wartload

Jeez ... for all these years I pictured you as an ad in Parachutist!

Oohhh ... crap. Hate to get into this. "Tiny Broadwicke/Broadwick" (AKA Georgia Brown and Georgia Ann Thompson) began jumping from "smoke balloons" around 1908. Her real name was Georgia Ann Thompson, but she took on the name of "Tiny Broadwicke" (usually spelled "Broadwick") because she was very small and Broadwicke was the name of the promoter who gave her a start in the business. She was later married for a time to a Mr. Brown, but she was known as Tiny Broadwick for most of her adult life. All of her jumps were cord-assisted, with the cord either being attached to the balloon, the airplane, or to another parachute that she would cut away. She made about 2,000 jumps without a reserve (except for when she was doing an intentional cutaway). She was a parachutist, rather than a skydiver. She wasn't the first person to make a parachute jump in the US, or even the first woman to do so. She was, however, the first woman to make a parachute jump from an airplane in the US, and some argue that she was the first in the US of either sex to parachute from an airplane. Be that as it may, she was an incredible lady--one whose accomplishments need no embellishment. If you ever happen to go into a Walmart or other store that has a bin of cheap DVDs, look for a Groucho Marx "You Bet Your Life" episode and BUY IT! Even though it doesn't say so on the cover, one of the contestants shown was "Tiny."

Hardly the longest here, but I left the house outside Toledo, OH, one day, planning to go get lunch, and ended up having breakfast in Charleston, SC, instead. It was just sort of a whim.

Experienced it twice, with two different women. The first time, it was a turn on ... clearly something unusual, but ... ummm ... of a modest quantity. Pretty neat! The second time, it seemed like a bucketful. Everything got soaked. Too much like peeing the bed, and I don't happen to be into golden showers.

"Don't worry men! They can't hit us from this dist...." Civil War officer's last words--wish I could remember his name. "Hold my beer and watch this!" Last words of many a good ol' boy.

Woo-HOO! A Rogallo O-riginal!!

Ok ... in addition to the deer-smashed front end of the van (it can be fixed, and my no-deductible comprehensive covers Vixen strikes) I got a 4-color ballpoint pen that says, "Dad's" on it. When you know that your 8 year old picked it out and bought it with his own money, that's a great present!

The Navy Hymn (Eternal Father, strong to save...) but I grew up in a Navy family and also served.

Interesting! So far, females are indicating 3:1 that they enjoy having their end be a receiving end. I wouldn't have guessed that it would be that high a ratio. My own feeling about this is that it was interesting "pitching" for a woman the first few times that I did it, but any real interest in it now is only there if I know the recipient really wants it.

I got one of Santa's reindeer with my van. I think it was Vixen. Damage estimate is about $3,000. Vixen didn't suffer, at least, and I avoided a head-on by resisting the urge to swerve away from the impact.

Good idea, and I try to do it, but that ship has already sailed in the area where I live. There are no longer any of the following Mom & Pop owned businesses in the county, or within at least an hour's drive: Clothing store Shoe store Book store Grocery General merchandise Appliances Carpet Fabric Electronics The list could go on much farther!

Another thread made me curious about this. The poll refers only to anal sex between males and females. Respond only to the male questions if you are male, and female if you are female. I'm sure everyone knows what "pitching" and "catching" refer to. It's up to each of you to figure out how certain combinations might do either--you may well have experienced things that I haven't thought of.

That document needs to be provided to everyone at birth! Thanks!!!

Are you in Roanoke? I hope that you are able to get out of there quick! Next time, let people know that you are gonna be around BEFORE you get stuck somewhere!

I'd feel really guilty about this, but I've decided not to let someone else's notion of political correctness dictate how I conduct my life. It's still "our country," or "my country," no matter if I live in the U.S., the U.K., or wherever. And I'm sure that the big corps are trying to swallow up everything in everyone else's "our country," as well. If someone wants to know which "our country" I'm referring to, they can check my profile -- but I doubt that anyone else really cares enough to do so.

