It was a beautiful spring morning at my beloved DZ, Skydive the Ranch in Gardiner, New York. The air was cool and crisp, and the sky was cloudless. I was doing wingsuit hop-and-pops from 10,000 feet with the hope of generating interest in this new-at-the-time discipline.

It was 8 a.m. on the first day of the year 1984. I was a young guy outside a hangar in Stow, Massachusetts, hooked into a 151-foot-tall tower of helium balloons that I called “Aprealis.”

This was going to be my first time out of a CASA, and I got to sit right by the tailgate, which was extra exciting for me.

In 1962, I was in winter training with the U.S. Navy Parachute Team, the Chuting Stars, in El Centro, California. One day, we were quite surprised to see Jacques-André Istel, president of the Parachute Club of America (USPA’s predecessor organization), arrive in his shiny new Cessna 182.