Guys gals...can you help me out

[shah269 0]

I think some one is yanking my chain.
That 60 min episode last night with the wing suit BASE jumpers.
I have this old guy telling me he was BASE jumping in 1979......1979? Was the equipment good enough for BASE jumping back then?

Here is a part of the email I got

First and only Building was the Sears Tower in Chicago. First and only Antenna was next, WCIX TV tower in Homestead. First Span was New River Gorge in West Virginia. I've also jumped Royal Gorge in Colorado. First Earth was Angel Falls in Venezuela. Also Beachy Head in England, Preikestolen and Trollveggen in Norway, Kalaupapa in Hawaii, Half Dome in Yosemite, Mount Thor and Mount Asgard on Baffin Island in Canada, and a few more I can't recall right now. I've jumped cliffs around Forio, Italy, Palofrugal, Spain, and Cost Rica. I've also jumped off a few boom cranes and a rail crane in a shipyard. I had a death wish at the time. Never so much as a bruise or scratch. My last jump of any kind was in 1979.

I'm thinking the old man forgot his medication. But I could be wrong, which would be very cool!
Thanks!

PS
he says he was also doing HALO and HAHO jumps.....again in the 70's?

Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools!

[skybytch 259]

You're wrong.

[shah269 0]

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You're wrong.

Cool! Well then maybe the old dude isn't so out of his freaking mind after all!

Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools!

[JohnMitchell 14]

Was it possible back then? Yes.

Was it this guy that did it? Dunno.

Did he do all those ones he said? Dunno.

[shah269 0]

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Was it possible back then? Yes.

Was it this guy that did it? Dunno.

Did he do all those ones he said? Dunno.

Just sounds like a very impressive list of jumps. Especially for the late 70's.
Between just getting to some of these places such as Angel Falls and the equipment that was available? Just sounds a little bit of a stretch.

Life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

The only thing that falls from the sky is birdshit and fools!

[NovaTTT 1]

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Just sounds like a very impressive list of jumps. Especially for the late 70's. (snip) Just sounds a little bit of a stretch.

Skydiving and parachuting have been around for a long time, but fixed-object parachuting predates skydiving and parachuting.

I would recommend researching the ancient history of parachuting and skydiving, if you're interested.

Start with Twardo!

Nova



Edited to add "parachuting"

"Even in a world where perfection is unattainable, there's still a difference between excellence and mediocrity." Gary73

[councilman24 36]

HALO report available on line.

OPERATIONAL TEST AND EVALUATION OF
High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) Parachute Techniques
X
.C673
1964
lU i ) K
1>D- IRA B
November 1964
HEADQUARTERS
TACTICAL AIR COMMAND
United States Air Force
Langley Air

A link to some history.
http://www.basicresearch.com/base_history.htm

Just because your new doesn't mean this stuff is.

It does sound like a long list for one person. There may be one or two people that COULD have done it. But almost certainly it was all done at some time. Before 1979. Remember, a lot of it was outlaw and NOT made public. Actually Angel Falls may not have been done that early. Couldn't find a reference to the first one.

And yes, the equipment was good enough.

I'm old for my age.
Terry Urban
D-8631
FAA DPRE

[JohnMitchell 14]

Quote

http://www.basicresearch.com/base_history.htm

Made a clicky for ya, Terry.
How's things down at Hobby? I see you on radar all the time.

[NickDG 23]

He certainly knows the BASE circuit well enough not to be some wacko making it all up. But the 1979 date does sound a bit early for someone to have jumped all those particular sites. But I'm starting to get dates wrong too as I get older.

I'll guess and say it may be Ron Boyles who I know jumped the Royal Gorge bridge in 1975, or Owen Quinn who jumped the World Trade Center Towers that same year.

The gear issue isn't relevant. The sport didn't make a full transition to "BASE gear" until after 1990. Up until then a lot of us were still B.A.S.E. jumping with slightly "modified" skydiving gear. It wasn't until a few years later that using skydiving gear for BASE became universally accepted as "stupid."

If the above names aren't right you can PM me the fellow's name. I'm sure I'd know it if he was indeed that active in that time period. In those days (the late 70's) BASE wasn't the underground activity it would became later. In those early days everyone thought BASE would be embraced as just another really cool thing we humans came up with. But by the mid-80s we realized that wasn't the case and the sport went underground for about the next 15 years.

