Re: [JaapSuter] August 8th 1978
Don't listen to to them, Jaap, they don't have the big picture . . .
And good job, on your initial post.
I really don’t have much to add except to say when I first met Carl Boenish in 1978 he seemed so much older than I, but when he died in 1984 he's only 38 years old. Had he lived he would be have turned 59 last April . . .
We (all of us) tend to go overboard sometimes when someone dies and the, "what a great person they were," stories are so prevalent the words don’t mean much anymore. It's almost easy to think a son of a bitch never meets a bad end.
Yet, Carl does deserve all the accolades he gets. At the drop zone he'd listen to the story of your simple two-way like he'd never heard anything like it, and he'd say, "Wow," in all the appropriate places. And although he is already famous, there wasn't a skygod bone in his body.
Carl never set out to become the "Father" of BASE jumping, a title he would have been given even if he had lived. In fact, he came to BASE very indirectly. He is first and foremost a film maker and he enjoyed, revealed in really, filming goofy things involving parachutes especially if they were off the drop zone.
This is how he agreed to film the hang glider jumps in Yosemite in 1975. Sitting in the valley with his cameras Carl Boenish had time to recall a story that made the rounds years earlier. This is about Brian Schubert and Mike Pelkey who first parachuted from El Capitan in 1966. While BASE has but one Father, it has many Grandfathers and Brian and Mike are certainly among these. Carl looked at the big walls in modern terms and suddenly realized the possibilities.
It took Carl another three years to turn his plan into action. On August 8th 1978, 27 years ago, the first four modern fixed object jumps are made in Yosemite Valley. True to his calling it must be said Carl is more interested in filming the event than anything else and he didn't make the jump himself until the next trip some weeks later. This is a pattern Carl followed throughout his short BASE career and thank goodness he did. If Carl had dropped his cameras to take up cliff jumping full time the world would never have witnessed the films that flipped the BASE switch to the on position.
Carl is the father of BASE for many reasons: Not only did he show these jumps are repeatable and not just one time stunts, he also prompted the use of Velcro closed BASE rigs and gave the sport its very name. It is the fact he had the courage to became the Johnny Appleseed of BASE jumping. Early on Carl quit a promising career as an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft for skydiving. He then put a hard won skydiving career on the line for BASE. The skydiving old guard is militantly anti-BASE by this time and Carl paid the price for pursuing BASE so passionately.
When the USPA posthumously awarded Carl Boenish their highest honor, USPA Achievement Award, in 1987 I was there. I sat and looked at the USPA officials on the dais and saw them for the sorry hypocrites they were. A few years later I interviewed for the editor's job at PARACHUTIST and was dismayed to see the largest photo in Bill Ottly's office is his own El Cap jump. Needless to say I turned down the job, but I gave Bill an earful about USPA's position on BASE jumping.
Carl is the Father of BASE because he didn’t seek to be the Father of BASE. If he was alive today I'm sure he would downplay his role unlike so many who are alive and keep reminding us how much they've done for the sport. No, if Carl were alive today and you mentioned to him that you just received your BASE number, he would listen like he never heard anything like it before and he'd say, "Wow," in all the appropriate places . . .
NickD
BASE 194
