“We Don’t Age Ordinary”

There are many ways to celebrate a milestone birthday—dinners with family and friends are the most common, along with trips to sometimes exotic destinations. Recently, though, five members of the Class of 1968 chose to mark the year in which most of them would achieve octogenarian status by doing something truly unique: Jumping out of an airplane.

The idea for a joint skydiving expedition came together at a mini reunion of brother rats held in Lexington, Virginia, in February 2026. Hal Switzer ’68, who’d traveled from his home state of Texas to attend the gathering, mentioned that former President George H.W. Bush had celebrated his 80th birthday in 2004 by skydiving, and soon, Switzer’s joke that his brother rats should do the same was being taken seriously.

After the February gathering, word spread among the class via email, and in the end, four of them coordinated on a jump place and date. On the last weekend in July, Dean Kershaw ’68, Creigh Kelley ’68, Richard Wallach ’68, and Tommy Norment ’68 gathered in Orange, Virginia, where a wide stretch of flat land makes skydiving a popular pastime. Switzer had made travel plans to join them in Virginia, but when his wife’s health prevented the couple from traveling, he made arrangements to jump on his own in Texas, which he did on his 80th birthday, June 20, 2026.

“We don’t age ordinary,” said Kershaw of himself and his brother rats.

The jump had originally been scheduled for Saturday, July 25, but weather prevented a safe flight that day, so the VMI skydivers waited 24 hours and were greeted with clear skies Sunday, July 26. As a safety precaution, each skydiver was hooked up to an experienced jumpmaster; in Kershaw’s case, his jumpmaster had more than 13,000 jumps to his credit.

Prior to this, Kershaw hadn’t jumped in 38 years, but he’d completed 68 jumps as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army while stationed at Fort Bragg and Fort Campbell.

Hal Switzer ’68 and his jumpmaster descend over Texas June 20, 2026.—Photo courtesy Skydive Spaceland.

Kelley, although an avid runner and outdoor enthusiast, had never been skydiving.

“I don’t think I had any trepidation, but it was yet another unknown thing,” said Kelley, a resident of Colorado who came East to skydive and visit old friends in North Carolina.

Having served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, though, Kelley was more than a little familiar with the anticipation of the unknown. “It’s that feeling of let’s get on with it,” he explained. “It’s kind of like going into the Rat Line. I don’t know anything. I don’t really understand what’s going to happen. But let’s get it going.”

Norment, a former Virginia state senator and 2007 recipient of the VMI Foundation’s Distinguished Service Award, hadn’t been skydiving before, either; his military service in the Army was entirely on the ground at Fort Knox. Very quickly, though, he was able to draw a parallel between the events of July 26, 2026, and those of Sept. 10, 1964—Matriculation Day for the Class of 1968.

“I can remember as my family and I were driving from Williamsburg to VMI, I had no idea what to expect when I got to VMI,” Norment commented. “I was a little apprehensive due to uncertainty and not having been through this experience of the Rat Line before. And the more I thought about it, I came to the quick realization I was not going to be in control. Someone else was going to be in control, and I might as well get over it and get along doing what I needed to do.”

The skydive, Norment realized, was going to be very similar to the Rat Line in another way.

“The way that I managed to work my way through the Rat Line in 1964 and ’65 was because of the support of my brother rats, and that support has remained through the years, no matter what path of life that I have taken, and it was interesting because I was jumping out of a perfectly good airplane with three of my brother rats who were telling me there was nothing to be concerned about.”

That Sunday, in the skies over Orange County, the plane reached an altitude of 14,000 feet—and it was time to enter the “shuffle line” that led to the open door of the plane and the waiting Earth below. Pair by pair, as each brother rat skydiver and his tandem jumpmaster departed via the open door, the plane emptied.

“They’re in the door, and then they’re gone,” said Kelley. “And so then you get to the edge, and you’re looking out, and [the jumpmaster] goes, ‘Okay, here we go. Step out.’ Huh? You’re stepping out into nothing.”

Creigh Kelley ’68, Dean Kershaw ’68, Richard Wallach ’68, and Tommy Norment ’68 after their skydive near Orange, Virginia, July 26, 2026.—Photo courtesy Skydive Orange.

“The exit from the airplane, whether you’re a military jumper or skydiver, the exit is the most traumatic point,” Kershaw concurred.

“You go from a very safe, comfortable, seated position to all of a sudden you’re, in this case, at 14,000 feet, and we were tumbling as we went out until the pilot chute opened, and that’s a small chute that stabilized us in that position to fly,” Kershaw continued.

Along with his jumpmaster, each brother rat reached a terminal velocity of 120 mph and sustained that speed for a full minute before the parasail’s deployment at an altitude of 8,000 to 9,000 feet provided a safety brake.

Soon, all were on the ground and were reunited with each other and their waiting wives, who were greatly relieved to see their husbands safely back on terra firma.

“We landed within about 5 feet of each other,” Kershaw recounted. “You know, it was the smoothest landing ever. We just embraced and got some pictures on the [drop zone], and then we went out and had a brunch.”

Norment, for his part, was grateful for the weather delay and the extra day it gave for reminiscing and visiting. “It really turned out to be fortuitous because it just gave us more casual time to talk about our VMI experience, what had gone on in life since we graduated from VMI, what our reflections were looking in the rearview mirror of 60 years or whatever it is,” he stated. “It was just a very, very special and fulfilling time to be together.”

Jumping solo near his Texas home (although with a tandem jumpmaster), Switzer had never thought of himself as the skydiving type. “Like many other people, I swore to never jump out of a perfectly good airplane in flight,” he related. “I purposely avoided things like jump school in the Army and everything like that. There was no way.”

The idea of jumping, though, is a bit of a misnomer, Switzer noted. “They push you out of the door,” he explained. “You’re hooked up, and they’re kind of rocking you out the door.”

Oddly, Switzer added, he had no sense of falling when he first exited the airplane. Rather, he was distracted by the incredible noise of the wind rushing by, and it wasn’t until the chute opened that he began to feel a sensation of descent. “Then I obviously knew we were coming down, but we were just kind of floating down, and it was fun,” he observed. He described the experience as “easy peasy” overall. “Everybody should try it,” Switzer added. “It was a good time.”

Will more such birthday jumps follow? All agreed that the answer is most likely, “yes.”

“Within the first hour, everybody was saying, oh, that’s good, I’m never going to do that again, and then within the first day, everybody was saying, why don’t we do a reunion jump, so yeah we’re scheduling [jumps for ages] 85, 90, 95,” Kershaw stated. “My daughter will turn 60 in 5 years, and she said she’d make a jump with me.”