The following is the script I wrote for my first reenactment with the West Volusia Historical Society. It is based on my research on Skydiving in DeLand, my own experiences as a young female skydiver in the 1970s, and on the amazing good luck of locating an alive and well JoAnn. We spent many wonderful hours discussing her experiences as the first woman to make a skydive here in DeLand. This is her story as related to me and as I related it to an audience at the Historical Society in April 2025. Much thanks to Bob Hallet for the loan of the period accurate equipment and to Mike Johnson for the access to Doc Gaffney’s archives and locating JoAnn for me! And of course, the amazing inspirational JoAnn!
Laine speaks as JoAnn:
Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is JoAnn Lekawitch. No. You don’t know me. You’ve never heard my name before, but I too am a DeLand Pioneer. As you can see, I wasn’t born in the 19th century. I’m not that kind of pioneer. I was born on July 15, 1943, in a small town in Illinois.
DeLand used to be known as the Athens of Florida for those earlier pioneers, but I bet most of you have no idea what that actually means. That was an ad campaign created by old Henry DeLand himself to attract settlers here. DeLand was to rival ancient Greece as a center of learning! In my high school days, this town was known more appropriately as Deadland. Now DeLand is known as the skydiving capital of the world, a reputation it has proudly earned since the 1980s. While DeLand has had an airport, a grass strip through orange groves, as early as the 1920s, it was modernized when it became a Naval Air Station between 1941 and 1946. But the first skydive was made here a dozen years later on December 26th, 1958. On that day, a chiropractor named John Gaffney, we all called him Doc, brought a few friends here to DeLand and they made those first jumps. Bob Lee, the airport manager, flew them. Doc and his buddies liked it here so much that Doc started the Falling Angels Parachute Club at DeLand airport and moved his practice from Gainsville to 339 East New York Avenue, DeLand in 1959. I was the very first woman to make a skydive here in DeLand on March 25th 1961. I was also the youngest woman in the whole United States to have made a jump then! I was 17 years old when I did that.
JoAnn’s Story
How did this Illinois teenager go about becoming a DeLand skydiver you may wonder? Back in 1961, Old Daytona Road that runs right past the airport went clear through to Marsh Road where my grandparents lived on Palmetto. From their house you could see the skydivers and I would always watch them every weekend. I was real attracted to aviation then. I wanted to be a stewardess, but then, I also wanted to be a professional ice skater! Neither happened.
I was born in Berwyn, and grew up in Hillside, both small towns outside of Chicago. By 1961, I was living with my grandparents here in DeLand for my last year of high school. I missed a lot of school when I was in the hospital with mono during my senior year and my Illinois school would not let me graduate with my friends even if I was able to make up the work I missed. We had come down to DeLand to visit my grandparents over Christmas and we thought to ask at DeLand High if they would let me graduate on time – IF I made up the work. I got their approval, so I completed my senior year at the old DeLand High School on Rich Avenue. Luckily, the southern schools had a different curriculum than the northern schools and I didn’t have all that much to make up. On the weekends, my grandpa used to like to walk down to the airport bar for a beer when the jumping was happening, and I came with him to watch. I always did have an adventurous spirit, not wild, mind you! Just adventurous. I was a tom boy, a bit of a dare devil, loved to climb trees, a real outdoors kid. So yep, watching those boys jump just looked like so much fun to me!
After a couple of weeks watching, I saw some of the guys at the restaurant, so I started talking with them. I wanted to know everything! And they seemed happy to answer. Finally, as we got to know each other, I just asked, “Can I jump with you?”
They looked at each other as if they couldn’t believe I asked this. Then after some deliberation they said “Sure, but because you’re so young, you will need your parent’s permission.”
“So, if I got permission from my mom, you would teach me?”
They just laughed and said, “Yeah ok!”
Little did they know, when they said yes, I ran straight back to my grandparent’s house and called my mom! I guess they never believed I would get permission.
Aaaaaaaaand they were right. Mom said no on the phone. But I wasn’t going to take that for an answer. I wrote my mom a long letter begging her for permission. She finally gave it and when I showed up at the skydiving club a few weeks later with that letter in my hand, those guys were really surprised!
