Skydiving’s Legend — the making of the book

The Legend of Jerry Bird

a new sports biography/memoir coming soon from Ground Rush Productions…

Aerial Sports Biography/Memoir

Extreme Sports/History

History/American subculture/20th century

Oral History/Group Memoir

If you aren’t a skydiver, or if you recently started jumping, you might not have heard of Jerry Bird. Bird was the world’s first famous skydiver, known, respected, and loved by skydivers worldwide. Long before Redbull sponsored extreme sports, Jerry Bird was a legend during the golden age when the sport evolved from paramilitary accuracy and solo freefall maneuvers to group skydiving.

Jerry is a national and international champion, world record holder, innovator, gear designer, coach, teammate and friend, Bird brought us together in freefall in the second half of the 20th century.

Here’s a quick backstory of my connection to skydiving:

I started jumping out of airplanes in 1981; I was 27, a nurse by night, and a mother (single again). My beginnings in the sport is a story in itself to be told another time…  During the ’80s and early ’90s I became a jumpmaster (static line and Accelerated Freefall) and a skydiving instructor and worked at Skydive Colorado, formerly, Skies West. Once I taught the ground school, the First Jump Course (AFF) to a group of cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy (and imagined myself as skydiving’s Kelly McGillis.) I was part of a girls 4-way team (yeah, we called them girls teams back then, even though we were grown-ass women) and I made some good skydiving friends.

In 1986 I met Bob Russell at the drop zone — Skies West, on Colorado’s front range. Bob had more jumps than I did — he had started in 1972 and had once jumped with Jerry Bird. An officer in the Air Force, Bob served for five years (two of them in Australia) then returned to Colorado and to CU Boulder as a graduate student in astrophysics.

Bob got his AFF Jumpmaster rating before I did and he also got his tandem rating. We were on a 4-way team together and one summer we ran Skydive St. Louis together. We competed locally a few times, and once at Nationals, but mostly we were weekend skydivers.

Skydiving was a big part of our lives for more than a decade. Then we moved to Hawaii and the ocean took over for a decade and we traded parachutes for sails…

In 2020 we began working on a documentary film about the evolution of sport skydiving. With our producer partners Chris Johnston and Bethany Baptiste we interviewed dozens of notable skydivers, skydiving pioneers all. Skydivers like Lew Sanborn (D-1.) Al Krueger (Captain Hook and the Sky Pirates), and Kim Emmons Knor (U.S. Women’s Parachuting World Champions 1962). And of course, Jerry Bird.

After our 2-day experience with Jerry Bird at Skydive City in Zephyrhills, Florida — a world renown center he helped to create in 1990 — Jerry invited Bob and I to his house. That’s when he asked me to write his biography. I am not worthy!  But the skydiving and cultural history — and Bird’s stories — needed to be preserved.

I agreed to help with the project but I wasn’t the one to write it — I wanted to hear Jerry and the pioneers tell their own stories their own way. Luckily for me, his longtime friends Sam Alexander and Raylene West had already recorded hours of interviews with Jerry and transcribed them verbatim.

Sam, Raylene and Jerry shared history together. Sam was on Jerry Bird’s All Stars team. Raylene was a novice skydiver and avid All Star fan who followed the team across the Atlantic to Bled (Yugoslavia, then) to witness their U.S. Freefall Exhibition Team’s demonstrations at the Parachuting World Championships in 1970. Jerry lived with Sam and Raylene (married, at that time) for awhile after his marriage to Diane crashed.

Sam and Raylene are the creators of this project and Jerry is the driving force, the star at the center. The book springs from Jerry’s oral histories and his voice comes through on the page. In the process Sam, Raylene, Bob and I met up in Florida and interviewed Jerry again — all the five of us.

Then began my research in earnest!

Five years after beginning the Jerry Bird project, we are close to announcing a release date for the book: Jerry Bird: The Making of a Skydiving Legend. We are in the copy-edited process. Next comes the interior book design, image placement, and cover design. Then, the proofs/advance readers copies will be sent to reviewers and a release date will be announced!

 

P.S. And the beat goes on… Our 20 year old grandson Isaac is now a skydiver! After making two tandems, he graduated from the AFF program and is working toward his A license. A lot has changed in the sport of skydiving over the last 50 years, but some things remain the same. Like, Gravity. Ground rush. Adrenalin. Camaraderie. And the legend of skydiver Jerry Bird.