squirtdad

Andy_K what years did you cover nationals? Do the names Davey Hearn and Cathy Hearn ring any bells?

non-fixie 

1. Garbage man, board member at an institution for the social reintegration of (former) drug addicts and alcoholics.
2. Hosting an IBO world title fight on live television
3. What?

Andy_K 

No, I think it happened because we're both short and had similar bad haircuts.

iab

Walking down a London street, a cabbie thought I was Morrissey.

Andy_K 

It was 1989. Wikipedia tells me that the Hearns were medalists that year. I was working for a local newspaper at the time, and that year the championships were in our area, so they sent me to watch and write about it.

jadmt

sort similar but different. I talked 3 buddies into skydiving. That was back before tandem jumping was a thing. we did the solo static line. we had to go through a class and during the class the instructor had a chute all laid out and proceeded to pack it in front of us while explaining the does and don't of packing a chute. all 4 of us watched him do what he said was a don't during the packing of it and when he was done he said one of you 4 will use this chute. all 4 thought he was testing us to see if we caught his mistake and we all spoke up and told him he had twisted the lines. He blew us off so we thought it was his humor. Next day we jump 2 at a time as it was out of a beat up cessna 180 or 182 if I remember correctly. It was held together with duct tape. I jumped first and no issues and my other buddy jumped next no issues. The plane landed and picked up my other two buddies and 3rd one jumped no issues and sure as **** the 4th jumped and her chute was tangled. She was able to get it untangled and landed safely. Our chutes per the instructor had the deal that would deploy the reserve if we reached a certain elevation and were still dropping too fast but we still needed to pull the handle to release the main chute. This is the crazy part. the jump master jumped out after the last 2 jumped and his chute was also tangled and his reserve chute deployed and the two chutes started wrapping around each other but his reserve was still open enough to slow him down some. He was lucky as hell and augered into a swamp area and walked away but he hit hard and was lucky he landed in a swamp. None of us ever jumped again.

jadmt

1. ran a jackhammer for 8 hour a day for several years and then had a job where I rode motorcycles 10 hours a day for several more years. (don't think just because i am old and beat down you can beat me in arm wrestling I will surprise you, my uncle however was a top rated world arm wrestler back in its heyday and my cousin who is also 64 is going for a world police games bench press record this year so strength genetics are in the gene pool) both jobs paid pretty well.
2. One of charles mansion's girls stayed at my house for a few days.100% guarantee no story ever can top how that came about so won't even go there.
2.5. Was in Sturgis during bike week and I had been wearing my prescription sunglasses and it got dark so walking back to our camp I could not see worth a damn and walked right into a couple HA's wearing colors and I mean literally right into them. My buddy thought I was dead. He said they actually looked stunned and moved out of my way. He said they for sure thought it was some kind of set up or they would have kicked my ass.
2.5+ Oh for some reason I have been asked for my autograph several times. Not sure why as I am an ugly sucker and not sure who people think I am, and probably better off not knowing lest my feelings would be hurt .
3. Broncs and I did play all sports.

steelbikeguy

Yikes!
As beginners, our chutes were packed by the experienced folks. Not sure that worked out well for me!
My story dates back to around 1990, and I'm hoping things are a bit better regulated now. We certainly didn't have any automatic opening chutes. We did have emergency chutes that automatically released the primary chute, which I'm grateful for.
If nothing else, tandem jumps seem to be the norm for initial jumps, and that's probably an improvement.
In retrospect, I wish I would have had some sort of way to check on the history of the skydiving group.

Steve in Peoria

ollo_ollo

1. Operated an animation camera.
2. Ran against Peter Snell in college. (1958-59)
3. Saxons.
ollo_ollo.

gugie 

Andy should share how he got that local newspaper job, it's pretty funny.

squirtdad

in st louse a gal thought I was Huey Lewis

in a grocery store kid come running up yelling knight rider

squirtdad hasselhof

Andy_K 

Here's the story. I was just starting my freshman year in college and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. At the time I wanted to be a journalist. My father was against it, encouraging me to pursue something in math or science instead. He said even the local newspaper only hires one person every ten years, and I should accept the fact that it wouldn't be me. At the same time, he was also trying to encourage me to get a job, any job, to help pay for my expenses. One of his recurring themes was that I needed to go out a pound the pavement. "No one is going to just call you up and offer you a job," he'd say. Of course, I was a typical 18 year old and mostly just rolled my eyes at this and did nothing. Then about a month into my freshman year, I got a call from one of the sports writers at the local paper, asking me if I'd like to come work for them. Ha! Take that dad!

This may seem implausible, but I swear it's all true. I had been editor of my high school newspaper, and the sports writer who called to offer me the job was the son of my high school faculty advisor and they were both close family friends. Plus, I like to think I was a pretty good writer. My father knew all this, of course, but he didn't believe anything like this would actually happen. He also continued to tell me I should study science even after I got the job at the newspaper, and since he was paying my tuition, I reluctantly decided to major in math and physics. Then just before I graduated, I applied for a job as a technical writer. After an interview and a technical aptitude test, they offered me a job as a programmer, which is what I've been doing ever since. It turns out that as much as I liked journalism, I like food and shelter more.