Training to Jump
When it came to my training, they were really crazy! They were so careful with me because I was a girl. They just wanted to be very sure that I could handle it. Even after I started jumping, they were overprotective. If the winds weren’t just right, or any excuse, they would not let me jump. Sometimes it would make me so angry, but they were my family now and you can’t stay angry when you know they are looking out for you.
There were some basic things you needed to learn to be allowed to jump. We used Cessnas that held 4 jumpers and the pilot. From exiting the plane, to releasing from the strut of the Cessna, to keeping stable in the air, pulling the rip cord, steering the parachute, managing a malfunction, landing, packing the chute again…. My training took a full month of preparation. Training took part on the weekends between the guys’ jumps. During the week I studied the manual. I was quizzed on the whole contents of the Sport Parachuting Manual by RA Gunby. I don’t know if they made anyone else do these tests, but I had to do them.
The physical training was the wildest part! Landing under a perfectly good parachute was not as smooth as it is now. We had to learn to do a PLF or a parachute landing fall. Back then the first chute I jumped was a military surplus chute – the huge pale green kind with no modifications for steering. Landings were pretty hard so we all needed to perfect the PLF. That was a way to spread the shock of landing throughout our bodies, not just our legs. We’d land on our feet with knees bent and immediately roll over to the side and round onto our backs with arms folded close to our heads. Back then they still had lots of military buildings there from when it was the Naval Air Station during the war. For my training, they had me climb up onto a concrete ammo bunker that was maybe 5-6 feet high and jump off of that to practice my landings! The boys in the parachute club would all stand around to watch, “Yup, that was a good one/Nope that’s not a good one. Do it again”, commenting on what I did wrong – and right. I must have jumped off that bunker fifty times before I was consistently getting it right!
To train me to steer the chute, to manage near power lines, or water jumps, or to cut away if it didn’t open, they had me wear a parachute harness and hung me from a tree. I had to practice looking up and analyzing the situation, then release the capewells to cut away the chute, drop and grab my reserve chute. So I sure hit the ground many times before I was ready to actually jump!
My First Jumps
When I finally made my first jump, my grandma was too scared to watch but my grandpa wanted to be there. Since he had heart trouble, I made him lie on the ground to make sure he was relaxed before I went over to the plane. So that’s how it all started. My gramma would stay at the house, but Grampa would come and watch flat on the ground. My first jump was so cool. I was gawking and looking all around and marveling at the beauty. I could see the ocean and the Gulf!! It was just so neat. I totally missed the target because I was too busy admiring the world from above.
I did the standard five static line jumps before I was allowed to do freefall. Gradually, I was allowed to jump from higher altitudes. All of the equipment we used was designed for the military, so it was all made for guys weighing much more than I did. So yes, if the winds were strong or squirrely, they’d say, “You don’t weigh enough, you can’t jump”. I’d be so angry! Other times, on warm days, especially after the fields were just plowed, I’d jump and because I was so light, my parachute would rise in the thermals instead of come straight down like it did for all the other guys. They’d be down and already done packing their chutes by the time I got down. They often had to wait for me to get the next load up. They didn’t mind. They were all my big brothers and they looked out for me.
After my 12th jump, in August 1961 I bought my own rig. It was an orange and white TU35 and a 5 PSTU rig. We modified the chutes to make them easier to steer by cutting upside down “T”s in the panels. I got it all second hand for $80.
Early Sport Competitions
We didn’t do much of that freefall formation in those days. We only had small Cessnas for jump planes. When we had bigger planes, we could do more freefalling in groups but it was nothing like now where people jump in groups or teams and they catch each other and make big formations. Back in my day, people mainly jumped alone, or two people would pass a baton. Jumps were for landing accuracy. You’d exit the plane, open your chute and try to hit a small disk in the middle of the pea gravel. Keep in mind our chutes were not very steerable, so it did take skill to hit a target. Since this was a sport, we had to have competitions. So landing accuracy was how we competed. Doc Gaffney, he was the guy who started the Parachute Club here in 1959, created the freefall ‘style’ competitions. That involved doing a set of turns and movements alone in freefall. You’d be timed for precision and speed and then accuracy in hitting the target. Not surprising, some of our Falling Angels would win those earliest competitions taking the gold medals in 1963.
