Probably you think that parachutes are made of silk. In November 1941 we stopped importing Japanese silk and by June 6, 1942 Dupont chemicals orchestrated the first jump in a nylon parachute by Miss Adeline Gray of the Pioneer Parachute Company. (I have never even seen a silk parachute and I am an FAA Parachute Rigger.) Exactly two years later every one of the thousands of parachutes in Normandy were fabricated from the superior nylon material. Every industry with weaving capabilities was turning them out! (I specifically remember "Milady's Hat Shoppe" being stamped on a reserve.) Dorothy Dandridge, as Bizet's Carmen, did not work in a cigarette factory but was a WWII parachute rigger in my all-time favorite opera, Carmen Jones. The toreador Escamillo was a champion prizefighter and Joe (Don José, Harry Belafonte) was being sent to the U.S. Army flight school.
There are no bigger wastrels in the world than the United States Government. The land of hundred-dollar monkey wrenches. Ever since going off the gold standard, printing presses have been running 24/7 churning out little green rectangular pieces of paper that we pretend are intrinsically worth something.
When parachutes were silk, there was every good reason to demand, by law, that they be opened, aired out and repacked. Every sixty days. Moth and dust (and a lot of other things) doth corrupt silk. Nobody changed the law. A nylon parachute, kept out of the damaging UV rays of the sun, will last well over a century. Nobody wants something that will last that long...more must be manufactured for the sake of the economy. So every five years or so perfectly good parachutes were...burned. The Marines had a big conveyor belt oven in Kaneohe MCAS where perfectly good parachutes were put on the belt and incinerated. About one hundred at a time. Well, melted, actually. Nylon does not burn; it melts into puddles. Those who ran the conveyor belt would tip off the parachute instructors about the date of "burn day", for a few bucks. We grabbed them off the belt before they, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were consigned to the flames. We used these parachutes for our students who would purchase them for themselves if they were to continue in the sport.
Any jumper could pack his own main chute, but licensed riggers had to repack every reserve chute every sixty days and re-seal it with their own lead seal. For five bucks a pop! It is very much akin to a pilot's license for which you must pass muster under a picky FAA Inspector's steely eyes. If the chute did not open and was found to be defectively packed, the rigger would go to jail. So we were very meticulous!
One burn day it was raining so hard it was difficult to see fifty yards. I drove off with over ten chutes in the trunk, took a wrong turn out by the parachute loft and...wound up on the runway! Dousing my lights so as not to be spotted, I got back on the road. Behind me was a Marine police car, lights all ablaze and siren howling. There I was with over $3500 worth of stolen government goods in the trunk! The police had no doubt spotted me on Kaneohe's active runway. I wondered if I would be sent to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire, or straight to Leavenworth, Kansas. I rolled down the window, donning my best "Clean Cut American Youth With Sorrowful Mien Guise". A red-faced PFC was screaming at me. Slowly I realized that this was not about driving out on an active runway, not about stealing government property, but about not stopping my car and getting out and saluting while "Taps" was being played. At sunset, every day. Everybody stops what they were doing and salutes. An excellent tradition. It was so dark out I was not aware it was sunset and I certainly could not hear "Taps" with all the rain hammering my car. He had seen nothing of what I was worried about. Whew!
The next day I discovered a real gem in the trunk...a large training chute with thirty gores. Over 180 square feet more area than the usual! I had never seen one before but Mom took a picture of Dad under one at Ft. Bragg back in 1943. (The picture hangs on the wall right here.) It really did let you down more gently! Instantly it became very popular for other jumpmasters to ask to use for their own students. Sure, why not? I had saved this beautiful chute from being a molten, useless puddle! A friend asked to borrow it for his student's second jump the very next day. The DZ that day was a huge field with high-tension towers running near the boundary. Of course the student was cautioned to stay away from the wires. Like some sort of magnet, she went right into them. The nylon wrapped right around the wires! There was a blinding flash! The poor girl suffered first, second and third degree burns and was weeks in the hospital. Her father sued the pilot, the electric company, the land the wires were on, the owner of the airplane, and her jumpmaster. Happily, it never got out that she had been using a chute of mine. The parachute and most of the suspension lines were instantly melted. Tucked away safely out of the sun for decades, yanked from the voracious maw of an incinerator one instant, vaporized and melted in a millisecond the next. Apparently this was foreordained. Alas.
A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Soon afterwards, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace, he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, who made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, he flees at great speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles, where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture to his servant. She replies, “That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”