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howardwhite

"Pioneers" Reunion

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At the risk of being slapped for cross-posting, but because people here don't necessarily visit the Events and Places section, go there for information on the Pioneers of Sport Parachuting Reunion in Raeford in May. Lots of low D-numbers and other well-known people will be there.

HW

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At the risk of being slapped for cross-posting, but because people here don't necessarily visit the Events and Places section, go there for information on the Pioneers of Sport Parachuting Reunion in Raeford in May. Lots of low D-numbers and other well-known people will be there.

HW




My old SandyEggo Roommate is a low D, he told me I'd better show up this time! B|

See ya there HW!










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

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Jerry,
Howard has told us of these reunions in the past and so far I have not noticed - maybe I'm going blind - that he ever called it the "Pioneers Exclusively" reunion. Certainly he might not have posted in a manner whereby the whole planet can learn of the upcoming event if it was meant to be a private affair. "Don't tell anyone, we'll just post it on something with the name WORLD WIDE in it."
Are you saying that by having anyone with a D# with triple or greater digits is cause enough to lose pride in having one with single or double digits? And when is the demarcation between 'Pioneer' and everyone else? The sport in its modern version is nearly 60 years old (using Istel, Sanborn et al at Orange and even Good Hill & Northern Westchester in NY State as a starting point). I see that you yourself have only been at the game for a mere 40 years and have four digits after the D. How is it you feel qualified to be a pioneer if you got started upwards of 15 years after Sanborn's D-1 was issued? I started jumping in '89. In a hundred years I'll be seen as a pioneer. You're going to make me wait, aren't you?

Sorry to hear you've lost your pride. Must be like losing religion.

I don't mean - and I hope I do not come off as meaning - to be disparaging of your comment, or you. I apologize if I am taken that way. I'd just like some understanding because essentially, your comment could well be taken as disparaging of anyone who came after you.

While it may be that those who came later are not so called pioneers, many of them have made huge contributions to advance the sport so we certainly cannot suggest that anyone who is not in your league has nothing to offer the old timers. (If you don't object to being called "old timer" as a way of distinguishing you from us.) I'd wager that even you have grown in the sport because of some of those contributions. But with only 1,000 jumps in 40 years that may be hard to gauge.

I think it is a good and even important thing for the newer generations to mingle with the older. The sport still has many of its original members alive and active. It won't be long before that changes. How better to understand what went into making this a sport for subsequent generations than by allowing the mixing of the generations? Perhaps there is simply a desire for a certain camaraderie among the elite but it seems counterproductive to me to isolate the old from the new. As it is we move too fast and wind up going about the sport with less and less respect for the original skydivers and all they did. I think a little exposure to these people and their stories is vital to the future of the sport. You certainly wouldn't wish to foster any disregard for the accomplishments of the 'pioneers' would you? And what better venue for this sort of exposure and friendliness than to have a "Pioneer's" reunion at which even the kids are invited? Please don't feel like you have to shut access to this rich resource once you're in the door. Such elitism is unhealthy for everyone as it is for the sport. Please reconsider your position.
With all due respect,
Kim

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Hi howard,

I cannot agree that it is the 'Pioneers' anymore; they are letting the young folks attend these days. :S

There was the day when it was an accolade to take some pride in.

JerryBaumchen




Damn straight!! Who do these new guys think they are? :)

Yeah, it might all be relative (that word rings a bell) so to help identify the "Pioneers":

You might be an "Old Fart" if - you have ever started a story or comment with, "In the old days..."
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossilbe before they were done.
Louis D Brandeis

Where are we going and why are we in this basket?

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Hi howard,

I cannot agree that it is the 'Pioneers' anymore; they are letting the young folks attend these days. :S

There was the day when it was an accolade to take some pride in.

JerryBaumchen




Damn straight!! Who do these new guys think they are? :)

Yeah, it might all be relative (that word rings a bell) so to help identify the "Pioneers":

You might be an "Old Fart" if - you have ever started a story or comment with, "In the old days..."


"Back in the day" doesn't count?:([;)
One Jump Wonder

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Hi howard,

I cannot agree that it is the 'Pioneers' anymore; they are letting the young folks attend these days. :S

There was the day when it was an accolade to take some pride in.

JerryBaumchen



I think you still can take pride in your accomplishments Jerry.

It's the type of event that I wish I could attend so that I can learn, and enjoy the experiences of those Pioneers, before they are gone.
----------------------------------------------
You're not as good as you think you are. Seriously.

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Hi kim,

Thanks for your thoughts. I never meant to be disparaging to anyone.

I did not come up with the title 'Pioneers' nor the definition; it was there before I attended my first event ( Tuscon '02 ).

The 'organization' ( Pioneers ) is no longer defined by what it began as. That is what I was referring to.

