Anisa Khalifa: This year marks the 120th anniversary of Orville and Wilbur Wright's powered airplane flight. It was one of the most important technological advances in the history of humanity, and it took place at Kill Devil Hills in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The state is, rightly, proud of that achievement. It’s commemorated on our license plates by the slogan “First In Flight.” But the Wright Brothers aren’t the only icons of aviation with ties to the South.
I'm Anisa Khalifa. This week on the Broadside, correspondent Elizabeth Friend brings us the unlikely story of a woman named Tiny Broadwick. Born into extreme poverty and married at 12, Broadwick went on to be a trailblazer in the male-dominated world of parachute jumping, saving thousands of lives along the way.
Elizabeth Friend: At a small airstrip along a rural highway in Franklin County, North Carolina, two men are hoping to cheat death.
Will Warwick: My name is Will Warwick, I live in Summerville, South Carolina, I’m 26 years old.
Mark Simmons: I’m Mark Simmons, I’m from Pittsboro, North Carolina and I’m 31 today.
Elizabeth Friend: We’re at Cadence Sky Sports, a skydiving center about an hour northeast of the state capitol. The parking lot is packed, and the observation deck is bustling. Turns out, there’s a lot of folks here who also hope to cheat death this weekend. The difference is, most of them have a lot more experience than Mark and Will.
They’ve both done tandem jumps before, strapped to a harness attached to a skydiving instructor… basically along for the ride as the instructor jumps out of the plane and operates the parachute equipment. But this time Will and Mark want to go it alone.
Elizabeth Friend: How are you feeling about it right now?
Mark Simmons: Palms are sweaty.
Will Warwick: I was very nervous this morning, but now I’m excited. Very excited.]
David Evans: All right, so once you've deployed the parachute, go back to neutral body position. We're going to fly the opening. 1000, 2000…
Elizabeth Friend: David Evans is the man in charge of making sure first timers know exactly what to do.
David Evans: So I’m the safety and training advisor, and I’m also the accelerated freefall instructor.
Elizabeth Friend: He drills students on how to exit the plane, when to deploy your chute, how to pick a landing spot, how to identify malfunctioning equipment, and, if worst comes to worst, how to release the reserve chute.
David Evans: And we're looking: is it there, is it square. If it's a malfunction, you've gotta respond accordingly.
Elizabeth Friend: After six hours of practice, Mark and Will each get a jumpsuit, a parachute rig, and a seat on the tiny plane making runs up and down the airstrip all afternoon. They will have instructors nearby when they jump, but they will be the ones pulling the ripcord and troubleshooting in the air if anything goes wrong.
Mark Simmons: I’m ready to go.
Elizabeth Friend: Is it heavy?
Mark Simmons: Yeah the pack is pretty heavy, but it feels like something that is going to keep you safe, so the heavier the better.
Elizabeth Friend: You got a lot of material over your head.
Mark Simmons: Yeah yeah, it’s going to be good. But it’s my first one, so they’re not going to let me fall, so.
Elizabeth Friend: If that little plane were to fly just 20 miles northwest, it would pass over the hometown of Tiny Broadwick. She’s the pioneering daredevil who paved the way for sport skydivers–as well as military paratroopers. Although her career resulted in innovations that revolutionized air safety, including early versions of the parachutes Mark and Will are using today, her story is not widely known.
Jessica Brown: Because we don't see her in many history books. We don't see her throughout national aviation histories, you have to really look for it.
Elizabeth Friend: Meet Lieutenant Colonel Jessica Brown.
Jessica Brown: I'm an aviator by trade. So I am what we call the Combat Systems officer, which is a fancy term for navigator or electronic warfare officer.]
Elizabeth Friend: Lieutenant Colonel Brown logged thousands of flight hours in her eleven years with the Air Force Special Operations Command. Now she teaches military history at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Jessica Brown: On April 8 1893, Georgia Ann Thompson was born on a farm in Granville, North Carolina. And she received the nickname Tiny because she weighed three pounds.
