Tales from the Bonfire | A Powerful Presence
When I heard John Sherman had passed, it took me back a bunch of years and made me realize that I’ve known him since I was 16 years old. In my first year, I made 200 jumps and was given an honorary alternate slot on the 10-man team, The Beechnuts. I was lucky to have the DZ just down the street from where I lived, and the jump planes were a C-180 and a Twin Beech. A big plane able to carry 10 people was unusual in the Midwest, and the first 8-man and 10-man stars in Michigan were completed over Austin Lake. I was blessed to have these guys as my mentors growing up.
In ‘74, the Beechnuts were going to go to their first Nationals in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but just before, Ken Coleman broke his arm and wasn’t going to get to jump. So, the word went out, and they found a ringer, who would meet us there, to fill the slot. These were 10-man round stars, so being able to dive fast and swoop was the criteria of the time. We traveled in a caravan of a few vehicles for the journey, and when we arrived, it resembled a fair: Twin Beeches lined up on the flight line, tents scattered about, a row of telemeters and judges lined up around the pea-gravel pit. For me, it was huge. They said the ringer’s name was John Sherman, and by his reputation, they were comfortable enough to give him a slot without having ever jumped with him. He was known to have hung out in Hinckley, Illinois, jumping with the James Gang and out at Elsinore for 10-man scrambles. He also made his own harness-and-container system called the Super Swooper.
Photo by Troy White.We arrived with our cut-down B-4 containers, a couple of Mini Systems and Style Masters filled with Para-Commanders and 24-foot flat reserves. I’ll always remember walking up with Ken to manifest with masses of people in different jumpsuits and gear, all headed somewhere.
There under the covered area was John. He was tall (I was 5’2”), slim and dressed in a primarily white bell-bottomed Brand X jumpsuit, a thin white container and a pop-top reserve. I had heard tell of these pop-tops but had never seen one up close. He also had a leather frap hat and was sporting Para Moccasins. The moccasins gave him an air of casualness, as I was still in two-inch-sole jump boots and couldn’t imagine anything less. He recognized Ken right off and walked over with a big smile. He would have shaken his hand had it not been broken. I don’t know what he thought of me initially—some little kid tagging along. He did shake my hand. At that moment, for me, John was a vision of the future.
His rig was thin and had split leg straps. The ripcord housing went down toward the bottom of the container rather than over the shoulder, which was more common. I later overheard him explaining to someone that the housing had two purposes. One, when someone pulled, it was a more upward movement, so the cable didn’t have to make a 90-degree bend, and two, it took away the chance of a crimped cable should you hit your rig on the top of the small door of the Beech. This happened a bunch. Some of the style rigs had split leg straps, but most of the rigs of the time had solid saddles. Yes, John was sporting the future, a trendsetter from the first time I met him.
At that time, Nationals were always held at the beginning of the summer, which gave the southern teams an advantage. In Michigan, the weather was limited in April and chancy in May, followed shortly after by Nationals. But now that John was around, things picked up throughout the summer months. He managed to wrangle up a DC-3 for us to jump out of, and a DC-3 in the Midwest drew folks from all over. The Greene County guys, the God Frogs, Clockwork Banana, and the Sphincter Brothers (yes, there were a bunch of sphincters back then, too) all came up to Michigan to fill the plane with us. This DC-3 had the door on the right side of the fuselage. The pilot’s name was Wheels, and he flew the plane like it was a Cessna 180. It really sparked massive growth and integration of different DZs throughout the Midwest.
Again, John was the catalyst.
At the end of the season, we loaded it up with folks and took it down to the Turkey Meet in Zephyrhills, Florida. Again, this was like nothing I had ever experienced. There was a C-46, five or six DC-3s and three or four Lodestars. With a hundred 10-man teams in attendance, once jumping started, you could look up any time of the day and see a 10-man star in various levels of completion. It was like that for a whole week. Since the team was whole and didn’t need the alternate, I filled in on the Clockwork Banana team for the meet.
