Sunshine Superman Page #4

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and we really have fun skydiving.

It's almost become a way of life for us,

we take it so seriously.

Interestingly enough,

if it weren't for the camera,

I, personally, probably wouldn't be

that interested in skydiving.

Because the camera captures

something not only for ourselves

but for everybody,

over a vast amount of time.

And it's really a sense of creativity

that we do a lot of things in skydiving

just for the sake of the camera,

and hence for millions of people,

to see what we do.

Pretty much all the BASE jumping

was called into the Manor Drive house.

"We're going to go jump El Capitan

at six o'clock tomorrow morning."

"Want to come and film?"

Carl and Jean, this is Mary Todd.

Well, I'm over here.

We did El Cap yesterday

and it just went so fantastic.

Piece of cake. Everything.

As you can tell, nothing happened.

No rangers.

Soto say he was a ringleader,

yes, he didn't tell people to go jump

but he knew about it.

Even though we had had problems

with the National Park Service

as far as arrests or people

wanting to fine or prohibit,

BASE jumping

was not an illegal activity.

And in the park service specifically,

it should easily have been

a permitted activity.

Currently it's pretty illegal to jump

off of the top of most of those cliffs.

And I know that you've been instrumental

in fighting that.

What's going on with that now?

Is that going to be legalized

in your opinion?

Well, we hope that in time,

just like mountain climbing,

that it will be unregulated.

Right now, we want to work

hand in hand with the park service.

We both wanted the same thing.

To legalize it.

To reduce the danger

of jumping illegally.

Because they're doing it at night.

Trying to evade us.

Bill Wendt is the National Park

Service director for Yosemite.

El Capitan happens to be

inside of Yosemite National Park.

And it's one of the few cliffs

in the world

where they can safely jump

from the top of a cliff

and parachute down

to a suitable landing site.

We have finally, after a year of

negotiating back and forth,

you might say, convinced the park

service that it can be done safely.

The park service is issuing permits.

It worked,

and it worked for a while,

but it really started to be untenable.

There were just too many free spirits.

And we had to shut them down.

The ninth of September.

Jumping off El Capitan

was first unregulated

because it was unthought of.

And then it was regulated

because it was feared.

And then it was banned

because it was abused.

We got it started

because I recommended it.

And it was stopped

because I recommended it.

So I'm responsible.

And maybe I was too impatient

and didn't...

That... that I will admit.

It really has no connection

with what we consider

to be an International Aviation sport.

It's more closely related

to circus acrobats and circus tricks.

OK, the Granite Circus

was one of Carl's dreams.

The last day of jumping,

he wanted to make it spectacular.

So he arranged for one person

to be on stilts, that was me.

Mayfield was going to walk

on his hands, doing a handstand.

Carl was on a pogo stick

and one other guy

was going to be on a skateboard.

I got up on the stilts, made about

two or three steps and I was gone.

It was so cool

that that kind of set my heels in.

I was into BASE jumping.

Even though it wasn't called

BASE jumping at the time.

That was the program for me.

After the permitted season

of jumping from El Capitan,

the number of jumpers interested

doing this activity was growing.

And Carl in his foresight knew

that we needed to be able

to call it something other

than fixed object skydiving

or skydiving from fixed objects

or cliff-jumping.

There were boundaries

beyond just cliffs.

I found some other objects around that

I thought might be interesting to jump.

Phil Smith, Smitty,

came up with a couple ideas.

One of them was jumping off TV towers.

He had a TV tower in Houston

that was over a thousand feet high.

He also mentioned that there was a

building going up at a construction

that was ultimately going to be

about 900 feet high, a little bit more.

One thing led to another.

Carl and Jean decided to come out

in January of 1981.

The four of us would go down

and jump the TV tower.

That was the prime focus.

The building had been mentioned

almost in passing.

It seemed like not having done

either one

that a TV tower jump would be

a lot more feasible than a building

just because of the logistics

of getting onto a building.

Smitty did all the homework

and lined it up for us.

And by that I mean figured out

when we need to be there

and how to get onto the tower

because we'd have to climb a fence.

How to get away and how many sets of

cables there were on the tower

so we could avoid hitting those.

Bottom line is we jumped that.

Carl and I had traveled out

to Phil Mayfield's house

and we met Phil Smith there as well.

And we started talking about

Carl's latest ideas. His grand idea.

His big picture of fixed object jumping.

That evening we were up

in Phil's house in Arlington.

And we were planning

our next day's jump.

And Carl had been daydreaming all week

and brainstorming this thing.

He came up with the idea

of making an organization

where to be a member,

you had to have jumped

these four different kinds of objects.

So we started brainstorming

different acronyms, different names

so that we could come up with

something that was kind of catchy.

I don't really know who came up with it,

but it evolved into the word BASE.

And all of the guys instantly

just grabbed hold of BASE

and said, "Well, that's the one."

- What's your group called?

- We don't...

Crazy Men of the World.

No, what are you called?

That's what most people call us.

But we've got an organization.

We have to be members of it

although we don't have a roster

of official members yet.

It's too new an organization.

The type of jumping that we do,

first of all, is called BASE jumping.

B-A-S-E is an acronym for Buildings,

Antennae Towers, Spans and Earth.

So at that time nobody had

jumped off four things.

We had kind of planned

to do the building in Houston.

At that time, it was called

Texas Commerce Tower.

You jumped off a cliff. What's next?

I heard you want to jump off buildings.

Well, yes. It's just mankind's spirit

that's bubbling out saying,

"if there are mountains

let's climb them."

"if there are buildings,

let's jump off of them."

Houston was going through

a lot of growth.

They were building several new buildings

that would be

about a thousand feet high.

At that time,

that was kind of our criteria.

I didn't want to do

much lower than that.

The nice thing about those buildings is

when a building is under construction,

they're really vulnerable

to people like us.

Often the building would have

just a chain-link fence around it.

You could just pull it apart and find

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