Eighty-two-year-old U.S. Army veteran Joe Muldoon made his first jump from an airplane Saturday afternoon with his 21-year-old grandson Mason. Joe, a Cleveland-area resident, said he wanted to do something special to coincide with the likely nomination of Donald Trump at this week’s Republican National Convention.
On Friday, this reporter was at the Cleveland Skydiving Center, about 30 miles southeast of downtown Cleveland, filling out the necessary forms to make a skydive. Bad weather delayed that jump, but the center’s manager said that an 82-year-old man planned to make a tandem jump the next day to show his support for Trump. The jump also was Mason’s first.
Trump “is going to jump into a hornet’s nest when he arrives in Washington and I thought I would like to get some kind of feeling about what he is getting into,” Muldoon said.
“Trump is going to build the great wall of North America and the Mexicans are going to pay for it,” he said.
After Joe and his instructor landed, Muldoon said that first step out the door of the airplane was what he feared the most. “It was awesome. I recommend that everyone do it once, but I am glad it is over,” he said.
CJ Executive Editor Don Carrington is reporting from Cleveland on the sights and sounds at the Republican National Convention.