Old Daze . . .
I'm tagging onto the Bungee thread here, and it's in their defense . . . Bungee has an early relationship with BASE and if you don't see it, I understand, as it as it was before your time.
The very first "actual" bungee operation, before the "craze" hit in the early 90s was the Kockleman Bothers.
They did a lot of early bungee stuff in a "BASE" way when they did the Golden Gate Bridge and some other very high profile sites without burning them. Almost everybody who came after them were commericial site burners. The Kockelman Bros came to us for BASE training and that's how I met them. They also started taking bungee customers to out of the way Nor Cal Bridges before they purchased a crane just for the purpose.
I've uploaded a vid and when if it gets approved by some skydiver in Espanola who've never made a BASE jump
it's of the first BASE jumps from the Kockelman's crane up in Tracy, CA. This was probably the very first BASE Crane jumps. And this story was published in The Fixed Object Journal under the title of "Going to Doomdom . . .." I did the first jump, a PCA, and then the first freefall. I think this crane was about 240-feet and that was kind of low for the times, especially with the crap gear we had. I'm using a "Frankie, an old Piglet harness with a Velcro closed container sewn onto it. The canopy is a Para-Flite Cruislite and I didn't have an on-heading opening that whole weekend.
BTW, I'm bald as I was in the middle of chemo therapy, and Moe mentioned, at the time, we should stick some advertising on my dome.
This is kind of a milestone for me personally as this is the first bit of BASE video I've ever uploaded to the internet. But it's historically old, and maybe significant, so I can live with that.
This, along with a few others vids, I'll be putting up, are unedited, at least since then, and w/o newer music, and that's the way we first saw them and so the way you should see them too . . .
Most are mine, and some aren't, but any copyrights have run out now, and I think it's more important you see them in terms of what you all are doing today. This is not "look at me" type video, but "learn from this type video" so take a second look at what you're doing. I have hours of this stuff.
If anyone thinks I shouldn't be doing this, let me know. I've been batting a big fat zero in the what's the right thing to do lately, so let me know . . .
But to my fellow old timers, I'd say release what you have, after all, we didn't do for money and fame in the first place!
NickD
BASE 194