Elizabeth Friend: Tiny was the youngest of seven girls in a poor farming family where everyone was expected to earn their keep.
Jessica Brown: She worked in the tobacco fields pulling worms off leaves in order to earn some type of wage to help her family.
Elizabeth Friend: When she was six, her family moved to the nearby town of Henderson, hoping to earn more at the local cotton mill.
Jessica Brown: Working in the mill was not glamorous by any means. It meant you worked long hours and you had low pay. 40 cents a day. So if you did the math and you're working, you know, a 12 hour shift, and you work maybe six days a week, you're looking at making probably $2.40 a week, and that's as a child.
Elizabeth Friend: Tiny grew up fast. She married at 12, gave birth at 13, and at 14, her husband abandoned her. She found herself as a young single mother working in the mill to support her infant daughter, with a lifetime of drudgery looming before her.
Jessica Brown: The job was hard. And just like her peers, Tiny was looking for ways to escape her reality. State fairs was a common thing to see in North Carolina as well as in the south, and Tiny, in 1907, found herself attending the Johnny J. Jones carnival, which was showing in nearby Raleigh. And so she found an opportunity to escape one day and that moment, that circus environment is where she found her new love, and that was the air balloon show. And the air balloon show was performed by Charles Broadwick.
And so you see this just giant majestic technology starting to climb into the sky, and it would go up to about 1000 to 1500 feet. And then once it reached its highest level and it maintains stability, the jumper, at this time it was Charles Broadwick, would fall towards the ground, right? It's like an angel jumping from the heavens and making their way to the earth. And during that process, he would pull a parachute and the parachute would fill itself. And he would find himself gliding down. And she was mesmerized by that.
Elizabeth Friend: In that moment, Tiny realized she could escape, not for just an afternoon, but quite possibly for the rest of her life. Tiny found Charles Broadwick after the show and talked her way into his aerial act.
Jessica Brown: She sells herself by saying, Look, I have the physique that would make this possible, and I could probably go higher than you. And I can probably bring in more revenue because I'm a girl doing it. And there was truth to that.]
Elizabeth Friend: Charles Broadwick struck a deal with her parents. Tiny would leave her baby with her mother while Broadwick would take Tiny on the road and send money back home to her family. Because it wasn’t considered proper for a young woman to travel on her own, he would adopt her as his daughter. And he’d teach her all about parachuting and showmanship.
Jessica Brown: It was like an internship if you were to think of it that way. And she learned quite a bit from him.]
Elizabeth Friend: A year later, in 1908, Tiny Broadwick returned to the fair in Raleigh to make her first public parachute jump from a hot air balloon. She was just 15.
Jessica Brown: She gets to about 1000 feet above the ground, and the winds shift. And when the wind shifted, she realized she was not going to land in the open field that she had intended. But instead, she found herself in a blackberry bush. They are thorny and sticky and very hard to get out of. And instead of fighting to get out, she allowed herself to stay there until she was rescued.]
Elizabeth Friend: That first balloon jump taught Tiny a lesson she would rely on throughout her career: plan ahead. Be prepared for anything.
Jessica Brown: She was given the nickname the Doll Girl. And so she was dressed up and ruffled bloomers. She wore a dress, of course. She had pink bows on her arms and ribbons in her hair, and they curled her long brown hair. And so she looked like a doll, like a child's doll. Which is funny because she was anything but a little doll. She was the biggest tomboy and she even said she hated wearing dresses.
This facade that they put on her was to help sell her entertainment. It was to sell her image and it was successful. And when the doll girl was coming into town with the circus, customers came out lined up ready to purchase a ticket. And they were excited to see this young woman, this young doll jumping from a high balloon, you know, descending from the heavens come back to the earth. And on top of that, she's one of them, right? She is not from the upper class but she is from a lower class position.
