85-year-old skydiver chases 1,000 jumps
Knor says the excitement never goes away while she's strapping up to get ready for her 689th jump.
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DETROIT, Michigan (WWJ) — Have you ever been skydiving? How about more than once? Could you fathom doing it a thousand times?
One 85-year-old woman from Cadillac is more than halfway there.
“In my mind, it’s just I’m gonna jump, I’m gonna jump. It’s coming you know,” said Kim Emmons Knor.
Knor says the excitement never goes away while she’s strapping up to get ready for her 689th jump. That’s right, at the time of this posting, she has 688 jumps logged.
Her first jump, as logged in one of her several booklets seen in the video above, was 65 years ago, when Knor was just 20.
Hundreds of jumps later, she’s chasing 1000.
“A thousand is what I need for Gold Wings and back in the day when I started jumping in 1959, the epitome of success was Gold Wings,” Emmons Knor said.
After her first jump, she was hooked. So much so, she made a run in 1962 as a member of the first United States Women’s Parachute Team, taking home gold.
“To stand under the American flag and get a gold, it’s really really something,” Knor said while choking up.
While recalling some of her fondest memories, she turns back to the present day, in Ray, Michigan at Midwest Freefall Skydiving.
Knor’s trip here comes just days after a stop in Ohio for multiple jumps but this time around, she’s had to wait for the weather to clear up.
“To me it’s part of it and because I’m retired you know, tomorrow’s another day,” Knor said on awaiting jump 689.
The 85-year-old skydiving Michigander also shared some advice to those on the fence about skydiving.
“If you’ve raised your children, raised your grandchildren, whatever and don’t sit around and watch TV or get on a computer, or go have lunch with all your friends, get outside and do something that keeps the blood moving and you’ll be healthier and you’ll eat better and you’ll sleep better and jump out of airplanes,” Knor said.
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