As far as the younger crowd, I am more than willing to have them at almost any event. Heck, I always felt that by hanging out with them on the dz is what kept me young ( B| ).

At some point in most of our lives we join something that is well defined; maybe we just go up to the local senior center for cards, etc. I know the local senior center here means you have to be 60 or older ( I don't go there because it is full of old people :P ).

So, any thought of the exclusiveness of the Pioneers was not defined by me. However, it is no longer what it began as.

That is what my comments were in regard to. And, most importantly, I have never considered myself as any kind of trailblazer or anything like that. It was just happenstance that I started in the mid-60's, nothing else.

On most Thursday evenings I play drop-in competetive volleyball. It is only for those who know how & can play a fast, hard-pounding game. We 'run' those that cannot keep up off of the court. Why, because we want to keep the game at the level that we want to play at & not some rat ball crap. Is it selfish, yup but that's life.

JerryBaumchen

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Please don't feel like you have to shut access to this rich resource once you're in the door. Such elitism is unhealthy for everyone as it is for the sport. Please reconsider your position. Kim



What a wonderful voice of compassion and reason, Kim. A wonderful breath of fresh air amid the smell of old people.

When accessing DZ.com just now, before reading Kim's comments, I saw predominately displayed on the DZ home page an article headlined "Skydiving and the recession". The second sentence in that article is this: "The student numbers are down, and we are blaming it on the economy."

We can probably blame the recession to an extent but we also must blame attitudes similar to that espoused by Jerry. To do anything which will separate us from our roots and those who came before is a major error, in my not humble opinion.

I saw a similar attitude in the most obnoxious of ways in the DB Cooper thread. There one can read the words of many "old timers" who wanted the thread closed down because of too many non-jumpers posting to the thread. The old farts...many of them...did almost all they could to ban the thread and postings by whuffos.

How dumb is that?! We NEED whuffos asking dumb questions. If we answer correctly and with compassion we may be able to make an airplane payment because the answer was given without an aloof attitude.

Maybe, because I have less than 1000 jumps in nearly 50 years I shouldn't be taking such a sacrilegious, anti-skygod position. Maybe I should be groveling and shuffling my feet before the exalted two or three digit Ds. Truth be told, had I cared about such things, I would be displaying a two digit D. When I started, PCA was allowing people to pick a D of their choice. I was more interested in learning about jumping than I was bragging with a patch on my jumpsuit. I never applied for any license until I wanted to become a DZO...and "legal" instructor.

Let's realize that we are a weird breed. All of us. We don't have much to brag about with the few USPA memberships numbers. Many of you are driving people away because of the SkyGod, "limited access" to the holy inner circle mentality.

I was seriously thinking about using the Pioneer Reunion as an excuse to take my 16 year old daughter to Bragg on our way to the reunion. I don't think I will, now, after reading some of these comments.

We need inclusion in the sport; we do not need exclusion to the detriment of DZOs, pilots, mechanics...and whuffos who are working on having the courage to do something as counter-intuitive as jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
Guru312

I am not DB Cooper

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Hi Jerry~

I'm going because I heard there were folks 'younger' than me attending last time...besides, it's not the years it's the miles...;)



I attended...And learned a LOT from the old guard.
I'm younger than you, Airtwardo (not by much) but I'll bet I can brag more miles under my belt.
Jerry, I knew what you meant.
If you can make it to this reunion, I surely would take the opportunity. Sitting at a table and hearing the old stories, trying to figure which ones were really true and which ones were figments of a feeble imagination was a great experience. Ted Strong sure had some goodies, so did Bullit Bob, Jim, Howard, and we even had a US Senator and Astronaut there to bullshit right along with em'.
wish I could attend this year.[:/]

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The Grand Army of the Republic, an organization for Union veterans of the Civil War, dissolved in 1956 upon the death of its last surviving member. Since "membership" qualifications for the Pioneers of Sport Parachuting were never as clearly defined as those for the GAR, when will the "Pioneers" dissolve?

The first reunion was at Nate Pond's (D-69) farm in Vermont in 1997 and the second in Tampa in 2001. I think the definition of a "pioneer" then was someone who had jumped prior to 1965 -- so even at these first two, I didn't qualify.

When I took over the Pioneers web presence on the PIA site a couple of years ago, I blew away any qualifying language, so blame me for the lack of clarity.

I hang out with a lot of newbies. I made three jumps last weekend with college kids exercising their relatively new A licenses. When I drag out "A Sport is Born" -- or even "Masters of the Sky" -- some of the new people are interested, others wander away. That's fine. I'm participating in trying to get a National Skydiving Museum built and open while some genuine pioneers are still alive for the ribbon-cutting.

May 2, 2009 is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Orange Sport Parachute Center. Two days after I posted the event on Facebook, 25 people have already said they'll be at Jumptown -- lining up, no doubt, in the hope of jumping with Lew Sanborn.