Since it seems inevitable that all commerce in our country will be swallowed up by mega-corporations who don't care about individual customers, does anyone else feel really let down when they get crap service from one of them? I've gotten great service from Amazon in the past, but this year I had a Christmas order that came late (ok ... really a FedEx problem), and the books were tossed into a box where they got beaten up and looked like they were used. You can't reach a real human on the phone anymore. The e-mail "help line" doesn't help. They send you a canned reply that shows that nobody read your message...and that takes 24-72 hours to receive. It comes across like a big "F___ Y__!! There are plenty more customers where you came from!!" Is it just me, or has anyone else gotten bummed out about this?

During the slow changeover from chest-mounted reserves to pig rigs, lots of RW jumps were organized so that people with similar gear would be on the same load. A nickname for a chest-mounted reserve was a "belly wart," so it wasn't unusual for someone, say in the later 1970s, to be putting together a "wart load."

Hell, yes! Here's another quick one ... I had to fly up to Fayetteville, WVA, to help a friend repair a broken wing on his plane. Since a couple of other mutual friends wanted to go, I invited them along. We ended up with Big John in the back seat of a tri-pacer, along with Duke in the front and a stack of guitars, mandolins, and banjos--along with some luggage--in the luggage compartment. We were gonna make a weekend party of it, and did so. Got the plane fixed, got the partying done, and couldn't resist the fact that the airport had a supply of 80 octane avgas (couldn't find it most places, older engines crapped up on 100LL, and the MOGAS STCs weren't out yet). Went ahead and filled up both tanks, applying the "we'll make it" principle. Takeoff roll took forever, but that was typical in that plane. Once off the ground, it climbed steeper than most. That's why the line of trees at the end of the runway weren't to scary looking ... at first. Besides, we were committed at that point. Finally broke ground and expected the plane to start its usual good rate of climb. It didn't. It wallowed toward the trees ... air not that dense in the mountains to begin with, and it was a hot day outside. Too much weight aboard. Ok. I'll aim at the very tops of the trees. If we can make it, we'll skim over them. If not, we'll hit the more "cushiony" part of the trees and worry about what happens next when it happens. The treetops barely slid by beneath the wheels. It was a fairly narrow band of woods, followed by the edge of the New River valley. Nose back down and down into the valley, followed by a painfully slow climb back out. At least we were heading in about the right direction. Duke, sitting in the front with me, said, "If I didn't know how good a pilot you are, that would have scared the shit out of me!" "Well, if you'd known how scared I was, we'd never have gotten the smell out of this plane." Looked in the back seat and Big John was sound asleep.

I dropped in on the Trinity club (sort of near High Point, if I recall--I would go by there between Raleigh and Charlotte area) once and made a jump there. At the time, it struck me as being less of a club than an operation built around one guy. There wasn't enough attraction to go back. The Wilson club was at the old Wilson airport, just north of town (between town and I-95). I never jumped with them, but some folks involved in a glider club there later told me that there'd been some friction between the groups, and suggested that the airport management had asked them to leave. Some other early NC Clubs: The club at Roanoke Rapids was my favorite -- when it was still a club that was run by members. Great bunch of people there! "Red Oak," on the property of Bud McLamb-- to the west of Rocky Mount, was another good club DZ. It was another fun/family club atmosphere. Mount Olive had a club made up of basically the same people who had formerly jumped at Big Daddy's seafood restaurant, sort of near Goldsboro. Earl Imes headed up those two. They were also places where you felt welcome and among people who were going to have a great time without doing stuff that was likely to get you killed. Some ECU students, and others, had a club that flew out of the Greenville airport and jumped into a dairy farm a bit to the east. When it broke up, one of the guys started his own DZ near Farmville, using some of the former club gear. There was a good club to the West of Jacksonville ... near Maysville?...for a time. Mostly Marines there. Pretty insane group, but fun place to be. Midland, NE of Charlotte, grew out of a club at the Mint Hill airport, if I recall correctly. It was another of the fun places with a club atmosphere. Some "bandit jumps" were made in Mooresville and Lake Norman in the early 70s.

How do you expect anyone to take your claims to be an engineer seriously? Quit spelling words correctly!

