NEXT AVENUE - SPECIAL SECTION
WELCOME TO THE NEXT AVENUE SPECIAL SECTION
How My Parachute Took 75 Years to Drop in Normandy By Deborah L. Jacobs
"It is a very beautiful historic piece and its packaging is very pretty," wrote the museum's curator, Eric Belloc, in response to the photos I sent. Opened in 1964, the museum has expanded its collection through public and private donations. On view in one pavilion is a C-47: a military transport plane that dropped parachutists during the D-Day attack. In another, visitors can walk through the only original Waco glider on display in Europe. The museum owns about 50 parachutes. The Airborne Museum plans to keep our parachute in storage for two or three years until the museum completes a renovation of its Waco Pavilion. The parachute can't be displayed fully opened, Mallet told us, because parachutes "are too big and would lose their shape." But it could be exhibited, in a special case, partially unfurled, with the original carton beside it.
While grounded during the pandemic, one of my projects was to find a worthy recipient for a red World War II nylon/cotton parachute that had been sitting in my Brooklyn, N.Y. basement for 22 years. The parachute, in its original carton and never used, was previously in the attic of my parents' house in the Bronx when they bought the place "as is" in 1967. About a year after my father died in 1997, my mother sold the house and, while cleaning out 30 years of detritus, showed up on my stoop with this bulky, 27-pound bundle.
She announced that she was passing the torch to me, to preserve the parachute "for history." Envisioning the day when we, too, might need to downsize, my husband and I recently decided it was time to hand off our red inheritance to the pros.
So, I contacted several museums that might, for various reasons, want to add our parachute to their collection.
The one that showed the greatest interest was the Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mère-Église, the first French town liberated by the Allies on June 6, 1944.
Knowing his plans satisfied every secret wish. This meant that as many as 100,000 visitors per year would see our parachute. And finally, it would be out of the box. Read more of this story on Next Avenue.org
14
NEXTAVENUE.ORG
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator