When Jumping Out of Airplanes Is an Excellent Idea

When Wendy Graham was growing up, she was especially fascinated by two television shows, Ripcord and Sky King, both high-flying adventures about parachute jumpers. She soon became determined to get up there herself.

Much of Graham’s life since then has been up in the air. She has done more than 3,000 parachute jumps — for the military, for charity, for sport, and for fun. She served 28 years as a military paratrooper, overlapping in part with the 17 years she has spent at BU as an employment training specialist in the Office of Human Resources. A year and a half ago she was part of Jump for the Cause, a benefit for breast cancer research that assembled the largest group of women free-fallers in history, setting a world record and raising half a million dollars.

Graham has recently retired from military service, but skydiving remains a passion. “It’s just what I do to relax,” she explains. “Feeling the wind on your face, getting yourself out of the aircraft — there’s just something special about it.”

Graham joined the military in 1978 for a simple reason: enlisting to jump was cheaper than going to skydiving school, although she later had to pay for lessons because the requirements for civilian jumps are different. And when she finally got airborne, she was as nervous as anyone else. “The first time was just mechanical,” she says. “You’re listening to your drill sergeant yell at you, so you can’t think much. But on my second jump, I saw that green light in the aircraft [the signal to jump] and I thought, ‘Oh Lord, I’m going to die.’ Then suddenly you’re out and you’re just floating.”

Graham ultimately earned the rank of command sergeant major, a rank held by relatively few women and the highest awarded to a noncommissioned officer. After joining the National Guard, she was deployed to Bosnia for nine months in 2000. “It was a humbling experience,” she says. “When you meet different cultures, you realize that everyone truly is the same, that we are born with no prejudices. Those are taught.”

Her service ended last December. “It’s a serious commitment,” Graham says. “You’re serving the country and prepared to give your life. I kept extending my stay but finally decided it was time to let someone else take over.”

One of her personal and career peaks, the Jump for the Cause event in October 2005, found her and 150 other international women skydivers creating a flower-like formation in midair over Perris, Calif. Graham had been part of Jump for the Cause’s record-breaking events twice before: with 118 women in 1999 and then in 2002 as one of 131. The organization attempts a world record every few years, and it’s likely that Graham will be involved when organizer Kate Cooper tries again. “The community of experienced jumpers is fairly small,” she notes. “So it’s always good when we can all see each other.”

Some of her feats have occurred closer to home. Once she jumped onto Nickerson Field for the Special Olympics. “I was wearing a pink jumpsuit and had a purple canopy [parachute], and I’d borrowed a BU flag that was flying behind me. The children enjoyed coming up and seeing the canopy afterward.” She and her husband, fellow skydiver Tom McLaughlin, who has more than 13,000 jumps to his credit, sometimes work as a team. One couple hired them to jump into their backyard on the husband’s 75th birthday. They jumped from opposite wings and kissed in midair. Sometimes she and McLaughlin, assistant director of academic services at the College of Communication, jump purely for fun.

For all the time she’s spent aloft, Graham admits to being petrified of roller coasters and Ferris wheels. And she’s not fond of certain smaller aircraft. “Going up in some planes can be difficult,” she says. “Getting out of them is easy.”