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The face of skydiving has changed quite a bit over the past
decade, it used to be something mostly the younger generation would
have done, now the young at heart are taking to the air to make the
jump. For her 80th. birthday, my mother, Clara "Peggy" Roe celebrated by jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. She has had 3 hip surgeries and still she jumps. Peggy, as most people know her, took her 5th. jump on Sunday, October 24, 2010 with Skydive Atlanta, at the Thomaston Airport, and this time she managed to talk her brother Raymond Miller into taking the jump along with her. Peggy had been taking care of her mother, my grandma Miller, in Florida and had returned to Barnsville. She had been talking to my sister, Victoria "Vicky" Ellis about going to Six Flags, she wanted to do the parachute jump at Six Flags. It was around this time when Peggy met one of her friends who had gone skydiving,"She made it sound so wonderful", so I took the money I was saving to have my car painted and at the age of 72, I took my first jump. "I wasn't nervious or anything, I just jumped and loved it, it's a feeling I can't describe, It was just fun. Peggy's second jump was a Mothers Day gift from her daughter Vicky. This year's jump is the 3rd. year in a row the local Veterans of Foreign Wars" VFW" has taken up a collection for Peggy Roe's,, annual birthday jump. Half of the VFW group came out to watch the jump, she said " I jump tandem, and after this jump I could go by myself if I took lessons". When Peggy is not skydiving, she crochets, selling her craft at the Barnsville Buggy Days and the Johnstonsonville Christmas Flea-Bazaar. Peggy has lived on Crawford Road since 1982, she raises her own chickens and grows vegetables and flowers, she was born and raised in New York and moved with her parents at about the age of 15 or 16 years of age. When her son William L. "Bill" Heathcoe married a girl from Lamar County, Peggy fell in love with the area of Barnsville and she now lives at the old W.A.Farley Place,(aka Southern Oaks ) which is on the National Resister of Historic Places in Georgia. Source: Live interview with my mother, Clara"Peggy"Roe. - See Photo's |