These two stories don't actually involve skydiving, but they may still be of interest to someone. Before I was drafted, in the late '60s, I attended a small college with a guy that I'll call "SS." A few years later we ran into each other again. He was working as a reporter/cameraman for a local TV station, and I was hustling a living doing whatever I could find--preferably involving flying or skydiving. He called me up one day and asked if I could fly him out to a remote lake, where a boat full of fishermen had capsized and the occupants were presumed drowned. As he told me what he knew of the story, I realized that one of the guys who was lost was an old acquaintance of mine. I agreed to fly SS out to the area, and then do an air search -- hopefully to find a survivor in the woods along the shore (unfortunately, none survived). There was a local crop duster's strip near the lake, but it wasn't on the charts. I knew "RG," the cropduster, but not all of the little strips that he used out in that part of the country. I called the local county sheriff's office and they told me to follow a canal that went north from the lake. There was a white building that served as a country store along the canal, and the runway was "...just across from the store." The sheriff would come pick up SS when we landed. Wanting to be able to fly low & slow, we took an Aeronca 7AC Champ (taildragger) for the flight. We shot some general footage above the lake, then buzzed the dock area to let the sheriff know that we were going to land. "Right across from the store" was one of the worst-looking landing strips I'd ever seen. It was short, narrow, had small trees growing on both sides, had powerlines across one end--but the store prevented flying under them. The canal ran along one side of it, and the other side went steeply down to a deep ditch. The surface was very coarse gravel. Dammit, I thought, if that crop duster can work out of that thing with a full load, I can sure get into it! I set up for it, slipping radically as I crossed the store and the powerlines...rolled out of the slip just above stall speed... lifted the left wing to avoid a small pine tree that was just a little too tall, then hit the brakes...sliding to a stop in the gravel just before the strip ended in a dropoff of several feet. We both had to get out of the plane, lift the tail, and rotate it around the main gear because the strip was too narrow to even think about turning the plane around. I taxied up to the store, shut off the engine, and said to the store owner (sitting on the front porch), " RG (the crop duster) has a bigger set of balls than I would have ever guessed! That strip is miserable! The guy yelled back to me, "Well, maybe he does, but RG uses the long grass strip behind the store. That place where you landed is just a gravel pile that the highway department keeps around." Second story ... SS called and said that there was a forest fire in another remote area. He wanted to film it for the 6 O'clock news. I called some guys that I knew who flew for the state forestry service and they told me where the fire was and what frequency their planes were using. The guys wouldn't mind the good press coverage. I rented a Grumman Tiger, so that we could slide back the bubble canopy and film forward and at an angle. As we got close to the area, I contacted the forestry service planes. They said that they were making a single-file run into the fire, and that we could just follow them. We slid back the canopy, got in line, and SS started rolling the camera as we dove toward the fire. I was concentrating on keeping where I was supposed to be, and on pulling up when we got down to the fire. The forestry planes looked like they were going almost right into it, so we would, too. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement that looked out of place. SS had taken off his seatbelt, so that he could lean out of the cockpit for a better shot. I reached out with one hand and grabbed the back of his belt, while pulling back on the yoke of the plane with the other. Just at the same time, we crossed over the fire. The hot air rising from the fire hit the plane hard from below, forcing it up, and sending SS and the camera nose down over the side. Fortunately, I had a good grip on his belt, so I was able to pull him back up enough that he was able to get into his seat again. I told him, rather impolitely, to put his seatbelt back on and leave it on ... which he did without complaint. The film turned out rather well!

They were called WASPS. I hope to hell that you got her to sign your logbook for that jump!

True. During a good bit of my earlier career we jumped at private clubs--sometimes literally into cow pastures. Lots of the folks were students and cash was tight. At first there wasn't a requirement to have USPA membership (insurance), and then the requirement only applied to those on student status. When there was a decision about forking over money for USPA membership, a license, or something else like that--versus using the money for a few more jumps--the jumps almost always won out. I'd been jumping for years before I wandered into Hartwood and Harry S. said that I had to fill out a USPA membership application and hand him the cash before I could jump there. There was also a subculture of savoir faire when it came to logging jumps. It sort of made someone seem a bit cool to jump purely for the pleasure of it. There was also an underlying message of, "I'm not going to ever have kids who will see my logbook, so why bother?" Besides, a *few* of the people who had big numbers of jumps logged managed to log some that nobody else remembered them making. It wasn't all that important.

Ok. I won't try to get you nekkid at the boat docks...but I'll still help them cheer on the nekkid dive.