We had our area staked out along the edge of the landing area, able to view the day’s goings-on and close enough to stumble to in the evening. On the last day we were going to be there, flying out that evening, I had an experience that changed my teenage years forever. I was lying in the grass, watching load after load. Then, while watching a particular breakoff, I just happened to see one guy track off and pull. He pulled relatively high and deployed a competition Para-Commander notorious for frontal closure, which he had in spades. He rode it for a bit and decided to cut away. At the very moment that he was looking down at his reserve and most likely had his thumbs in the rings, it opened, but he was already in the process of cutting away and didn’t see it. This caused him to fall over on his side as he fell away, so when he pulled his reserve, the pilot chute got caught in the burble on the side of his body while the rest of the reserve continued to deploy.
As the skirt came out, the pilot chute went through the lines, and when he saw that, he grabbed the lines and tried to untangle it but couldn’t, so he released it, hoping it would clear itself. But it didn’t, leaving him with a streamer, and because of pulling high he had to look at it for a long time. He went in on his back, looking up.
John knew right away how traumatic this would be for a 17-year-old kid and came over to see that I was OK. This was the moment when John became one of my surrogate skydiving fathers. He took the time to explain exactly how it happened and made me understand how to avoid anything like that happening to me. When you watch someone who is alive until he goes below the height of the grass, it changes how you think about life. We flew back that night, and walking into my high school the next day, I found it full of children.
As I said about skydiving in the winter in Michigan, it is seasonal. In December and January, there were times when the lake got frozen thick enough to take the Twin Beech off from it, but after being in Z-hills and knowing that people were jumping at the exact same time in shorts when I was jumping in a snowmobile suit, I decided that the snowmobile suit was for riding snowmobiles.
The following season began as usual, hit and miss. When teams from all over the Midwest showed up for a conference meet at a drop zone in Tecumseh, Michigan, there was John, again bringing us into the future, unveiling the Super Swooper Tandem—a small main container with a pop-top reserve container mounted over the top [“tandem” referring to a dual parachute system for one jumper].
Piggyback rigs back then were huge, like carrying a small refrigerator on your back. The SST was small, lightweight, and the perfect size for the coming revolution of small, square main canopies. The Strato-Star was about to revolutionize the sport, and John had the ideal rig for its debut. At the Nationals that year, it was a gear-war year. Jerry Bird and The Wings of Orange showed up with their entry, which still had the front-mounted reserve but was tapered and slim. The main canopy was a small round they called the Trickinal, which was actually a tri-conical. Captain Hook and the SkyPirates came with a piggyback system and a single-surface wing called the Paradactyl. And we arrived with the SST and Strato-Star. We didn’t win the meet, but we definitely won the gear war. At that time in the sport, to have 10 people on a jump—all with square parachutes—was revolutionary, and skydiving was never the same after that.
As the alternate, John gave me the very first SST. Since there were only 10 Strato-Stars for the team, he gave me a white cut-down 28-foot, five TU on which he had gutted the lines out of the canopy and short-lined 6 feet so it could fit in the rig. I made thousands of jumps on that combination, until Mike Johnston showed up at Pope Valley years later, saw I was still jumping it and told John. John told him to get it from me to put it in the archives, and he made me a brand-new one.
John was my sponsor for the rest of my skydiving career. He always supported me, even when I went rogue and away from traditional disciplines. I think I became more of a rebel because of John’s influence. He was an example of how I wanted to approach the sport. Stepping out and trying new things that were cause for ridicule by the mainstream was his way, and because of his example in my formative years, I was able not only to survive 50 years in the sport but was able to leave the sport better than I found it, as did he.
If you never got to know the real John, then you missed out. I genuinely believe I’m a better person, having known him the way that I did.
Mike “Michigan” Sandberg | D-5894
Grants Pass, Oregon