That’s me 38 years ago. Just click on my face. It takes until 1:11 for the action to begin, but it’s nice footage. My friend, Tom Campeau, filmed it with a helmet-mounted 16 mm camera. In the course of filming we made four or five jumps that day, at the end of which we needed some footage of my opening. But it was clouded over. We flew further up into Michigan over territory neither Tom, nor I, nor the pilot recognized. We were at 12,500 feet when we were able to peek through the clouds below. All we cared about was that we were not over water or thick forest. We saw what looked like a trailer park, so out we went. You can see how bunched up the clouds were as we went through them at opening altitude.

This all took place the summer after a man named D.B. Cooper commandeered a Boeing 727 passenger jet, demanded and got $200,000 in ransom, then had the pilot lower the back loading chute. Cooper, who had donned a parachute he’d carried on in a bag, then jumped over the Pacific Northwest. He has never been found.

So, on that last jump of the day, Tom was filming my opening. As a result, he was five or six hundred feet below me when we were both under open canopies. In a very short time quite a few people were heading towards an open area — exactly where Tom and I were aiming. Tom landed and I saw a bunch of people swarm around him. I was still a couple hundred feet in the air when Tom yelled, “Hey Fred. Did you get the money?” His idea of a great joke. Well, why wouldn’t they think he was serious — they’d never seen skydivers in these parts. Worse, one of the guys, me, was wearing a business suit.

We calmed them down fairly quickly. I don’t know if anybody ran off to call the cops. Eventually, somebody let us use the phone and we called the airport in southern Michigan that we’d flown out of. They sent somebody to pick us up and all was well.

Did the film help the Chevrolet Parts Department peddle their wares? I don’t know. Skydivers. A beautiful blond. That should be enough to motivate a guy to pick up an extra crankshaft or two.