[Milsurplus] Last of '46 Smokejumper class

[Hue Miller]

Pendleton man last of his class of smokejumpers

Sept. 30, 2011, 3:47 p.m. PDT
AP
[ via: Hue Miller. When I read his comment about the BC-611, I just thought, 
"Yeah, that sounds
about right!" ]

PENDLETON, Ore. (AP) — Richard Courson is the last man standing.

Every two years, the Pendleton man has traveled to a reunion of smokejumpers 
from the now-defunct Cave Junction
Smokejumper Base. The number of jumpers from his original training class of 
46 men dwindled with each reunion.

This summer, Courson found himself the lone jumper from his training group 
from 1946. He mingled with
smokejumpers from later classes, wondering where all the familiar faces had 
gone.
Courson, 89, isn't one to flinch at danger. The Marine paratrooper came home 
from World War II having
survived the fierce Battle of Iwo Jima. He returned to Portland and started 
looking for a job. He had a limited skill
set, he said, that included jumping out of airplanes and killing his enemy.
The retired Umatilla County circuit judge has a wit as sharp as a carbon 
steel knife and a sense of humor dryer
than the Sahara. "I could have gone to Chicago and worked for Capone," 
Courson added, "but that wasn't real practical."

When he noticed a newspaper ad for Forest Service smokejumpers, Courson 
applied and got the job.
The 22-year-old learned to parachute Forest Service-style, wearing a heavy 
canvas jump suit with stand-up
collar and helmet with open-lattice face protector. He parachuted from 
Noorduyn Norseman bush planes onto
mountainous, rocky terrain of northern California and southern Oregon. The 
jumpers aimed for trees close to the flames.
"Smokejumpers inevitably got hung up in the timber," Courson said. "You're 
talking 80 percent slopes with nothing but rocks."

A huge pocket on the right leg of their trousers held 80 feet of coiled 
rope. Using the rope, the firefighters
rappelled from the canopy and started looking for equipment that had 
free-fallen from the aircraft — cross-cut
saws, shovels and pulaskis, double-edged tools with an axe on one side and 
an adze for digging on the other.
The firefighters communicated with the pilot using surplus World War II 
radios. "The darn things usually wouldn't work,"
he said. "The pilot would have to throw notes out of the plane. There was a 
lot of waving. It was really clumsy."

Radios are better now, but "not much has really changed," said Bill Selby, 
smokejumper program manager at the
Redmond Air Center. Kevlar has replaced canvas, he said, but jumpsuits have 
the same design. Modern jumpers
use GPS units and chainsaws, he said. Ropes are made from tubular nylon, 
instead of natural fibers. Tools have their own chutes.

[ Entire article at: 
http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/pendleton-man-last-of-his-class-of/d929c69b5bc14215aa9bd33f248f93c8
but there's not much more to it. ]