 |
 |
 |
 |
| One of the finest men that I ever met. |
| Dave Paternoster |
| It's hard to believe that he's "gone" . I'd rather say that Dave has left our company. |
| He always had a kind word & shared information that would help me. I hadn't known him all that long with 1000s of jumps logged Dave asked if I'd like to do a 2-way with him. That was on a boogie weekend when he could have been on a freefly big way. Instead he invested the price of his lift ticket in coaching an old guy who was a newbie in the sport. He used that jump to teach me how to "orbit" and on post dive shed light on other issues. He was so laid back that I didn't ever realize that I was getting a one on one class. That's just one of my memories of Dave Paternoster. |
| He knew that I used paid packing and he insisted on packing my rig after that jump. He was a rigger & wanted that opportunity to inspect my rig to be sure that it was safe. He wouldn't accept pay for the pack job saying that he wouldn't pack for money anymore.That's just the kind of guy that he was. |
 |
| Dave was a "Kansas City guy", well St. Joseph actually. One weekend he was down on the Mount Vernon airport, jumping both at Freefall Express & Skydive Missouri it was then that he met Gail. She wasn't a Skydiver & I don't know the particulars of why she was on DZ that day. But they did meet & a romance came to be. Eventually they married. It was sweet to follow their romance. One benefit of that for me was that while Dave & Gail were dating we saw Dave on our DZ more often. After he & Gail married they move up north & we saw them less often. One of those time on our DZ, he & |
| Scott Louzader, our jumppilot at the time, got into a watermelonseed spitting contest. The target was a grasshopper on the hangar wall. It was fun. |
| Odd, isn't it that you can only see a guy 3 or 4 times a year and still miss him when you learn that you won't be seeing him again in this life. I miss Dave & my heart goes out to Gail who by all standards is as sweet as Dave was. |