Eighty-One Year Old Charles “Chuck” Arnone Celebrates A 60th Anniversary Jump

by Linda Charlton

“We Can Do It!” is Charles “Chuck” Arnone’s mantra.  As a young army recruit in the late 1950s, Charles “Chuck” Arnone had dreams of going to Germany, of seeing the world. Instead, he was stationed at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, home to the XVIII Airborne Corps. Arnone wasn’t a paratrooper (he was in the signal brigade) but he did catch the jump bug.

With so many paratroopers on base, it’s no surprise that Ft. Bragg has its own jump club. Arnone saw members of the XVIII Airborne Sport Parachuting Club jump every weekend, weather permitting. Their jump ship was a big olive drab helicopter, and some of the jumpers wore wingsuits. Arnone saw the jumpers enjoying themselves immensely, and decided he had to try it. So at age 21, he jumped. Then he jumped again. Then he jumped a third time. He does not remember why he didn’t do more — “I should have done some more jumps,” he says — but he never forgot the experience and he never forgot how he liked it.

So on Saturday, May 23, 60 years and one day after his last jump, he jumped one more time, sporting a custom made shirt with the Airborne jump club logo on the front and a reproduction of the famous WWII Rosie the Riveter “We can do it” poster on the back.

“We can do it” is personal to Arnone. It’s not about him following through on his desire to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft one more time, its that his mom Ann was a real-life Rosie-the-riveter, working during WWII riveting parts for the famous B-24 Liberator bombers.

“I was about 6 years old,” Arnone recalls. ” She’d go to work after dinner. She’d work all night. I think what we are going through today, the virus pandemic, ‘We can do it’ is a good thing to hear .. over from 1940 to today. We can do it.”

In 1960 Arnone jumped by static line from 3,100 and from 3,800 feet out of a copter that was basically parked over the drop zone. This time at Skydive Space Center in Titusville, he stepped out at 18,000 feet into the turbulence of the Beechcraft King Air while strapped to an instructor (Cristofer Parenti, also a military veteran) for a 90-second freefall, followed by a gentle 5 to 7-minute descent by parachute from 5,000 feet.

Comparing the exit from the powerful King Air to the earlier ones from the helicopter, Arnone said “it’s not even close. Your body goes into a roll. It’s 8 or 10 seconds before you can see anything It’s almost terrifying. I remember saying to myself,  ‘what was I thinking.”

Then the skydiving pairs stop their roll and stabilize and are able to enjoy the view. When the chute jerked open, as Arnone recalls, “you settle down and go thank you Lord.”

Speaking the day after, Arnone said “I accomplished what I set out to do. I wanted to do it and I did it. Sitting here right now, I don’t have a desire to do it again. If I change my mind, I change my mind. Take it one day at a time.  I got it out of my system, but my wife doesn’t like it. She’d never let me do it again.”

So next time Arnone is feeling adventurous —  just maybe — it will be parasailing.

“If she’ll do it, that’s a deal,” he says.  “We’ll have to try that.”

Arnone, a south Lake County resident, is a retired industrial designer/tooler, having worked extensively in the plastics industry. He served in the army for three years and has been in Florida since the ’80s. At 81 years old, Arnone was by far the oldest jumper Saturday in Titusville.