So I don't really care what we call it; I care that at least some who never saw a round or a PC or a static line jump are interested in more than how to look cool swooping under a tiny canopy.

Check out the attendance list on the reunions website. A lot of people on that list have really cool stories. Some of them are bores. If you're bored, go to the bar.

I might be at the bar myself.
HW

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Well if it's an organized thing with parameters for who qualifies then by design it's a closed club and in a sense I would defend the right to do so even if I lament the practice. If that's the case I stand corrected.And, yes, either I misunderstood or there was that lack of clarity or I just should have investigated further. For speaking out of turn in that regard I apologize to Jerry. For the general sentiment, however, I stand firm.

I don't know who among you knew Tom Craighead, who passed not quite a year ago - it'll be a year in about two weeks - but he was Istel's rigger back at Orange, helped Istel found the first club in NY before skydiving was even legal in NY (hence the move to Orange). Tom would tell me stories and I sat riveted. It would have felt like a great injustice to have been excluded from his stories.

Frankly I want to jump at Good Hill some day. To me that's hallowed air.

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Another reason to be there: a talk, either Friday or Saturday night.
The topic: "How a Phantom Driver, with a budget of $0.00, steals a C-130, rounds up 12 folks from around the country and ends up at 2 AM, 44,100 feet over Ft Bragg."
The speaker: Bob Mathews, one of skydiving's truly legendary storytellers. Subject: Marines (plus one Army guy) high-altitude record, June 1964.
Bob says eight of the 12 participants will be there.


HW

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Jerry

Who let you in with your high D#? This is exactly why I don't go to many events. There is always someone with an attitude. I am going to this particular event to meet with some Marine Skydiving Hackers from the early 60's, whom I haven't seen in 46 years. If not for that I might reconsider.

Paul Mac Lean
D-320

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Hi Paul,

Quote

Who let you in with your high D#?



I don't know because I did not set the criteria of who is a Pioneer. I was only commenting on:

1. The criteria as originally determined
2. The change in the criteria

If it were up to me ( and, thankfully it isn't ) I would restrict the Pioneers to those with a B, C or D license of three digits or less. IMO, those are the true pioneers.

As I stated, I was not trying to disparage anyone.

I have attended two of the Pioneers reunions and really did not care for them all that much. For those who have enjoyed them and those who will be attending for the first time: I hope that you have fun.

I find that they tend to become more of a beer-fest than I prefer to be at. But that is just me.

If you were to really know me ( and you don't ) you would know that I am someone who does not have an 'attitude.' If fact, I really do not care for those that do; and I have met a lot of them in skydiving.

For the most part I am a rather quiet, unussuming type of person who prefers quiet conversation with only a very few people at a time.

And I hope that I don't let the anonymity of the keyboard ever change that.

For any of you that I might have upset with my comments: I apologize, that was not my intention.

My apologies do not change my opinions regarding what is a Pioneer,

JerryBaumchen

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Hi Howard

Wouldn't it be cool if everyone who came to the reunion brought 1 or 2 pictures and at least one story written up. The stories could all be combined into a sort of souvenir booklet, posted online, etc....
If some old guy can do it then obviously it can't be very extreme. Otherwise he'd already be dead.
Bruce McConkey 'I thought we were gonna die, and I couldn't think of anyone

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Wouldn't it be cool if everyone who came to the reunion brought 1 or 2 pictures and at least one story written up.



Yeah! Everyone has a different idea of what a reunion should be like. I'd be bored too if it was just old guys drinking beer, although if that's what they want to do that's up to them. If I go to a pioneers' reunion I'd like to hear some stories and learn more about the old days.

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I will have a scanner with me.
I'll grab whatever pictures people want to share.
In Salt Lake City last year, Ted Strong had a huge stack of black and white pix taken by Tom Schapanski, who was well known both as a photographer and competitor. Unfortunately I didn't get to scan any of them and Jim Arender took a bunch of them home with him.
I wish I had been able to record peoples' stories (well, at least some of them.) Particularly memorable were the early jump stories from Brian Williams, a (definitely) pioneering southern California jumper.

HW

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I wish I had been able to record peoples' stories (well, at least some of them.) Particularly memorable were the early jump stories from Brian Williams, a (definitely) pioneering southern California jumper.

That's why I thought it would be cool if everyone had at least one story written up already -- jump number, date, location (if the statute of limitations has passed) -- could be digital or hard copy. I know some people have way more stories than that that should be written down, but it's a start, do it again at the next reunion and you're making some headway... And just put them all into a pdf somewhere for people to browse....
If some old guy can do it then obviously it can't be very extreme. Otherwise he'd already be dead.
Bruce McConkey 'I thought we were gonna die, and I couldn't think of anyone

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