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Bingo..... Now I remember that quite well...moreso because of the cafe on the airport....my girlfriend at the time and I ate there. A year later she was cleaning out her purse and found a chicken leg from eating dinner at that cafe. It was like, petrified....but that funny thing made it stick in my memory banks.... Yes, Phil Goetsch and wife, Steve Duell, Ray Mahon and Bill B.....are all well known and part of that era..... I think we must have visited that DZ a few times back in the mid to late 60's...

Can't say as I remember that DZ for sure but the name sounds familiar.....was it on the west side of the state, maybe towards the north some....?? I can vaguely remember going over that way at some point and visiting a DZ there but can't pull it up from my mem banks.... Do you have any names to tie in?

Wisconsin, New Years 1966, 182, no door, doing the ever popular exit in one year, land in another. I was flying loads and relatively sheltered from the wind blast but the guys in the back got nailed big time with wind. Even with snowmobile suits on, long johns, thermal layer under the suit and the suit itself your hands and feet would get numb, the aircraft's heater was a joke, fortunately the jumps were only to 3k or so but still brutally cold for all. I was usually good for maybe three or four loads but after that had to warm up a bit. In those early days aircraft doors were few and far between, if you were lucky you got a Snohomish door or something similar. Ahhh, those were the days my friend, those were the days.....what fun.....would I do it now....fuhgheddaboudit......

Damn! Federman is STILL alive!!! Whoa baby!......

Tuna....hah!...knows all sees all.....lol... Actually he's on facebook and it's an automatic notification..... Old Indian trick!!

It's Bill's birthday today....have a happy one Bill.....congrats on making it this far!!!!

Ditto Pat!! Great Job on the slopes man!.... I can remember one time going to a pool party you were at, and I watched you walk across the bottom of the pool without weights on. Seems your muscle density is so great you couldn't float! We had been talking about diving and using weights to control buoyancy underwater and you demonstrated that you could walk without weights on the bottom.....

Along with all the ghosts of past times who still inhabit the place.....

Kaufmann was there when I came down to work for Jeff...I seem to remember the Tampa Skydivers went to a little strip, maybe Birdsong? when they moved. Does that sound correct Hoop?

If you're running Firefox just double click on the picture and it will enlarge it.

Zhills was a tough place in the early days, I mean the City of Zhills, I can remember going to town council meetings with Jeff and fielding all sorts of complaints from citizens who "didn't like that noisy airplane flying all the time" and "those parachutes are so noisy when they open" and other ridiculous accusations about "all these hippie people in town". Jeff and I even joined the local Kiwanis chapter to show them we were human and not animals. And, Oh the Horror!, I actually shaved my beard off and got a haircut...ahem.... Needless to say the city was rather stand offish about the whole thing but could not legally stop us but seemed to delight in throwing all manner of short stops towards the center. And with Hoop's experiences I see it didn't go away.

The building was also a packing area, a small "dorm" with bunk beds and two little "apartments" or walled off rooms in the West end where I lived for the longest time. Can't remember when Jeff built the other building or even why we moved from this one. Can anyone fill in the blanks?

I totally understand how you could feel on that one...lol...I guess "suspension lines" is really what they are, don't know why they bastardized it into "shroud" lines....perhaps because the parachute somehow resembled a funeral shroud... Maybe Howard can shed some trivia light on that aspect of the nomenclature. Further googling supplies these tidbits, the closest one would be the maritime useage. 1. a cloth used to wrap a corpse for burial; winding sheet 2. something that covers, protects, or screens; veil; shelter 3. any of a set of ropes or wires stretched from a ship's side to a masthead to offset lateral strain on the mast 4. any of the set of lines from the canopy of a parachute to the harness in full shroud line

First come first serve sir, it is yours! I will put it in monday's mail for ya....enjoy...this one I probably got when I was a rigger at Zhills, we got a lot of surplus harnesses, many with those attached.... If you had a lineover it was the cat's ass to get it corrected with one of these. I carried one for years as part of my scuba outfit and always had one handy when flying jumpers....

I was cleaning out some stuff in the barn and ran across an old military shroud line knife, Army issue I think but if anyone has a use for it, send me your snail mail address and it's yours... http://i524.photobucket.com/albums/cc329/redfish443/2010_0327knife0001.jpg

Those T-33's are one of the best little birds to own, fully aerobatic from what I understand....solid as a rock and gas wouldn't be all that bad...

Happy Birthday Pat, glad to see you're still kicking...... Tuna

Hmmmm, words fail me.... Interesting though Howard...the stuff legends are made of....?

There was a time at Zhills that just about any unattached object was taken into the air. You did not dare even to take an afternoon nap or you might fall prey to the eager hands of "object divers". Not to take away the watermelon fun, does anyone remember when the tail wheel of Douglas 343 decided to join the skydive community and landed in a field off the end of runway 36. As I remember a farmer in a pickup showed up at the jump shack and wanted to know if anyone was missing this tailwheel in the back of his truck. 343 was called on the radio and someone went to check to see if the tailwheel was there, it was not. This took place at the Turkey meet, anyone remember how the plane got back to the hangar?

They probably had some time to spare before the authorities figured out what happened and could think about catching up with them.

Way too cool of a jump....it looked hairy but once you saw the landing area it seemed pretty good! Did they recover the Main?

Another Trevor tale.... When Trevor would get up in the morning, he would invariably make a cup of tea. As long as he lived with me, he had the same routine every morning, he would take a mug, drop a teabag in it, boil a pot of water and when hot would pour water into the mug until it overflowed. Then, taking his spoon, would shovel five or six tablespoons of sugar into the cup, causing, of course, the tea to flow up and out of the cup all over the table creating a pool of tea. Then, going to the fridge, he would grab the 1/2 & 1/2 and pour a great dollop into the cup, further overflowing the cup and adding to the pool of tea on the table. I estimate that he quite likely had as much tea on the table as in the mug which would then overflow the table and hit the floor. As many times as I tried to change this particular morning ritual, he would get up in the morning and do it all over again, usually drinking his tea while walking out the door to go to work leaving a river of spilled tea for me to clean up. That's not all though, when Trevor had a ladyfriend stay over up in the shrimp net strung from the ceiling, he would become quite chivalrous and endeavor to take the young lady a cuppa as well and would then climb the rope ladder, with two cups of overflowing tea in his hands, and would thus splatter tea all over the front room floor and furniture. He was always puzzled that I took offense to his liberal applications of tea to my apartment and eventually I gave up on trying to modify his behavior. The tea stains on the table, floor and living room remained long after he moved away.

That would be Trevor....any clues on the others?

Hey Hoop, Finally finished the book and the ending was nothing short of spectacular. The description of your Brother's incident of being shot was spot on and unbelievably realistic and spellbinding to read, by the time I finished, I was turning blue from holding my breath hoping he made it home safely. A terrific read and one I will remember for a long time to come, and the insight into combat operations in Nam is spellbinding and quite revealing in a first person sense, these guys were there, and know with certainty what happens in war, and are the true heroes of the war there for their valiant sacrifices in battle to save those around them. Excellent job Hoop, kudos to you as an author and now I'm waiting for your next one!!