Wayne Burg has had his share of adventures in his nine decades on the planet.
He chased humpback whales in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, the narrow sea between the Mexican mainland and Baja California, a body of water Jacques Cousteau dubbed “the aquarium of the world.”
He and a friend paddled into a pod of humpbacks, but they couldn’t see them. The water, for some reason, was black, and you couldn’t see two inches below the surface, he said. Suddenly, a humpback breached the surface of the placid water not 10 feet from their two-man kayak.
“We were that close to being dunked in the sea,” Burg said, laughing.
He’s cross-country skied in Yellowstone during the winter, slogging through a foot and a half of fresh snow, when the group encountered a herd of bison. It was so cold, though, that the bison paid them no never mind, burrowing into the snow in search of fresh grass to sustain them. Now and then, mice would leap from the voids in the snowpack, only to be snagged by quick-footed coyotes.
He endured survival training in Escalante in southern Utah when he was about 50, learning to live off the land on a solo excursion into the wilderness, “going to bed with the coyotes serenading you.” He said, “I lost 10 pounds on that trip.”
Now that he’s 90, he was thinking about the next adventure. He recalled that the elder former President George H.W. Bush, marked his 80th birthday by skydiving.
He thought, “Why not?”
So at an age that you would think a person should know better, he is preparing to jump out of a perfectly fine airplane.
From football to cigars
Burg is an affable man who seems younger than he is. Upon first meeting him, you would never think he was 90. He is energetic and has a quick wit. Laughing comes easy for him.
He was born in Felton, but his family moved to Red Lion when he was a kid. His parents were restaurateurs; they owned Burg’s Diner between Craley and Felton, a popular spot in that corner of York County. (They also ran restaurants in Eastern Market and in the Farmers Market in York, famous for their baked chicken pie and other Pennsylvania specialties.)
Burg graduated from Red Lion Area Senior High School in 1954. After a two-year stint in the Army, serving in Germany, he enrolled at Shippensburg University, where he was involved in student government, was president of his fraternity, Sigma Tau Gamma, and was captain of the football team. He played fullback. “I wasn’t very good, but I was good enough to play,” he said.
After graduating in 1961, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He tried a number of jobs – selling replacement windows and partnering in a delivery service, ADS Courier. He married his college sweetheart, which lasted 11 years before dissolving.
He found his niche with C. Fehrenbach and Company, developing commercial and residential real estate projects. He worked on projects in the Shrewsbury area, developing fields where he hunted small game – rabbit and pheasant – when he was a kid.
He and a partner later built the radio station that would become Starview 92, a legendary rock station before it was sold to a corporate broadcast chain. Burg loves music, but his taste runs toward big band and classical. He and his partner sold the station a couple of years after building it.
A few years later, Burg met a woman from Bavaria, Ermelinde. She was a manager for Victoria’s Secret, a very successful woman who had three children from a previous marriage. They traveled extensively, he said, often going to Germany to visit Ermelinde’s large family. (She had 21 nieces and nephews.)
A lot of people know Burg from business and from his passion for playing bocce. He played for years in the league formed at Victor’s Italian Restaurant on Ogontz Street, winning a number of championships.
Burg is what you’d call kind of retired. He still has a business in York, one that came out of his long enjoyment of good cigars. He’s been smoking cigars for about 40 years, always seeking out a good smoke. About 15 years ago, he teamed up with local businessman and fellow cigar aficionado John Kindig to open a cigar shop. It’s not a run-of-the-mill cigar purveyor. They import cigars from the Dominican Republic, hand-rolled with aged tobacco, some aged as much as 35 years. Like wine, scotch or bourbon, aging the tobacco mellows the final product, he said. The cigars made with aged tobacco have no aftertaste and are smooth and mild, with aromatic smoke, he said.
The shop, Casta Fine Cigars in the 100 block of East King Street, in Royal Square, sells cigars that range in price from $8 to $35. The shop provided hundreds of cigars for both of former Gov. Tom Wolf’s inaugurations. (Wolf does not smoke cigars, as far as Burg knows.)
This year, he moved from his house in York County into an apartment in the 1,400-acre retirement community at Masonic Village in Elizabethtown. The place is beautiful, landscaped lawns with lush gardens and walking paths. The massive main building, built in 1911 by Italian stone masons, looms over the grounds. The apartment buildings and townhomes are all built in the same style. It’s like living in a resort, Burg said. His wife, who has dementia, resides in one of the complex’s memory care units.
“It’s a very friendly place,” Burg said. To be fair, Burg seems like the kind of person who, if dropped into any city in the world, would have friends within 15 minutes.
He wanted to do something to show his new neighbors that just because they’re old, it doesn’t mean they have to stop living.
‘Why am I doing this?’
The former president’s skydive got him thinking. “That’s a pretty good achievement for a guy who’s 80 years old,” he said. “Maybe I can try that.”
He never got around to doing it, though.
That changed. “Now that I’m 90, I thought it might be fun to do it,” he said.
He checked it out and you can get a tandem jump – one where you are strapped to an experienced skydiver, just along for the ride – at the Maytown Airport, a small, grass airstrip in eastern Lancaster County. The airstrip has a jump school and offers tandem jumps for $400. A bonus, he said, is that very little instruction and training is necessary to take a tandem jump.
“I’ve always been an adventurous guy anyway,” he said.
It is an adventure, but he doesn’t believe it’s extremely dangerous. The only thing is giving up control. “To do this, you put yourself completely at the, I don’t want to say mercy, but you put yourself in the hands of someone else because they’re the experts,” he said. “It’s the same as flying in an airliner. You put yourself in the hands of the pilots.”
So the question is, “Why am I doing this?”
He wants to show his new neighbors that anything is possible.
“Everybody goes through life and has things they wanted to do but never did,” he said. “If I can encourage a few people because of what I’m doing at my age to try something – ride in a hot air balloon or go kayaking – that’s what it’s about. There are a lot of things people can do at an advanced age if they have the gumption to do it.”
And then, of course, there is one other reason: “Why not?”
‘Finding joy in life’
The jump also answers a question that he posed to himself.
“When I got to be 90, there’s the question, ‘What did you learn with all that experience? What did you really learn from all of this?’” he said. “That’s hard to answer in a few words.”
He figures you need to have four things in your life – aside from love – to live with joy and happiness: nature, music, humor and God.
“When you’re around nature, you’re happy,” he said. “When you listen to music, you’re happy. When you’re laughing, you’re happy. It’s all about finding joy in life. That’s where I am now.”
And that’s why, on Saturday, Aug. 15, he will be jumping out of a perfectly fine airplane.
