Re: [FIREFLYR] WTC
>>Actually it says he jumped from a crane attached to the tower<<
>>Bex<<
Owen Quinn made his jump from World Trade Center Tower #1 on July 22, 1975. This was three months before I made my first skydive, and I recall everyone was still talking about it. At the time it was considered nothing more than a stunt, and a stupid one by most skydivers, and I suppose they can be forgiven as the thought of repeatable fixed object jumping is still a few years away.
Owen is a construction worker and he helped build both tower #1 and tower #2. He is also a skydiving instructor although not very experienced by today’s standards. At some point, as the towers grew, Owen realized they are high enough to jump. He enlists the aid of another jumper from the DZ named Mike Sergio. (Mike is the jumper who later does the bandit jump into Shea Stadium during Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.) http://longislandpress.com/v01/i28030724/arts_01.asp
Owen and Mike waited until construction was sufficiently completed around the base of the buildings in order to afford an unobstructed landing area and dressed as construction workers they entered the building, oddly, on a Monday at 4:00 in the afternoon.
I recently saw a piece of video by a friend who’s making a BASE history film containing an interview with a now much older Owen Quinn. http://www.scissorkickfilms.com/
He explained his was worried and filled with apprehension for days prior to the jump. Nonetheless, with Mike Sergio taking pictures, he stepped over the side of northwest corner of tower #1. What he said next is what every BASE jumper still feels today. “Once I went all the fear vanished and I was overjoyed and just wanted to keep going and going.”
While Mike escaped from the building after the jump, Owen is caught and arrested. The mentality of the day branded Owen a nut job and he’s ordered to take a battery of psychiatric tests. Finally, he is charged with creating a public nuisance.
I realize when you are new to jumping its hard to get a perspective on all this but Owen’s is not the first building jump made in New York City. Fredrick Law, has that title, when he jumped from the Banker’s Trust building on Wall Street in 1912. Law’s jumps (he also jumped from the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge) began the chain of historic fixed object jumps that concluded with Carl Boenish’s El Capitain expeditions in 1978 which ushered in the era of modern BASE jumping we know today.
I’ve uploaded the photo Mike took of Owen’s jump in the DZcom personal photo galleries under NickDG
Nick
BASE 194
) 
there was a #7...?