The Parachute
	There were three young men in our block on Ellicott Street that had come home from WW II wounded. All three were in their thirties, very handsome and great guys. At one end of the block was Royce. I remember seeing him one day on his front porch with his shirt off and as he went into his house I saw a line of deep scar holes going across his left shoulder. It was where he had been wounded by machine gun fire. I guess I was about nine. Royce. I had never heard that name before. I said to my brother, Andy one day "I wonder if when they all sit down to supper someone says 'Pass the rolls, Royce." I guess even at that age my incorrigible sense of humor was budding. In the middle of the block was Mr. Holly. They said he was "shell shocked". He and his wife would take us neighborhood kids to the Fun Lan drive in movie theater. He had two sons and a little daughter. His sons' names were Charles and Charles Perry. I never did quite understand that. Their little sister called them "Choch" and "Choch Pay". At the other end of the street was Floyd. Floyd had been a paratrooper. The paratroopers played a decisive part in WW II. Floyd had a metal plate in his head. At the age of nine I couldn't quite figure out how they could get a plate in someone's head but the term is perfectly clear now. Floyd wasn't able to hold down a regular job so he managed a paper route. One day I walked up on him and some of the neighborhood men talking and they were all laughing and ribbing him about something. They quieted down when I came up. I had heard enough of it as I was walking up behind them to know what they were saying but being so young it didn't mean a whole lot to me. Floyd said he was collecting the money on his paper route and a woman had come to her door and was holding a towel up in front of her. She had just gotten out of the shower. The glass front door had a curtain hanging inside covering the glass. He said that when she pulled the curtain to the side to pay him she accidentally also pulled the towel to the side too and had no idea she had done that. In spite of the teasing from the men Floyd said he kept his eyes looking straight ahead and didn't look down. But what made the situation worse is that on the wall behind her was one of those big wall mirrors. All the kids in the neighborhood really liked hearing Floyd tell stories about being a paratrooper, especially Andy. He had always had an odd attraction to flying. Not like "Someday I'm going to be a pilot." He actually wanted to fly. As we were growing up I watched him make homemade wings out of cardboard, canvas even linoleum and leap off of our house. None of them worked. I could still take you to the spot on our side yard where he always landed in a big crumpled up heap. But oddly enough he was never discouraged. Floyd showed us how to make a small parachute by tying four pieces of string to the four corners of a handkerchief. At the other end of the strings you tied a small rock. Then you'd hold it up by the center of the handkerchief with the rock end dangling down. Then starting with the handkerchief you'd roll it up eventually winding the strings around the handkerchief with the rock left on the outside. We'd throw them as high as we could and coming down the bundle would unroll and about halfway down the small parachute would open and slowly glide down as pretty as you please. Well, it didn't take long for us to realize that the thing to do is to climb up on top of the old deserted 22nd Street water tower which is gone now but was about three streets south of Ellicott Street where we all lived. The tower was ancient even when I was nine. From our house every evening at dusk you could see a cloud of bats make their way out of the small door in the roof of the tank and into the sky for a night of feeding. We had all climbed the tower for years and would sit on the circular three-ft. wide metal walkway that went all the way around the tank and we'd lean our folded arms on the rusty safety railing. Every part of this tower was rusty. Climbing the thin ladder was so scary to me but I never let it show. There were several places where the side handrails of the ladder were completely rusted through but once you got up to the top, oh, it was worth it! I bet we could see for twenty miles. One thing I clearly remember was the Sulphur Springs water tower that looks like a medieval castle. It looked like the stick of a small wooden match standing on end in the far distance. Throwing the handkerchief parachutes off of the tower was better than we had imagined. Then my brother Andy realized that "This would be the thing to do, make a boy sized parachute out of a sheet!" He was certain it would work. When he got an idea like this there was no changing his mind. At this point in time I was probably twelve and he was fourteen. We spirited away a sheet off of the clothesline and went to the wooded field below the water tower and made Andy's parachute. I'm glad the sheet wasn't too worn. When our sheets got thin Mother would tear them down the middle and sew the outside edges together to make them last longer. Andy tied the ropes to the four corners of the sheet and the other ends to his belt loops. "This should work." We rolled the sheet up and he climbed the water tower ladder, thank God not to the very top but to the horizontal beams that went around to all four "legs" of the tower. There were two sets of these beams, one level was about thirty ft. above the ground and the other one, where he was sitting, was just below the tank. We all waited, holding our breaths. We knew he was not going to back out. Silence. It was quiet enough to hear a parachute drop. And we did. He jumped holding the big roll of bedsheet in his arms which he threw into the air as soon as his butt left the beam. Did it open? Of course not. Luckily there was a pretty tall orange tree that he landed in the top of that broke his fall. He wasn't banged up too badly. He said "There wasn't time for it to unroll. If I had gone higher it would've unrolled." I guess we'll never know. The tower is gone and so is he. I don't know what would've happened if he had jumped from the top and I don't want to know. Lash Out Loud