I'll give you a very short BASE time-line so you'll understand it better . . .

Parachutes were invented long before airplanes and some of the first test jumps were done from fixed objects. In fact the original idea for the modern parachute was to escape fire in tall stone towers that were springing up all over Europe in the 16th century. Of course we don't have any photographic evidence for these jumps, but there are many written accounts of them being witnessed. Between then and the 1970s many one-off fixed object parachute jumps were made. (The sport wasn't called “BASE” until Carl Boenish named it that in 1981).

Here's just a few of them. Fredrick Law, a New York steeplejack, parachuted from the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and a Wall Street Bank building in 1912. In the 1930s a Milwaukee airplane mechanic made a parachute jump indoors from the rafters of a blimp hangar. In the very early sixties a Dentist jumped from a cliff in the Italian Dolomites. And in 1966 Mike Pelkey and Brian Schubert jumped El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

Up until this point these jumps were seen as stunts and little else. It took sometime for us to see them as very significant to BASE history.

In 1975 Carl Boenish, who was a well known and respected skydiving cinematographer, is in Yosemite Valley to film some friends parachuting from hang gliders. While he waited in the valley he looked up at the shear granite walls around him and recalled hearing about the Pelkey/Schubert jump 9-years earlier. One big difference was now we had square parachutes and for Carl it was one of those bingo moments. “We could jump here,” he thought, “and we could do it over and over again.” This marked the very moment fixed object jumping made the leap from “stunt” to repeatable act.

It took Carl three years, until 1978, to make the many recon trips to the top of El Cap, and to assemble a four man team to actually make the leaps. On one of those recon trips Carl lowered himself over the edge of El Cap until he could see straight down. He was out of sight to the others on top but they heard him yell, “Eureka! We can jump here!” While we call Carl Boenish “the father of modern B.A.S.E. jumping” he didn't make the leap himself until the second expedition to El Cap. He can be forgiven for that as first and foremost, as a cinematographer, his first priority was getting good film in the can.

The four men chosen were a four-way skydiving team from Lake Elsinore. Chosen really isn't the right word here. Carl was turned down flat by many of the first jumpers he approached. It was just too knucklehead an idea to most “experienced” skydivers of the day. Carl was also looking for jumpers who could keep quiet about it for the few months it would take to get the film ready for presentation. One of the jumpers was Tom Start, a fellow I was jumping with at Elsinore at the time. And to this day how he kept the secret is beyond me.

So in August of 1978 the four, one by one, trotted off the rounded brow of El Cap, tracked away for tens seconds, opened their square parachutes, and landed in the meadow below. Easy peasy nice and easy!

A few months later Carl showed the film of the El Cap jumps for the very first time at Lake Elsinore. I was there and remember getting ready to leave after a sunset load, but word was Carl was premiering a new film that night, and at the time, that wasn't something to be missed. So I grabbed a beer and sat down to watch. I'm sure Carl wondered, at least a little bit, how it would be received. But to say it went over big is very understated. We were absolutely floored!

And that was the very night the sport of B.A.S.E. jumping was born.

One big and very important reason for that is the following. Up until that point being a skydiver meant being connected to a dropzone, being connected to airplanes, being connected to the USPA and the FAA. But to our “hippie” mindset we wanted nothing more than freedom! And here is was! Carl Boenish was handing us our freedom on a plate!

And as Carl's film made the rounds from DZ to DZ around the world the word spread. At first fixed object jumping, as it was called then, was pretty much all cliff jumping, both here in the States and to a smaller extent in Europe. It really wasn't until the 1980s that other objects were starting to be jumped by this latest crop of new fixed object jumpers. Phil Smith in Texas started jumping antenna towers. And this marked another milestone in modern BASE history. Up until then El Cap didn't actually seem that crazy because it was high enough that you still had a shot at a reserve parachute. But Phil figured if you were willing to forgo a reserve than a whole spectrum of new objects suddenly became jumpable. So after that it was buildings getting jumped too and this was when we started sneaking around in the middle of the night.

This is when the problems between skydiving and fixed object jumping began to surface. It wasn't so much the illegality of it all, it was fixed object jumping being in its infancy, and regularly making the newspapers for spectacular mishaps.