JoAnn’s Early Jump Experiences
You might wonder if I was ever scared or if I got hurt or had a mishap skydiving. I once landed really hard and was on crutches for a week and once I exited the plane and ended up in a flat spin that I couldn’t stop. When I pulled my ripcord to open my canopy, the risers and lines were all twisted. This was at an exhibition jump at McCoy Air Force base – what you know now as MCO! Orlando International Airport has the call letters MCO because it used to be McCoy. Did you know that?? Back to my moment. While my chute was open but twisted round, I couldn’t control it so kept swinging my legs to try and untwist the lines. Thankfully, the lines did not go over the top of my canopy, so it was not what we called then a Mae West. You can use your imagination to figure out why we called it that! But it was still concerning. Twisting myself round to unravel the lines worked. I never had to pull my reserve. It did put me off our landing target and I landed really close to a huge Air Force plane parked by the runway. This was the only scary moment I ever had as a skydiver.
You might think as the only actively jumping woman I’d have been harassed by all the guys, but that was never the case. Instead, I had a whole bunch of big brothers looking out for me. In those days, we only jumped on weekends so many of us would just sleep at the airport, in the hangars or at Doc Gaffney’s place, the apartment above his practice on NY Ave. My grandparents trusted me and never had reason to worry. I’d just call to say that I was staying over.
Skydiving History
Skydiving at the DeLand Municipal Airport began in 1959, when Doc Gaffney started the Falling Angels Parachute Club, and the first girl to make a jump here was in March 1961. Can you guess what it cost me to go through a whole month of intensive training back then? Nothing! And jumps cost $3 to cover costs for the planes. Back in the 1960s and for about ten years, skydiving was run as a club, not a for profit business. The goal was to develop the sport and attract more jumpers. The business side came later. The Dupuis brothers were some of the original Falling Angels, and they took over management of the club when Gaffney had had enough, and formed the DeLand Sport Parachute Center around 1971. They brought in a DC-3 airplane in 1973 that held three times the number of skydivers compared to other large jump planes available at the time. This was a huge boost to skydiving here in DeLand that led directly to the expansion of formation skydiving, attracting skydivers from around the country and the world to DeLand. The formation skydiving teams from DeLand dominated competitive meets for years. DeLand’s prime position in the world of skydiving has also attracted skydiving industries with many innovations and businesses manufacturing parachuting gear and accessories all based in the area near the airport. Skydive DeLand as it’s known now was founded by Tom Piras and Bob Hallett in 1982 and is known worldwide for top quality training and skydiving.
JoAnn’s Deland and Life
As for me, DeLand turned out to be my Mecca too. Not only could I graduate high school on time here when I could not in Illinois. It was again my haven after my marriage dissolved. I would go back to Illinois regularly after graduation to work, make money, then return to DeLand. I got married in 1963 to a guy I met at a late night restaurant back in Illinois. The guy was gorgeous and he rode a motorcycle. I stayed in Illinois after I married, and I would skydive there too. My goal was to make 100 jumps but I didn’t quite make that because I got pregnant and stopped jumping after that.
A few years later, my marriage fell apart and I got on a bus with my daughter and we came back to DeLand in 1967. I’ve been here ever since. I married again in December 1968 but we had to hold the ceremony at home because I had a full hip to toe cast on my leg and also my arm in a sling from a motorcycle accident. I told you I liked adventure. We had two daughters.
I’ve worked far too many jobs to bore you with as secretary, bookkeeper, manager, bartender, and more. I’m still working now. I try to always do my best and give my employers the best that I can as that is the way I was brought up and I have tried to teach my children the same. I am a true Christian believer and thank him every day for my life. Oh and I’m a crazy cat lady with a house full and I take care of community and feral cats. I’m in my 80s now and zip lining is my favorite thing to do even now.
As Laine (remove wig):
It’s 60 years now since my pioneer stopped skydiving. JoAnn still has her ripcord, and a whole lot of old, yellowed newspaper clippings where her name was almost always misspelled – so good luck googling her! Sadly, her beloved purple pilot chute finally rotted away, and she can only find one of her logbooks. But unlike other reenactors, I can actually introduce you to my pioneer and celebrate with me her memories of those amazing years spent as the first female skydiver right here in DeLand!
Laine Berman 