Thursday, September 4, 2014

Idler, Monday, August 11, 2014

Hey, contact made!

 

BINGO! Last week we ran a photograph, taken in the early sixties, of members of the now defunct Durban Parachute Club. Allan Banfield, of Hertfordshire, England, asked if anyone could identify the individuals. He is putting together a history of parachuting/skydiving in KwaZulu-Natal, in which we were pioneers because the Pietermaritzburg Parachute Club was the first of its kind in the Commonwealth.

 

He particularly wanted to know about two leading members of the Durban club, Major Al Petit and Denny Skinner.

 

Next thing I had Denny Skinner identifying himself as one of the fellows in the photo. He was a founding member and chief instructor. He lives at Waterfall and can identify almost all the others in the picture. Then it was Tim Barron with the sad news that Al Petit died last year. But Tim is in touch with his daughter, who lives in Knysna, and has sent a copy of the piece to where she is currently on holiday in the US.

 

Sherlock Holmes, that's me. Watch this space!

 

 

Big trouble

 

SKYDIVING calls to mind the days when I shared a few escapades in Angola with a photographer named Frank Black.

 

Angola was a difficult place for photographers because the long lens on a camera looked just like a bazooka. Luanda was being patrolled at the time by three trigger-happy armed movements and the Portuguese army. To be thought to be aiming a bazooka was not a good idea.

 

The outfit we were with at the time – the Argus Africa News Service – therefore bought a state-of-the-art, and very expensive, mirror lens camera that had a positively snub nose and could never be mistaken for a bazooka. But it had great zoom capabilities.

 

Back in Johannesburg, where he was an avid skydiver, Frank borrowed the AANS camera to photograph a mass free-fall jump that was trying for some kind of record. Frank would photograph it from a Dakota.

 

Later that day, the fellows had gathered at the usual hostelry to wash down the dust when in came Frank. He was battered, grazed and bleeding. He told his story.

 

The skydivers jumped and he was there in the doorway of the Dakota photographing them as they free-fell. The camera was on a strap round his neck. He was not wearing a parachute.

 

Suddenly a draught of air sucked him right out of the plane. But his leg was caught in a leather strap in the doorway. The slipstream hammered him against the fuselage.  There was nobody else in the plane but the pilot, who couldn't leave the controls and didn't know anything was amiss anyway.

 

Frank tried to kick free of the strap. The idea was to free-fall himself, catch up with the rest and grab somebody by the legs.

 

But then suddenly another draught sucked him back into the plane.

 

Everyone's blood ran cold as we listened to this account. Then the voice of Wilf Nussey, hardbitten editor of AANS, broke the hush.

 

"What's happened to our camera?"

 

"It's safe. I put it in your office."

 

"That's just as well. You'd be in big trouble if anything happened to it."

 

Nobody could accuse Nussey of mawkish sentimentality.

 

 

Vintage oops!

 

LAST FRIDAY we had a picture of a 1957 Cadillac Series 62 coupe near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Except, readers Noel Pickering, Zaid Paruk and Eddie Halstead assure me, it was actually a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air.

 

I stand corrected. Anyway, it was a lovely car in a fetching shade of what they used to call nipple pink. (Or do the experts in such matters believe otherwise?)

 

 

Tailpiece

 

A COUPLE are in a smart restaurant. Their waitress is taking another order at a table a few paces away when she notices the man was slowly sliding down his chair and under the table. The woman seems unconcerned. The waitress watches as the man slides all the way down his chair and out of sight under the table. The woman dining across from him still appears calm and unruffled.

 

The waitress finishes taking the order then comes over: "Pardon me, ma'am, but I think your husband just slid under the table."

 

The woman looks up at her and replies: "No he didn't. He just walked in the door."

 

 

Last word

 

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell

 

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