Dennis Suitor jumped out of an airplane the day after his 80th birthday and hasn’t quite come down yet.
“I tell you, I’ve had a pretty exciting life — I’ve done a lot of things — but that’s about the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,” Suitor said a few days after his Aug. 2 skydiving adventure.
Suitor’s leap seems all the more remarkable because of what happened a half century ago, which is when he first got interested in skydiving.
“I was going to do it with my brother-in-law,” he said. “He went out, and the guy who jumped after he did, his chute didn’t open, and he got killed.”
Still, Suitor never really gave up on the idea. “It’s a lot of safer now,” he said, quoting a statistic that there’s one fatality for every 350,000 jumps. “I felt pretty confident.”
Suitor grew up in Yukon, Okla. At one time, he owned three stores — an optical shop, ladies shoe store and ski shop — within a block of each other in Oklahoma City. He moved to Tulsa in his forties, building decks, remodeling homes and flipping houses there.
After his wife’s death six years ago, Suitor reconnected with a former girlfriend he’d dated decades earlier. Suitor and Veronica Bulla, a retired teacher from Rose Hill, married last Valentine’s Day in Arizona and now live in Bel Aire.
He’s still in the deck-building business.
Suitor woke up at 3 a.m. on the day of the jump, excited and a little nervous. But he headed to the Oklahoma Skydiving Center in
Cushing, Okla., where his wife and about 20 more family members and friends gathered to watch. Inside the center, Suitor was shown a film about sky diving and signed a waiver.
Finally, at 2 p.m., it was his turn. The plane ascended and Suitor was connected via a harness to the crew member who would pull their parachute.
“Just before they opened the door of the plane at 14,000 feet, I got a little apprehensive, but not enough to say I don’t want to jump.”
Then they did and Suitor was glad he hadn’t turned back. “When they open the door, the wind is tremendous,” he said. “When you get out, you free fall for about 60 seconds, (going) about 125 to 140 miles per hour. You don’t realize it because you don’t have any perspective. You don’t really realize you’re falling that fast. The noise is real loud because of the wind. You’re creating the wind.”
The cute came out at about 8,000 feet, after which the tandem drifted about six minutes. They passed through clouds at about 6,000 feet, an experience Suitor called “a little moist,” then landed “exactly where we were supposed to.”
Suitor is now part of a group known as the JOES, for Jumpers Over Eighty Society, which has its own website, thepops.org. Someday, he hopes to become one of the JONS, for Jumpers Over Ninety Society.
“I’m going to do it every birthday,” he said. “I was ready to again as soon as I hit the ground, but I didn’t want to dilute the memory of a special day.”
