Parachute Packers and Jumpers Leaving Town

Article Tools

Print friendly
E-mail story
Tip Us Off
iPod friendly
Comments

Bookmark This

del.icio.us.
Digg!
furl
google
newsvine
reddit
technorati
Facebook
Yahoo!

Weekend Warriors: To the casual eye, the National Guard Armory on Santa Barbara’s East Canon Perdido Street may look unused, little more than a storage lot for a few military vehicles. Not so.

Fact is, it’s long been a beehive of parachute packers serving three Army Reserve airborne units, an active duty Army airborne unit, and two National Guard airborne outfits. Until now, that is. Instead of a fulltime, vital cog to assure that jumpers get safe chutes, attracting about 100 Guardsmen from as far away as Phoenix and Sacramento, the 128th Quartermaster Company will soon give up the parachutes. It’s destined to become your standard “weekend warrior” training center. Only a handful of the unit actually live in Santa Barbara and many of the rest are expected to transfer out.

On the Beat

The unit’s new, downgraded mission will be to support a helicopter repair facility in Fresno, according to Sergeant First Class Scot James Miller, who showed me and my photographer wife, Sue De Lapa, around the old building last weekend. How many of its members will want to continue flying in from Arizona or making the long drive from distant parts of California to take part in a routine Guard unit, Miller wonders? “The lure of jumping out of airplanes brings them here,” said Miller, 30, whose day job is working as a general contractor. Every chute packer must be a qualified jumper, he said. If you pack them you’d better be ready to use one. Miller and other guardsmen are scheduled to make a jump today from Fort Irwin, Barstow.

I wondered, is the time ripe for a push by Santa Barbarans to buy the old building, in dire need of maintenance, for community recreation or educational use? “I’ve always thought that the city should buy it and have it be the new police station,” said Miller.

Sue De Lapa

Sgt. Scot Miller at the Armory

The cavernous, hanger-like main Armory structure is filled with tables for packing, repairing, and inspecting chutes, many of them carefully stacked and awaiting transfer out. “There are about 3,000 chutes here, personal and cargo,” Miller told me. During the week, a small army of hired technicians fill the place repacking and repairing chutes for jumpers whose lives depend on them. “The music’s blaring, the place is like a beehive,” Miller said. They pack about 300 chutes a month.

The homeless, contrary to public misconception, haven’t been housed in the Armory for around 10 years, he said. From the people I talked to when I started working there, it was a nightmare due to security and lack of sufficient facilities.” Since then other shelters have opened for the homeless.

On Sept. 11, 2001, familiarly emblazoned in our minds as 9/11, “We had to rush down here and secure the place,” Miller recalled. When wildfires broke out in Northern California this summer, the unit was sent there to help out.

According to Staff Sgt. Kristopher Solem, the place was built in 1939 by the city’s Public Works Department for a variety of uses, including recreation, with the Guard there from the start. During World War II it was a field artillery facility equipped with horses. You can still see the row of stalls, now filled with chutes, Miller pointed out.

The old place has a history. It also may have some lingering ghosts. “It’s supposedly haunted,” Miller told us as we left. I heard a scampering and turned. But it was only Nattie, Scot’s bull mastiff, hardly a ghost and known to all there as “friendly and loving.”

Related Links

• More On the Beat columns

Discussion Guidelines

Currently:
Mist
Temperature:
50.0°
Wind:
3 N