by Lois Szymanski
Everybody gets lost from time to time. Several Carroll residents with bucket lists say that having a bucket list allows them to get lost in the adventure of personal exploration.
Earlier this year, Finksburg resident Scott Blecman watched his grandfather fulfill a bucket-list item days before his 100th birthday when he threw out the opening pitch for the Orioles baseball game on Memorial Day.
Scott’s grandfather, Bob Strausberg, says, “I was asked when I was 98, ‘Grandpa, what will you do for your 100th birthday?’ Almost in jest, I said, ‘I want to throw out the ball at an Orioles game.’ My daughter grabbed the ball, so to speak. They were going to do it on my birthday on June 10. Then, two days before Memorial Day, they asked if I would do it on Memorial Day since I am a World War II vet. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that,’ so it came to pass.”
His grandson remembers the day with excitement. “It was a magical moment,” Blecman says.
“At the game, my mom and her brother walked him out onto the mound with his walker, which he did not want to use. When they got there, he pushed the walker away and motioned to my mom and his brother to step away. He did this big wind-up, and the crowd cheered. Then he let it rip. He threw it right down the middle! It did bounce one time, but it went right into the catcher’s glove!”
Blecman said his grandfather had all three of his children with him at the ballgame and all but one of his nine grandchildren there. Several of his nine great-grandchildren were also present. Strausberg says he has fulfilled most of his lifelong goals, but he and his wife have one more to achieve. “Jackie and I are waiting on the birth of our 10th great-grandchild,” he says. “That’s our next bucket-list item.”
Keeping History Alive
As a Civil War reenactor and history buff, Nancy Householder of Silver Run has a very specific bucket list. “I want to visit all of the Civil War battlefields in the USA,” she says. “A couple of years ago, I found this book that lists all the Civil War battlefields. It’s like a travel book, but you can write the date you visited, and it has questions about what you liked and a spot for notes. I’ve been using that book.”
As a member of the Pipe Creek Civil War Roundtable in Carroll County, Householder has loved history since childhood. She said that moving to Carroll County in 1983 and being close to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, ignited a new interest in the Civil War. “I’ve been to Ball’s Bluff battlefield and Ball’s Bluff National Cemetery outside Leesburg, Virginia,” she says. “I’ve been to Fredericksburg and the Manassas National Battlefield Park and the Antietam and Monocacy battlefields. Two years ago, I went to Tennessee and saw the Franklin Battlefield and Stones River National Battlefield. I was there with the Civil War Trust conference.”
Taking her adult children along with her on several trips has fostered an interest in history for them, Householder says, and that’s a bonus reason for keeping a bucket list.
“Friends ask, ‘Why would you want to go see those locations for a bucket list? That’s boring ol’ history!’ I say, ‘Yes, this is history, but this is all about people and how they fought and survived in the biggest war of survival for this country.’ To me, it is not just names, dates and places. This is about how people lived, what happened to them and how they survived, and that is not boring.”
A ‘Traveling Bucket List’
Joanne Bowen of Uniontown said that, as a teenager, her family had a camper, and they traveled to places many of her friends could not see. New Hampshire, the White Mountains and the Smokey Mountains were a few of her favorites. After she married her husband, Aaron, they continued to travel and camp with their two children at the beach and in the mountains.
By 2009, Bowen had started a list that she calls her “traveling bucket list.” The list has so many locations that she doubts she will be able to check them all off, but it also includes activities such as parasailing, white water rafting and whale watching.
“A big one was Alaska, and we did that last summer,” she says. “It was our first cruise. It was magical. We could see chunks of ice in the water at Glacier Bay. It was a dream come true for me.”
She and her husband share a love for nature and history. Bowen says she wants to go to South Dakota next. They want to see Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park and the Needles Highway, all in the Black Hills area. There are at least 20 more locations on her list. She scrapbooks, using her photos to preserve the memories.
When asked why she thinks a bucket list is essential, 56-year-old Bowen didn’t hesitate to answer. “I guess if you write something down, it makes it more real, and you are more apt to do it,” she says. “It is like a wish list. When you finish it, you check it off. A lot of memories go into it, and you learn a lot through your experiences.”
Big Goals For A Bucket List
Lisa Maempel of Hampstead says she has had a bucket list of sorts since she was a teen, but she didn’t get serious about it until she and her husband started planning their retirement. Then, she lost her husband suddenly in January 2023.
“Harry was my favorite person in the whole wide world. He was just 54 when he passed. After that, it became my mission to get our bucket-list items checked off the list,” she says. “He wanted to go to Iceland, so on his birthday in 2024, I went to Iceland. I took his ashes, and I spread some of them there.”
She said she had wanted to go on a safari, and they were going to do that on their 25th anniversary, but they didn’t make it, so she is going in December. “I am going to Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia for 3 1/2 weeks. Trust me, he will be with me on that trip as well,” she says.
Maempel says that when she was younger, she wanted to visit the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and she achieved that goal in her late 20s, but she still has many more goals on her list. They aren’t all destinations. “Some of the things I want to do don’t even cost a lot,” she says. “I want to learn how to crochet, and I’d love to learn sign language. I want to visit all 50 states. There are so many little things I want to do. I want to learn how to prune fruit trees. I want to broaden my horizons.”
People often walk around with blinders on, Maempel notes. “They don’t take the time to look at things from a different perspective. I don’t want to be that person. I want to look forward to things. You never know when you won’t have it.” While she is plowing headfirst into her list, expecting to accomplish just about everything on it, there is one thing she is not quite sure she will achieve.
“I would love to meet Elton John before I die,” she says with a laugh, “but I probably never will. I have said that for years. I have seen him in concert 10 to 12 times. That is one thing on my bucket list I am not sure I will get to do.”
Other things she has accomplished include seeing a moose in the wild in New Hampshire, holding a koala, feeding a flamingo, kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland and laying wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery.
Maempel says she thinks everyone should have a bucket list. “You just never know when something is going to happen,” she says. “I say, if I get eaten by a lion in Africa, I will have died doing exactly what I wanted to do.”
