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Page 11
The Life of a Parachute Jumper
by
Mark M. Campbell

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The author of this article is one of the best known 'chute men in the country. He has been a "barnstormer," circus flier, aerial acrobat and movie actor. His life has been one continual "close shave" but he is still doing his stuff and enjoying good health. 
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BACK in 1914, when I was bicycle training, I first became interested in the third dimension. It happened when I met two barnstorming fliers, Frank Stites and John K. La Grone. The latter will be remembered by hundreds of Air Service pilots as "Tex" La Grone- a real pioneer who is still at it after 
seventeen years of flying.

  Tex had wrecked his old Curtiss pusher and I got the job of helping him repair it. This was the start of a long friendship, for I worked with La Grone until the war broke out. In 1917, when all the civilian flying schools were closed, I left Tex and went to work for the old Glenn Martin Company in Los Angeles. Following this, I was with the Curtiss Company in Buffalo and then the Naval Air Station at Akron as flight mechanic. It was in this job that I got my first taste of "wing walking" and other aerial acrobatics, for I was occasionally called upon to climb out and do minor repair jobs on motors while in the air. It was an interesting job, but I somehow liked the old barnstorming life and decided to get back into it.

  The opportunity came when I met "Buck" Weaver and his brother-in-law, Charlie Myers. They were flying through Ohio and I found out that they needed a good mechanic. So I made Myers a proposition to let me take care of his planes and do wing walking for them on their barnstorming tour. Myers balked and I didn't blame him. Being a six-footer weighing 180 pounds on the end of his wing, wasn't quite what he considered a pleasant picture. But "Buck," his partner, after looking me over, decided to take a chance and let me go along. So I went- and got away with it- even though my experience was very limited at the time.
  We barnstormed around Ohio and I had the time of my life working out new stunts to give the crowds a thrill. We were out from May until September flying two ships every day. Some days we made as many as twenty-five flights with each ship. Then we flew to Toledo for the Dempsey-Willard fight. Following this, I left the boys to return to my old home on the Pacific coast.
  When I returned to California, I went into the office of the Crawford Airplane Company in Venice. Here I found most of the old friends I had left two years before. They were talking of the money to be made in flying for the movies and I decided to enter that field. I told the boys what I had been doing in the line of aerial acrobatics, showed them some of my newspaper clippings and announced that I wanted two pilots and a couple of Canucks for the cinema business. There were no volunteers as they all declared they were too young to die. 
  However, some of the old civilian fliers told me there was a young "shave-tail", a second Lieutenant, just out of the army who didn't care what happened to him. They said he wasn't much of a pilot, but he had a good Canuck plane and might be willing to help me break my neck. He turned out to be Ray Goldsworthy, a big six-footer who took nothing seriously- including himself. He was always smiling and never in a hurry.
  Ray and I had a brief talk and decided to take a ride together. The attitude of the "old timers" amused him and we made up our minds to show them up. I had never seen Ray fly, but he seemed cool-headed. I gave him a few pointers on how to counteract my resistance with rudder and ailerons. We taxied down the field and headed into the wind for a take-off with the rest of the crowd watching and expecting the worst.