When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur. It is extremely difficult to single out one or two, impossible to remember any that exemplify the whole.

Silk Parachute - Etsy Silk Parachute - Etsy

It has been alleged that when I was in college she heard that I had stayed up all night playing poker and wrote me a letter that used the word "shame" forty-two times. I do not recall this. Newspaper coverage at the time marvelled at her coolness: “As calmly as if she were going out on the porch to bring in the daily paper… [she] stepped out of an airplane,” wrote the New York Times. Of course, it was nothing new for Gray. She was an experienced stunt parachutist with 32 jumps under her belt, and possibly the only woman parachutist in America during the time she was active. After she landed, reporters asked “the attractive Miss Gray” how she felt, reported the Times. Her response: “all right.”

Princeton University and Cambridge University educated John Angus McPhee. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association since 1965 with the New Yorker as a staff writer. In the same year, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1968), Levels of the Game (1968), The Crofter and the Laird (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards. Selections from these books make up The John McPhee Reader (1976). We have now covered everything even faintly unsavory that has been reported about this person in ninety-nine years, and even those items are a collection of rumors, half-truths, prevarications, false allegations, inaccuracies, innuendos, and canards.

Brief History of the Parachute - Popular Mechanics A Brief History of the Parachute - Popular Mechanics

meters (about 50 feet) of nylon rope “The nylon rope is useful in scaling cliffs or craters you may have to cross. To prevent injury or in case you cannot walk, rope is helpful for tying you to others.” liters (10 gallons) of water “Water is another basic survival need for the astronauts. Because there is no liquid water on the Moon, the astronauts will need the water they brought with them to survive.” Inaddition to the structural analysis of the cloth, the properties measured areweight, breaking strength, tear resistance, elasticity, and air permeability.

On this day in 1942, in an airfield near Hartford, Connecticut, Adeline Gray fell to earth for the 33rd time.