The whole incident reminds me of a Mark Twain quote: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

The Golden Boy 

I have only done static line- but I saw a guy have a cigarette roll on a night combat equipment jump. A cigarette roll is where the main chute wraps around itself so it can't deploy. Night CE jumps are done at night (duh) and at 800 feet, so you literally only have a couple of seconds to make the determination that your chute is actually not going to deploy- then pull the reserve.

I've got 2 fun parachute stories.... I have ended up in the trees... I was doing a daytime "Hollywood" jump from either 1500 or 1800 feet with the "steerable" chutes. We rarely got to use the steerable chutes- just the round T-10B that you "steered" by pulling on the riser straps- so it was a luxury to actually be able to sort of actually steer. A "Hollywood" jump is the opposite of the combat equipment jump- you don't have the rucksack and weapon and all the extra "combat equipment." So doing it in the day time, with steerable chutes- it's more or less a fun jump, you can turn into the wind and get a whole lot of hang time and enjoy the scenery. So I'm having a nice time looking around- and decide to start heading back to the drop zone- as I'm getting closer, my feet happen to catch the one singular tree that's sticking up above the rest... I go bouncing down through the branches- getting the living **** kicked out of me, breaking off branches 2" around... I catch on a branch around 10' off the ground- and my chute catches air and drags me out of the tree and drops me flat on my back. That hurt.

Then there was the time I ended up in someone else's silk. It was a night combat equipment jump, it was on a drop zone right off the ocean- the flight line was over the ocean, a beach, a road and then the DZ. There was a "cherry" with us- a cherry is a guy fresh out of jump school- inexperienced. Back then, we'd tape up the guy's helmet with white tape so you could identify who was a cherry. I used to think it was more hazing than anything but... So we jump- and then I see this new guy heading RIGHT for me... I try to turn, he seems like he turns with me and then he just drops right beneath me- my chute stole his air- I kind of swing into his silk and inversion net... that **** isn't taut like a balloon or something... it just starts wrapping around you and I start CLIMBING my risers and suspension lines and it pulls me out- and I don't remember if I dropped again... but we hit the ground right by the road. Hard. I went over and checked to see he was OK, and then I started chewing him out... and he had this completely "duh" look on his face. THAT'S why you identify cherries.

The Golden Boy 

I was a drill sergeant from 92-94.

Drill Sergeant Pic by Dave The Golden Boy, on Flickr


BTW- dig my black eye in the pic...

GeezyRider 

"This We Will Defend"

VRJAKE 

1. Pro Football Statistician; Importer of custom-designed - manufactured private aviation radios & headsets.

2. Caught a small shark at a high school summer camp in Alaska, dumped it in the pool for all to find in the morning.

3. Trojans.

Schweinhund

I was rocking nine computers and a 400 dollar a month electric bill running SETI.
Never occurred to me that I could have wrote that off as a donation.

Germany_chris

Airborne school cured me of any desire to skydive.

When I was young I worked in a prefabricated concrete factory in Kalamazoo, my job was to jump in the mold and make sure the concrete they were pouring was even.

In college at OSU I worked at the coffee shop right across from the student union during my time there I got to meet the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Phish, and Buddy Guy

Andy_K 

Were you using their screen saver, or was there some other distributed software program they had?

They bought a scientific grade camera from the company I was working for at the time, and I added an extension to our software to compare consecutive images and save any that had interesting differences. The motivation was similar to their screen saver -- looking for a needle in a haystack.

squirtdad

nice mix of music there

jon c. 

1. mutuel clerk at various race tracks

2. picked up as a suspect in a murder and dismemberment case

3. I have no idea. That was a long time ago.

scarlson 

OK, I'll play.

1) Electrofishing (Exactly what it sounds like. You pass electricity through the water and stun the fish) for research purposes with the USGS in New Jersey. Driving cars for a driver's education program with the school district. Running planers and straight-line ripper (think tablesaw with an autofeed) for a furniture mill in Vermont. DNA sequencing tech at the University of Vermont Cancer Center. Did inventory for a video store that was later busted for selling a bunch of stolen goods.

2) Plunge froze protein-RNA complexes on gold mesh in cryogenic ethane. Wrote scripts to control pulses from a liquid helium cooled superconducting magnet. Bored a 6" hole in 20" diameter round steel bar on an American Pacemaker lathe, to make a pressure vessel for a colleague. Caught a few catfish with my bare hands on tributaries of the Delaware river. Restored a 1969 Honda CB350 from a pile of parts and rode it up Mt. Washington. Got a Harvard Ph.D.

3) Royals (mascot was a lion). In college it was the panther, but a subset of us called it the cougar.

Schweinhund

The regular SETI program. I set the nice to low and the computer not to sleep & ran it 24/7 on 8 and the one ran only as screensaver

Bogester

1. Paperboy, dishwasher, burger flipper, farm hand, cannon crewman, hardware, inventory, buyer, middle school teacher

2. I climbed mount rainier with zero training, renting boots and equipment the night before…ouch.

3. Blue Ponies…played football against the Sugar Beeters!!

Germany_chris

The state theater was next door so if they wanted coffee our place was where they’d go