They’re Off Their Rockers--and Love It
Pamela Boyd waited more than half a century before she tried bungee jumping, and she’ll probably wait a while longer before taking the dive again.
The 57-year-old Lakeside woman plummeted in perfect form 143 feet straight down off the Kawarau Bridge in New Zealand last summer and lived to tell about it.
Now she’s the cover girl on Senior World magazine and the pride of the Off Your Rockers, a local club for active people older than 50 who are young inside. The Rockers are doing all the things they have dreamed about doing but never had the time for in their younger years.
Boyd later confessed to fellow Rocker Terry Hickey that she held her breath all during her daring dive and only let it out after the elastic bungee cord gently arrested her free-fall, 5 feet above the river.
“I was on a high all the rest of the day. It was a hoot,” Boyd said of her waterless dive. “I’ve never done it before, and no, I doubt if I’ll do it again any time soon.”
The Rockers include both marrieds and singles from throughout San Diego County who have a variety of interests, none of which can be satisfied at a singles bar or a health spa. The Rockers like outdoors sports--golfing, skiing, hiking, wind-surfing, tennis, sailing--and a dozen other club activities. If it’s not on the list of activities, chances are that the Rockers will add it and recruit the person who proposed it as its organizer.
There are no rules or regimentation. Membership costs $25 a year, and members pay their own tab to participate in whatever interests them, joining in on as many or as few as they please. Not everything involves outdoorsmanship. There are theater parties, TGIF get-togethers, potluck dinners, bridge games and a recent Super Bowl party at Pamela Boyd’s Lakeside home.
Boyd and her husband joined the gang quite a few years ago but dropped out because they lacked the time to participate. Then, after her husband’s death four years ago, Boyd rejoined, “because I found myself getting too isolated, working in my garden and staying around the house.”
Estelle Womack of La Mesa also dropped out the first time she entered the club, and for the same reason.
“I was frustrated. I’d get their newsletters with all these great activities going on, and I’d be missing them,” said Womack, then an elementary school principal. When she retired, she signed up again and has been on the go ever since.
Dick Rothfus, a retired airline pilot now living in Rancho Bernardo, thought up the double-entendre name of Off Your Rockers for the local group.
Rothfus and his wife, Sally, ex-president of the local club, are the only members in memory who met through the club and later married. “I slept with 15 single women once,” bragged the Rev. Richard Goodheart, another Rancho Bernardo resident. Before the National Inquirer arrives to do an expose’ on the Presbyterian minister, he hastens to add that it was on a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon and there were two other married couples besides Goodheart and his wife . . . and 15 single women.
The women used Goodheart’s snores as an auditory beacon to guide them back to their sleeping bags when they lost their way in the dark.
One thing the Off Your Rockers is not, members agree, is a senior singles club. The women outnumber the men almost two to one, “and the good ones are all married,” a divorcee commented. “Anyway, it’s the activities we’re interested in, not the opposite sex. We all look alike on the ski slopes.” The members used to belong to an international organization called the Over the Hill Gang Ski Club. But the San Diego county contingent broke off from the bigger group in December to form Off Your Rockers.
The international group “raised the dues and put in a couple of rules that we couldn’t agree with,” said Hickey, ad hoc president of the local group. “The main thing was that the international puts on the dog and is a profit-making organization. We think we do it better and cheaper on a local level.”
Other local Rockers complained about the international’s change in policy from “a fun group” to “a regimented organization,” with rules and regulations and even a “leadership training course.”
Sally Rothfus said the international group changed its charter to require all Over the Hill Gang chapters to subscribe to the mother group’s liability insurance policy, “which we were all in favor of.”
“But, because of the insurance, the international said we couldn’t invite non-members to any of our activities. We couldn’t do that. That’s the way we recruit new members. We invite them to join in a golf game or come to one of our parties to meet us and see what we’re like,” she said.
The local club took a poll of its members last year, and 100 voted to go it alone. Only four favored sticking with Over the Hill.
“We lost about eight members in the breakup,” Rothfus said, and a few of the locals opted to remain members of both groups. After the dust cleared Jan. 1, the newly named Off Your Rockers had more than 200 members, ranging in age from their 50s to their 80s.
Three or four of the Off Your Rockers are travel agents who compete with each other to offer the lowest prices and the most interesting junkets. Although ski trips are the order of the current season, trips to Hawaii, the Caribbean and Mexico have been on the group’s agenda, usually at about half the price of an advertised group tour.
For example, they spent a week in Maui, in oceanfront condos, surfing, snorkeling and sightseeing, all for under $500 per person, air fare included.
Mary Ann Tardiff, an Encinitas “golf widow” because of her husband’s retirement avocation, has no problem finding Off Your Rockers to join her on the ski slopes. She organizes short ski jaunts to nearby slopes almost every week.
“I think that’s what I like the best about the club, the companionship of people our own age and with the same interests who are ready to go at a moment’s notice,” Tardiff said. “That’s what retirement’s all about.”
The Over the Hill Gang Ski Club was formed in the early ‘70s by three older ski instructors in Vail, Colo., who wanted to attract over-50 skiers back to the slopes by supplying them with companions of their own age group to ski with.
The local Over the Hill Gang chapter was started in 1983 by the late Gemma Parks of Solana Beach. Parks, who died of cancer in 1988, raised the club from a handful of North County skiers to a countywide coalition of more than 200 members interested in almost everything.
The club has activities scheduled around the calendar, ranging from bridge to boccie ball, beach parties to balloon rides. Most of the members joined for the skiing, but dabble in the other sports and activities.
“We always have a big turnout at the parties,” Pamela Boyd said. “Some of the people come to the parties that I’ve never seen at anything else. Some of them don’t even ski.”
This winter, with near-perfect ski conditions nearby, club members are taking off for impromptu outings almost daily, and a long-distance expedition monthly. One man in the club learned to ski at 74 and is still at it in his 80s.
“It doesn’t matter how well or how badly you do something, as long as you enjoy it,” Hickey said. “There’s a group you’ll fit into even if you never skied before.”
When spring thaws arrive, the agenda will change but the dedicated golfers and tennis players will keep up their pace.
La Jolla attorney Dan O. Henry summed up the attraction of the Rockers as “the people, an interesting bunch of people.” Henry, who was born in 1911 but describes himself as “holding at 64,” learned to ski about 20 years ago after he retired from a 39-year career as a New York City Boy Scout executive and began his second career as a lawyer, “where I could be my own boss.”
He was searching around for a San Diego ski club three years ago when he hit upon the then-Over the Hill Gang and went along on a mid-week ski trip to Big Bear. “I joined them mainly because these are fun people, interesting to be with,” he said. He and his wife, Robbie, also join in the group’s other activities, including Dan Henry’s favorite, Thank God It’s Friday get-togethers.
“It’s like a cafeteria line,” he said of the club. “I just go along picking out what I like at a time that I can do it. It’s wonderful.”