Elizabeth Friend: As Tiny’s career flourished, a new technology began to capture the imagination of the public–the airplane. The Wright Brothers first took flight in 1903, and in just a few years, people around the world were building, flying and racing their own planes.
The Aero Club of America was founded to promote this bold new world of aviation…. but not for everyone. It began as a gentleman’s club whose founders saw aviation as a new sport for the wealthy – like horse racing or polo in the sky – a world far removed from the cheap thrills of a balloon act at the state fair.
Jessica Brown: She was not something that the Aero Club wanted associated with aviation, they really wanted to limit who was involved. They didn't want airplanes to be seen as a circus event, which is what Tiny was. She wasn't one of them. She was far from it.
Elizabeth Friend: Starting in 1910, the club began to host annual air meets in California where pilots would gather to show off what their brand new airplanes could do. And despite the best efforts of the founders, entertainers like the Broadwicks started to show up too. At one of those air meets in 1913, Tiny made a jump that would set her apart from other aerial acrobats of her era, and secure her place in aviation history. She was nineteen years old.
Jessica Brown: So Tiny meets famed pilot Glenn Martin, and Glenn had watched her do her performance with a hot air balloon. And he thought, why not do this with a plane? Can we get a parachutist to jump off of a plane? How exciting would that be? He introduced himself. Tiny was just excited that a pilot wanted to use her in his act. And without thinking twice, she said, Sure, let’s do it. She’s the first woman to parachute from a plane.
She utilizes a new parachute that her father, Charles Broadwick, had created. This new parachute is a silk parachute versus canvas. So it's lighter, it's not as heavy and if it lands in water, it's easier to maneuver. And it's only six pounds, which is kind of nice for someone who's so small. And it's attached to her like a backpack and later on it's called the safety pack vest. And there are some historians that would credit this style of parachute as the foundation for parachutes that get used later on in World War II.
Elizabeth Friend: This new parachute pack had a static line attached to the fuselage of the plane that ran down to the top of the backpack, so that when she jumped, the line would pull the pack open to release and inflate the chute.
Jessica Brown: There's a famous picture of her with Glenn Martin, and she's on the right hand side of the cockpit, sitting on this, it looks like a small ledge. And on that little ledge, there's a release lever. And when she was at altitude and at speed, and she was in a position where she felt comfortable dropping, she would release herself and she would fall. And then the chute that was above her would fill up.
So for her first jump with Glenn, she was at 1000 feet going 80 miles an hour. This is the first time she's moving that quickly. And so she has the ability to maneuver herself, as well as tell the pilot, this is where I need to go, based off the winds, in order to successfully land in a location that's not going to hurt me. Where, in the past, with the hot air balloon, if the balloon's in the ascent and the wind shifts, she can't maneuver the balloon. She's gonna go where the balloon goes. The airplane allows that flexibility of movement, and she really enjoyed that aspect of it.
She jumped, the people on the ground, the crowds cheered, and they were excited, and so were the newspaper reporters, and they are just amazed by how cool she is about it, how excited, she is not nervous. She's thrilled with the idea of falling from a plane.
Elizabeth Friend: After that jump, Tiny’s parachute performances were again in high demand. She toured the country, this time with Glenn Martin and his airplanes. But her most important act was yet to come.
When you jump out of an airplane…You tumble instantly. Gravity seizes you. Your flesh pulls tight against your bones. The wind pummels breath from your body and you cannot hear yourself scream. The moment you pull the ripcord, everything changes…You count off the seconds as the parachute inflates…1000, 2000, 3000…
The roar quiets. Your hurtling fall becomes a gliding descent…but you’ve still got to get to the ground safely, with as soft a landing as possible. Check your parachute: is it there? Is it square? Can you steer it? How high up are you?
The U.S. Parachute Association estimates one out of every thousand sport parachute jumps will have some kind of malfunction. Many are minor and can be dealt with in the air if a skydiver has the proper training. Human error causes more deaths than equipment problems, but even these are rare. The association reported just 20 fatalities out of roughly 3.9 million jumps logged by its members in 2022.
