Newsgroups: rec.skydiving


Just got this in the mail from a friend in D.C.  Reprinted w/out permission...

Washington Post, Thursday, July 16, 1992

It Wasn't Falling in Love That Floored Him 
by Margaret Camp, Special to the Washington Post

Falling in love had inspired plans for a dream wedding beside the Jefferson
Memorial for Edward Gillespie and Elaine Doyle.

Buy a fall from the sky produced a nightmarish nuptial with a sedated groom
strapped to a hospital gurney at the Tidal Basin ceremony two weeks ago.

As the two tied the knot before 100 guests and attendants, curious bystanders
gaped and concocted some outlandish explanations for the heartbreaking scene.

"Some brave woman is marrying a Desert Storm paraplegic," suggested one woman
in knowing tones to the bemused mother of the groom.

"That brave man was shot down out of a plane in the war," wispered another.

Suffice it to say the real story is far less tragic, the tale of a young
man's last adventure as a freewheeling batchelor.

But something about it makes you sure this handsome pair, who have both
taken the name Doyle-Gillespie, can probably survice just about anything.

Gillespie, 22, and Doyle, 21, met two years ago as students at George
Washington University.  They were engaged a year ago on Valentines Day.
Both plan to be teachers, and Doyle has been enrolled in an intense
training program in Los Angeles this summer.

Her only weekend home was to be the weekend of the wedding.

That's when Craig Brobyn, Gillespie's best man in the wedding, came
bearing a special gift for his friend of 17 years: one free lesson in
skydiving, the two men together-the day before the wedding.

"I was really upset," Doyle said.  "But Ed promised me that if he could
do it this one time, he wouldn't do it again."

The instructor at the airport in St. Mary's City, MD., showed them the
fine points of jumping and landing, how to arc their bodies after the
leap, how to count so they would know when they had cleared the plane
and how the static line on the chute would release automatically.

"I was horrified of being out in space," Gillespie said, "but I just had
to do it."

Something like marriage.

As it turned out, the leap into the thin air was the easy part.

"It felt so strange to have my body disjointed from anything terrestrial,"
Gillespie recalled.  "It was very humbling.  I felt so small."

Then came the gust of wind, the zig when he should of zagged and the 
crash landing on the cement runway.  Suddenly Gillespie's arm felt
padlocked to the pavement, his face and hair soaked with blood.

"But I said [to the rescue paramedics],'I'm definitely getting married
tomorrow,'" Gillespie said.

The diagnosis was a fractured spine, a painful break but neither 
life-threatening nor paralyzing.  The doctor at Prince George's
Hospital Center kidded Gillespie unmercifully about doing anything just to
get out of getting hitched.

But when the couple told him they wanted to go ahead with the ceremony
anyway, the doctor agreed.

The next morning the hospital attendants clipped a bow tie onto Gillespie's
gown, wheeled him into an ambulance and headed for the Jefferson Memorial.
There, one usher never showed.  The groom's mother was an hour late, and
minutes before the service was to begin, the minister got cold feet.

"He said the wedding might not be legal with Ed on a gurney," Doyle said.

Ready to walk down the aisle in her long white dress and veil, Doyle
said she pleaded with the Rev. Arthur Gault, insisting that she was
sure her husband-to-be was of sound mind and body.  At Gault's request,
she agreed to describe the circumstances of the wedding on the back of
the marriage certificate to answer any questions of legality.

And the service began.

"With all the mishaps and everything that went wrong, the important
thing is that we got married afterall," Doyle said.

(Ed. note: accompanying the article was a pickie of the wedding couple;
she beaming and holding the hand of her, apparently comatose, new
husband who is firmly stapped to a gurney.  Behind them is the
ambulance with "Just Married" signs plastered all over it.)

-Richard Boucher