Taking the Leap: Getting to know SEMO Skydiving co-owner Don Dorris

Don Dorris, 85, shares his story while seated in a hangar at Cairo Regional Airport on November 7, 2020.

Photo by Jeganaath Giri

Over the span of 85 years, Don Dorris has made more than 4,000 skydiving jumps. He made his first jump back in 1955.

“I remember stepping out that door,” says Dorris, who is originally from East Prairie, Mo., and now resides in Cape Girardeau. “I was so scared. Damn. I remember rolling along the airplane outside, and I seen rivets go by my eye, and I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I didn’t jump; I just fell out.”

Dorris says during that first time while standing at the door of the airplane, he heard the people behind him yelling at him to go, but he couldn’t move. After he fell, he recalls thinking he was going to die and then being surprised when “he felt something pulling on [his] shoulders” and realized the parachute had worked.

That was while he was in the military, a career that lasted 21 years and took him all over the globe, including to Europe and Asia. Dorris was a paratrooper, and ironically, what initially encouraged him to continue jumping was fear — but not of skydiving.

“I was more scared of them sargeants than I was of dying,” Dorris says. “I was. I swear to God, I was.”

Dorris was six years old when he knew he wanted to be a paratrooper. He recalls the day vividly: His uncle went off to fight in World War II, and he wanted to go with him. He went with his grandmother to the train station in Sikeston, Mo., to drop his uncle off and tried to follow him onto the train. His grandmother had to hold him back while he clung to the train’s railing, crying. To get him to stop crying, his grandmother told him that when he was older, he could go. When he asked if he could be a paratrooper, she told him, “anything you want to be.”

When he was older, that was still what Dorris wanted. So, he went for it.

And he survived, with many stories to tell about it. Including one about a reconnaissance mission to bomb a building behind enemy lines, where he jumped at night out of a plane at 800 feet into the middle of a woods, with only 600 feet to deploy his parachute before he hit the trees. And one about being in the infantry in Korea, where it was often so cold they kept their canteens underneath their armpits so the water wouldn’t freeze and the men wouldn’t dehydrate. If they fell asleep in the weather, Dorris says, they would die within a few minutes. When men froze to death, Dorris recalls picking their bodies up and “throwing them in there like logs in the back of trucks.” He didn’t think he would survive. But he did.

On a rest and relaxation stint, he fell in love with a woman in Japan. He says throughout 21 years in the military, he never went AWOL until they sent him there, and after several days of being with her, he tried to sneak back into the barracks to take a shower and get clean clothes. They tried to put him on an airplane back to Korea, but when the people loading the cargo onto the plane turned their backs, he ran away, back to the woman he loved. He sneaked back to the barracks again a couple of days later, when they caught him a second time. This time, they got him on the plane, waving at him from the ground as he looked at them out the window.

“I never saw her again,” he says.

Japan and Copenhagen, Denmark — where he says he discovered “free love” on a 30-day military leave when he was 17 years old — are two of Dorris’ favorite places he traveled with the military. He says he also once had lunch in a train car with a Scandanavian princess, whom a waiter brought back to his car while he was traveling to Copenhagen, after asking if he minded having company. Dorris says he often wonders if she is now a queen in some country.

“Done some crazy stuff,” Dorris says. “I was all over the world ... several different outfits. I enjoyed the hell out of it.”

After he got out of the military, he saw people skydiving while he was living in Florida and asked them about the sport. Then, he joined them. It was 1973, and he never turned back.

As it turns out, he and Ralph Bailey were on a load together in Florida that year, although they didn’t know each other yet and wouldn’t become friends until a year later when they both lived in the Southeast Missouri region and were skydiving here. Bailey, a resident of Sikeston, Mo., was also in the military when he was younger, spending 31 and a half months in France before and around the time the Berlin Wall went up.

The friends decided to become co-owners of SEMO Skydiving in the 1970s when the previous owners got out of the gig. It’s a partnership that’s been going strong since, and now approximately 50 people, including four instructors, skydive with the club, with hundreds more jumping with them throughout the years.

The last time Dorris jumped was four years ago, before he got two rods put in his back. He hopes to jump again, though, easing back into it this spring.

What would he say to people who want to skydive but might be afraid to?

“If they’re afraid — everybody’s afraid. If you put the fear behind you like I always did, I never let it control me. I put the fear behind me and did what I wanted, accomplished stuff,” Dorris says. “Fear can control you. If it controls you, it will make you miserable because you will set around and regret it, you know. You know, ‘Ah, I shoulda did that, blah, blah, blah.’ But there ain’t much I ain’t done.”

It’s an attitude he carries with him into all aspects of his life.

“I really enjoyed my life. The doctors think I’ve got cancer now. I don’t give a shit; I’m 85. But I got to go next week, they’re going to tell me, you know, and my daughter’s a nurse, and I’ve got to tell her, you know, ‘Don’t worry about me,’” he says. “You know, I’ve had a good life. I’ve done things most people only dream about. So if I die, if this cancer gets me, no big deal. Hell, I survived Korea, and if I survived Korea, survive anything.”

He says he could talk all day long but won’t, and Bailey says to get another notebook. Dorris laughs at the joke and the friendship contained in it, letting three words escape from him, one with each breath as he laughs. They’re three words we’re all trying to understand.

“God. Oh. Man.”