Still, that’s not much comfort when the ground is coming up at you fast. And for Tiny Broadwick, who never once jumped with a reserve chute, the odds were even worse.
Jessica Brown: Well, because she's so well-loved and so well-known, the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1914 requested Tiny to perform her parachute jumps from a military aircraft. And she was supposed to do four jumps, which she did, three of those jumps went as planned. She, you know, released her seat, she fell from 1000 feet, the parachute opens up, she lands safely. And does that, rinse and repeat, for three times.
But the fourth jump, that's where things got a little tricky for her.
Elizabeth Friend: Somehow, her parachute lines got caught on the tail of the airplane.
Jessica Brown: And she's basically being flapped back and forth at eighty miles an hour in the sky, and she can't pull herself back onto the plane because of how quickly they're moving.
Elizabeth Friend: But Tiny, with all her training, didn’t freak out. She knew exactly what to do.
Jessica Brown: She started cutting these lines in order to free herself. And so she starts maneuvering herself through, she loosens the correct cord, the cord opens up and now she's able to, while falling from the plane, she's now maneuvering the lines that are attached to her pack and her chute to open it up.
And her dismantlement of that static line is what we now know as the ripcord and she does a premeditated freefall. It wasn't oh, gosh, it just happened. It was planned, she planned to get herself out of this dire situation by cutting the line that was supposed to pull the chute out for her, she manually operates it. And everybody was amazed that she had done that. She's the first person, not just the first woman, the first person to demonstrate premeditated freefall with a parachute and is successful with it.
Elizabeth Friend: You might think the rise of airplanes and parachutes went hand in hand, but people were flying – and crashing – planes for decades before wearable parachutes became the norm for pilots.
Jessica Brown: You don't see pilots in World War I utilizing parachutes until the end. In 1918 the Germans start giving their pilots parachutes, because they're running out of pilots.
Elizabeth Friend: Military leaders in Britain, France and America were also slow to adapt to the idea.
Jessica Brown: Part of it was the fear, the War Department feared that pilots would leave planes and allow them to crash versus trying to recover them. The other aspect was some of these parachutes in the earlier times were big and bulky, and they weighed the plane down. Some of the parachutes didn't fit in the cockpit of these airplanes. And so instead of changing these planes that were expensive to build in high numbers, the investment wasn't seen as a good thing to change it up until later on when, I guess sound reason and logic goes, if I lose a plane, I lose a pilot and how much was spent to train these young men to fly these planes.
So Tiny, demonstrating that freefall can happen, that you don't need a parachute to be attached to a plane in order for a pilot to survive a jump, did not translate into World War I tactics until far later in the war. Which is unfortunate because there could have been more pilots saved.
Elizabeth Friend: It wasn’t until World War II that parachutes – and paratroopers – began to play a major role in military operations. Once again, the U.S. Army would call on Tiny for inspiration.
Tiny retired from parachuting in 1922, at the age of 29. After more than a thousand jumps and many hard landings, her knees and ankles couldn’t take any more. She found work as a housekeeper in California, and, when war production ramped up in the early 40’s, took a job manufacturing aircraft parts.
Jessica Brown: So during World War Two, she finds herself being sought after again. And they asked her to come out to speak to the new paratroopers. She's a motivational speaker. They asked her to explain that it's safe. It's okay to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. And when she comes to these 82nd airborne paratroopers, here's a small stature woman coming in with these old silk packs. And she tells the young man she's like if I can do this, you can do this. And she shows them her old rigs. And the young gentleman, the young paratroopers are laughing they're like there'd be no way I’d jump off of a locker box with that thing on, like that is so unsafe.
