Woman Celebrates 95th Birthday on Harley

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Woman Celebrates 95th Birthday on Harley

Wed Aug 18,10:38 PM ET

MISSOULA, Mont. - A woman celebrated her 95th birthday with a ride around her neighborhood on a motorcycle. Marsha Fowler helped her stepmother, Helen Self, into a leather jacket, gloves, chaps and a black helmet for her birthday ride on the back of Dwayne Fowler's Harley Davidson hog.

"I tried to keep it fairly upright on the turns," Fowler said after the ride. "Don't want to scare her, or she might not ride again next year."

Self declared the ride "wonderful."

She knew the motorcycle ride was coming, but didn't know a reporter and photographer would be there to document it.

"She's worried it's going to be in the paper that she's 95," said Fowler, of Wasilla, Alaska. "She told her boyfriend she's only 91."

Self is the mother of two children, stepmother to four more and has five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. She has outlived three husbands.

Self lives with a granddaughter, Diane Gunter.

"She does all the laundry for seven of us, cooks all the dinners, I am totally spoiled" Gunter said. "She told me she was taking today off because it was her birthday, so I cooked for the first time in I don't know how long. She told me it wasn't half bad."

Gunter said Self isn't your typical sit-in-a-rocking chair grandmother.

"She has an 85-year-old gentleman friend who picks her up and off they go," Gunter said. "She says out late, I sit up worrying."

Self was born in Hamilton in 1909, the youngest of nine children. She moved to Missoula at age 16 and was the first nurse's aid in Missoula, working at the old Northern Pacific Hospital.

She has one brother still alive, Joe Chesnutt of Hamilton.

"He'll be 99 in January," Self said. "We've got a contest going. We're trying to outlive each other."

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Information from: Missoulian, http://www.missoulian.com

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