Former Ms. Senior Nebraska treks across country for music education

Patricia Starr seems to be having a hard time hearing my every word. It could be the air conditioner on full blast, the fan overhead or the internal fan of my overheated MacBook, which is recording the conversation. That's a lot of extraneous noise, but it's also the dog days of summer, and I'm not about to turn anything off.  

So the former Ms. Senior Nebraska has to ask again what it is I just said: "What are your biggest roadblocks in trying to bike across the country?"

"I'm sorry, what is the what?"

"What are the biggest difficulties in trying to bike across the country?"

"First of all, finding a place to do it."  

Yes, because the best roads are reserved for, well, driving. That means Starr, 74 years old, pedaled more than 1,000 miles on fairly harsh terrain during the month of July. Maybe the heat for me isn't quite so unbearable. Her husband and traveling mate Gabriel Starr said taking care of his wife is a full-time job.

"I'm making sure she stays alive, has food, water, nutritional stuff," he said. "She's hypoglycemic, so she drops real fast if she doesn't get what she needs."

But Starr says that's not what holds her up. It's the law that can keep her from riding.

"Sometimes we find some other roads that look like, ‘Oh, we've got this wonderful shoulder' and you can just take off. And the patrolman in the state behind said you could ride on that when you get there. So I go zooming off and pretty soon there's a policeman behind me that says, ‘Lady, you can't ride here,'" she said.

Starr isn't accidentally flouting state laws just to get in shape, either. She's biking as a way to give back to music education, which has helped her down the road this far. She started playing piano as a child and got her first gig teaching and playing organ at 13 in her hometown of Wahoo, Neb. She said a music scholarship allowed her to attend college. Since then, she's been singing, directing and teaching — playing piano, organ and trombone whenever she can.

"Many musicians have to keep their day jobs in order to be a musician, but because I had training in so many different areas, I have been able to put them all together and just make them work for me for a lifetime," she said. "Now it's my turn to do something else and to do something for somebody."

This is Starr's third road trip for music education. The first scholarship she traveled across the states for was sponsored by the Santa Barbara (California) City College in 2004. Her second bike ride took her from Wahoo to Atlantic City, where she competed for Ms. Senior America. It was then in 2008 that she started honoring two $500 scholarships annually to student musicians at Wahoo High School. This year, she continued those trips by going from the International Peace Gardens at the Canadian border in North Dakota to Ohio, where she played at the largest free music festival in the state this past weekend. All in all, she has raised more than $14,000 for Wahoo High School, but recently, her focus has shifted from pioneering her scholarship to inspiring others to start their own.

She has done this by playing with New Horizons bands all across the country, which feature musicians older than 50. She hopes those members will follow her example. And while she's now back home in Wahoo — though the temperature may keep rising through August — Patricia Starr will be out on the road again sometime soon, her husband said. And he'll be right by her side.

"She rides that bicycle like she plays her music," he said. "Once she gets out on it, she just feels like a free little bird. So the bigger the hill, the more she conquers it. She's amazing. So I just feel very blessed that I'm married to her, and I hope that lots of other people get to meet her because all who do will love her. They all do."