She's like, well, I've done over 1000 jumps in it. And I've survived. So you know, what's your excuse? Right? Like, you have better technology, better chutes. They are designed for you to maneuver and it's designed for you to carry 200 plus pounds on you. Don't be afraid. And the 82nd airborne finds themselves in the Mediterranean Theater, which is huge because that helps open up another front in Europe, when the allies are trying to figure out how they can get onto the European continent in order to challenge Germany. And they are also used in the D-day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. So these paratroopers that are being motivated by Tiny are the ones that are jumping into one of the bloodiest operations to open up France in order for the allies to come in and to push back the German threat.
(SOUNDBITE FROM ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL)
Unidentified Newscaster: Yank paratroopers receive last minute instructions before taking off for the invasion coast 100 miles across the English Channel. These are the heroes who establish first contact with the enemy. As the transports take off, General Bareton wishes them Godspeed.
Elizabeth Friend: After the war, Tiny faded from public view. She returned to housekeeping and lived a quiet life for many years, until she was rediscovered by a couple with ties to aviation who remembered Tiny’s career from decades before, and fought to see her achievements commemorated.
Jessica Brown: She finds herself being recognized and awarded for her contributions to aviation. In 1953, she received the U.S. government's pioneer aviation award...because of her contributions to the parachute and what it meant to saving the pilots' lives.
Elizabeth Friend: Right up until the end of her life, Tiny was celebrated. The 82nd Airborne made her an honorary member of their unit. She dined with celebrities, shook hands with astronauts, and appeared on game shows. She even donated one of her silk parachutes to the Smithsonian.
In 1963, Tiny was interviewed in North Carolina by WRAL TV news reporter Ben Runkle. Tiny, then 70 years old, stands in front of a huge parachute draped over a bannister, a parachute she’d later donate to the state museum of history.
Ben Runkle: And you had a rip cord with this I guess?
Tiny Broadwick: Yes, this was a ripcord I had over my shoulder. We tied it on the other side. And then when I would pull that, my parachute would come out of there and I would always come down safely
Ben Runkle: Apparently you did.
In the grainy black and white footage, the reporter towers over her, his head brushing the top of the door frame. Tiny is surrounded by parachute silk, beaming as she recalls her unlikely career as an aerial daredevil.
Ben Runkle: Can I ask you, how old are you now?
Tiny Broadwick: I'm 70.
Ben Runkle: And how tall are you?
Tiny Broadwick: I think I’m about five foot.
Ben Runkle: I think you are, I’m about 6’4” and I can find you down there someplace. It’s been delightful talking to you Tiny Broadwick, thank you very much for talking with us.
Tiny Broadwick: It’s been a pleasure to visit and try to tell you a little something of my past experience in parachutes…
Elizabeth Friend: When Tiny Broadwick died in 1978, members of the Army’s Golden Knights parachuting team served as her pallbearers, bringing her tiny body back to earth one final time. Near her gravesite, just a few miles down the road from the cotton mill where she once earned 40 cents a day, stands a historical marker commemorating Tiny as an aviation pioneer.
Jessica Brown: She broke barriers without realizing that she was doing it. And that wasn't her intention, her intention was just to fly.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Elizabeth Friend and edited by Jerad Walker. A huge thank you goes out to Lieutenant Colonel Jessica Brown of the United State Air Force Academy for presenting to us what was essentially a personalized history lecture. Also, thank you to the folks at Cadence Sky Sports, especially Will Warwick and Mark Simmons who allowed us to tag along during their first solo jumps.
The Broadside is a production of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. Find us on your favorite podcast app, and on wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or tell a friend to tell a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.
Elizabeth Friend: How was it?
Mark Simmons: It was rough. I had fun. It was just, you know…
Will Warwick: Pretty freakin' scary.
Elizabeth Friend: How did your chute look when it came out?
Mark Simmons: Everything that could have went wrong, kind of went wrong. So I guess you can get that all on your first jump. But it was, it was good. You know, got what I came for. I definitely recommend it. It's awesome. You get to go touch the clouds. See God and then come back to Earth. So that's what we're here for.