And local reporters would automatically run to the nearest DZ for a comment. It needs to be understood we didn't see fixed object jumping as a separate sport from skydiving. We saw these jumps as just “extra-special” like night, water, or demo jumps, just really another form of skydiving. But we were wrong about that and it took us many years, and unfortunately many lives, to learn that most important lesson.

So DZO's would give their comments to reporters from the standpoint of people trying to protect their businesses. “Oh, those Bozo's aren't skydivers like us, those guys are assholes!” Then the USPA after a brief flirtation with legal jumps at El Cap, sided with the DZOs and banned any mention of B.A.S.E. jumping in PARACHUTIST and officially made the statement that BASE was not sport parachuting. And that ban lasted over twenty years.

It's sort of ironic the powers that be saw BASE and skydiving as too different things before we did. But they were just distancing themselves from the bad press. What we learned as time went by was BASE is indeed a new and different sport, with it's own rules, techniques, and equipment. You can still say they are sister sports, but that's about it. And B.A.S.E. jumping with only skydiving knowledge can easily kill you.

But now we didn't care what anyone on the DZ thought. If B.A.S.E. jumping wasn't going to be accepted we were going to do it anyway. The genie was out of the lamp and there was no re-corking it. Carl started the first BASE magazine and in 1982 when he and Phil Smith started jumping buildings in earnest he came up with the acronym “BASE” for the four objects they were now jumping. And forever more the sport would be known as B.A.S.E. jumping.

And it wasn't until 1982 that a Lake Elsinore skydiving rig manufacturer named Jim Handbury built the first two Velcro closed single container BASE rigs for Carl and Jean Boenish. The funny thing about Jim is, even though he was building popular skydiving rigs at the time (the Handbury rig) he never actually had a rigger's ticket himself. But it mattered little. In those days it took more than a piece of paper from the government to make you "locally respected."

In the mid-80s when I felt experienced enough to actually start B.A.S.E. jumping myself the war between the sports was in full fury. I was already making my living as a skydiving instructor and I, and others across the country, had to keep our nocturnal pursuits to ourselves. Being outted as a B.A.S.E. jumper on the DZ could easily mean losing your job. It was that bad.

So for about the next ten years BASE went almost totally underground. We banded together, became the air pirates, hoisted the jolly roger, and kept everything to ourselves. We communicated through the few BASE “Zines” that were available and I published one myself from 89-92 called The Fixed Object Journal. And we used a new medium of communication called e-mail to pass on BASE how to's and don't do's around the country. The rate at which we were learning was astounding and often last week's hot tip quickly became this week's black death idea. And before the web went graphical I also started the very first BASE forum on a web service called “GEnie”.

All the BASE magazines, and the early BASE video, were all circulated around the BASE community but it was all kept “in house” as possible. If there was such a thing as Youtube in those days posting our stuff to it would have been shooting ourselves in the foot. We were getting arrested regularly in those days. But BASE was pretty much unheard of by people outside the jumping community. So a judge would laugh you out of the courtroom with no penalty or just a small slap in the wrist. We were seen by them as one-off lunatics that didn't need to be made examples of, after all, how many other people, they thought, are actually jumping off buildings in the middle of the night? So basically the less we talked about it the more we could get away with it.

This is when the first few people who didn't care about BASE, and only wanted fame for themselves, began to use B.A.S.E. jumping for the publicity it garnered themselves and the term Gloryhound was coined. In general the only “legal” B.A.S.E. jumping in the States at the time was at Bridge Day. And it had been an annual event since the late 70s. But what really started to change things is jumping from cliffs in Europe exploded in the early 90s.

Suddenly you could get on a plane, or even pull up stakes and move there, and your “legal” BASE worries were over. Around this time the first few BASE equipment manufactures also emerged from the shadows. As now they had a legal market in which to advertise.

Knowing everything that went on in the early days of BASE is hard for any one person to know. Obviously a lot of what went on was done in secret. For instance. Just a few days ago someone posted to B.A.S.E.jumper.com about how cool it would be to jump the Washington Monument in DC as it had never been done! But I know personally that it has been done, wink-wink!

I mention that because I've never heard of the Sear's Tower (now called the Willis Tower) in Chicago ever being successfully jumped. I know a few people who tried it and were caught, but that's it. Does it mean it hasn't been done? No, it just means it may have and we just never heard about it.

