife, Gladys, said that while she admires the cause, she is apprehensive about her husband’s participation in the upcoming marathon. She said that although her husband has been running marathons for a long time, she worries more now than she used to.
"Even though he doesn’t want to acknowledge it, he is going to be 70," Ms. Halper said Sept. 1 in a voice that was equal parts worry and acceptance.
She seemed resigned to the fact that, as the saying goes, boys will be boys even at the age of 70.
"She worries when she sees some of these people go golfing one afternoon and don’t come back," Mr. Halper said later that day, out of earshot of his wife.
For her part, Ms. Halper recalled with residual anger the worry she felt when, after her husband finished the New York Marathon in 1999, they missed each other at the finish line in Central Park.
"My daughter and I checked every First Aid station on the route," she said of her frantic search.
Mr. Halper, in the meantime, had given up on trying to find his family and, with no way to contact them, decided to take the train home.
"I rode all the way to New Brunswick wrapped in one of those little tin foil blankets they give you at the end of the race," he said, a mischievous glint in his eyes. "When I got there, I gave her a call."
Ms. Halper found the incident less amusing. When she got the call that her husband was home safe, she said, she was "quite angry." But in spite of her trepidation, Ms. Halper said she plans to meet her husband at the finish line in Orlando.
Mr. Halper said he gets between five and 12 letters a day, all of them with contributions. With three months left until the race, it looks like Mr. Halper will meet his goal, but he pointed out that he would be more than happy to exceed it.
Anyone interested in co-sponsoring his run can mail a contribution (checks payable to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society) to Spencer Halper, 15 Ardsleigh Place, Monroe, N.J. 08831.