So anyway, your guy may be telling you the truth, and just being a little fuzzy on the dates . . .

NickD BASE 194

[freeatlast 0]

Come on Nick - everyone knows that BASE was invented by a certain brand of 'soft' drink

I think it was at the X-games to celebrate the millenium ...

It was way RAD ...

[JohnMitchell 14]

An old room mate, Scott Tadaro, was one of those crazy Texans who started BASEing in the very early 80's. I was on the list for El Cap when it was made illegal in '81. Now I'm married to a great skydiver with too much sense to give me a kitchen pass for BASE. Oh well, I can't complain too much.
Hey Scott, you still out there? Anyone who knows him, give me a PM. Last seen heading to Oklahoma. Thanks.

[wmw999 2,149]

He lives in Houston, and I saw him in July. You can reach him here on dz.com as scottodaro (although he hasn't logged in since July). He's on Facebook, too.

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[NickDG 23]

>>"Come on Nick - everyone knows that BASE was invented by a certain brand of 'soft' drink
Actually, now it's JT from last night's 60 Minutes. I understand not everything said get's into a piece. And it was very positive. But slipping in some history never hurts. You can be a giant, or you can say you're standing on the shoulders of giants. And the latter always makes you sound better . . .

NickD

[freeatlast 0]

Well - i for one am always happy to read or hear about the history of those that went before ...

I was blown away at BD in 05 when i got to hear from Mike and the others, then i met Jevto and sat and had a long chat with Jean ...

It was a trip i will remember for the rest of my life ...

[NickDG 23]

>>It was a trip i will remember for the rest of my life ...
Yup, that was a night to remember all right. Mike and Brian had me in tears . . .

NickD

[lekstrom10k 0]

There was a jump off the Ambassador Bridge in 1966 or67 by the "One Arm Bandit" Don Parks. They drove out onto the bridge and his friend got out with him. They tied the apex of a 28 foot rag to the rail .The canopy was stuffed in a grocery bag. Don hopped over the rail holding the bag until the break cord snapped. He landed in the Detroit River and was picked up by his boat crew and taken out of sight. He also jumped into a park inside Detroit city limits for the Tigers winning the World Series in 1968. He was was busted for being a traffic hazard. They said there was no law on the books then but there will be tomorrow . We were finally allowed to jump in city limits5 years later

[NickDG 23]

And this brings up another point . . .

Some of you may well remember when "The BASE Zone" was part of this board. Then they moved it across the street to B.A.S.E. Jumper.com. (BTW, I'm only including the periods in BASE to avoid that super annoying link that appears when you write BASE jumper.) Can we please stop that!

And I thought that move was stupid as the whole point of the BASE Zone was to help skydivers who were thinking about getting into BASE. And that was for the good of both sports.

And now B.A.S.E.Jumper.com is falling out of favor and everyone is running back to the old BASE Board at BLinc.

The whole thing reminds me of a demo I did one time at an airport I used to work at during an airshow. (I was an aircraft mechanic in those days.) The hangar where we usually partied in was cordoned off from the Airshow rubes with a big sign that said, "Private Party!" And there, fenced off behind that hideous sign, sat all my usual airport friends. And I thought how smug and ridiculous they all look sitting there.

And worse, on BLinc, they added a private forum for known B.A.S.E. jumpers only. I got the invite and looked in. (There are some other local private sites like this. They tend to be regional and really do help with local logistics you need to keep quiet) But on the private BLinc board it's only the blather of little boys when no one else is looking. Total pathetic BS.

So yes, you can have your little private party. Or you can take the advice of Janis Joplin who taught us all. "It's all the same thing, man!"

So I say, bring the BASE Zone back to DZ.com . . .

NickD BASE 194

[airtwardo 6]

So I say, bring the BASE Zone back to DZ.com . . .

And I say...sure wish you'd publish another B.A.S.E. rag like the one you use to back in the good ole days!

Found a couple of old 'Readers' in storage that brought back some memories too...

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[NickDG 23]

>>Found a couple of old 'Readers'
I did have a few good lines in that article.

Like when I jumped from the building over the tennis courts and the crack of my canopy opening made the players look away from their little balls . . .

NickD