Neal Rubin: Remembering Leaping Larry Dilworth, the wheelchair-riding skydiver
United Press International was still a major wire service when Mary Chapman met Leaping Larry Dilworth, and she was one of the more minor parts of it. The story fell to her, then — or maybe the cub reporter reached out and grabbed it — when Dilworth called to let UPI know he would be jumping out of an airplane …
In his wheelchair.
“It was a slow news day,” Chapman said, and it turned out Dilworth had as much spark and personality as he did nerve.
Even if he oversold the jump — blurry television footage shows him without his prosthetic left leg, but also without the chair — the story launched a friendship that lasted from 1986 until a few weeks ago, when Dilworth’s constant quest for speed and adventure may have accelerated his demise.
He was 79, a lifelong Detroiter, one of those people you saw everywhere who knew everyone and had an opinion about everything.
Diagnosed at birth with spina bifida, he drove sports cars, skied on snow and water and flew in a glider. He was a plaintiff in at least one successful disability rights case against the city, and freely hectored the Detroit City Council on the same subject.
Dying quietly seemed out of character for him, and doing it anonymously seems outright wrong.
Let it be known, therefore, that Lawrence Dilworth Jr. has departed this realm, and that unlike most self-assigned nicknames, Leaping Larry’s was fitting and well earned.
On the day of the jump, Chapman drove to Tecumseh, southeast of Jackson, and found “this short guy, kind of muscular, with just the widest smile.”
It was a sunny day, she recalls, and Dilworth exited the airplane with an instructor strapped to his back.
The two landed smoothly, the instructor absorbing most of the impact as the empty leg of Dilworth’s yellow jumpsuit folded back, and jubilation reigned.
She and Dilworth spoke by phone far more often than they saw one another over the years, Chapman says, frequently about cars as her career veered toward auto writing. When she picked up, he’d say, “It’s Leaping Larry.”
Meantime, he tried drag racing, finished a couple of Detroit Free Press marathons and learned to scuba dive. Leaping Larry wasn’t just a nickname, it was a philosophy.
Amputations, autos and attitude
The son of a pool hall owner, Dilworth Jr. was actually ambulatory for most of his first four decades.
His left leg was amputated at some point in the 1960s, but he was walking despite the spina bifida until he woke up one day at age 38 and couldn’t.
Then, he’d tell friends, he took to drinking and complaining. Realizing there was a limited future to either, he refocused after a year or two, and the spirit of Leaping Larry took flight.
“He would make an entrance,” says disability activist Arthur Humphrey, who became friends with Dilworth on a wheelchair basketball team. “He knew everyone, and he had photographs of himself with everyone, Louis Farrakhan to Nelson Mandela to Coleman Young.”
An alumnus of Northwestern High School and what’s now Siena Heights University, Dilworth was shunted at one point to a vocational program that had him making watches, Humphrey says.
Ultimately, he worked for Barden Cablevision and then Travelers Insurance. He never married, never had children, never owned a house, and always had transportation.
Humphrey particularly recalls a wheelchair-ready van with a Detroit Lions logo on the side, a Mazda Miata, and the slickest available wheelchairs, both motorized and self-propelled.
At a sporting goods store one day, Humphrey says, they were zipping up and down the aisles when a little boy interrupted them with a question.
“What happened to your leg?” he asked Dilworth, whose right leg would also be amputated a few years ago when a wound refused to heal.
“I lost it some time ago,” Dilworth said.
“Well, come over to this aisle,” the boy said. “Maybe we can find it.”
Independent to a fault
Dilworth had a keen sense of humor, Chapman says, “but he could be a little … not cantankerous, but curmudgeonly.”
He particularly disliked any assault on his independence, be it his vegetable-free diet or his freedom to roam.
Hospitalized in early June with pneumonia, he was released with instructions to rest. But it was Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix weekend, and he wanted to watch the races and show off his zippy new motorized chair.
“He said, ‘I’ll rest when I get back,’ ” Humphrey says. Dilworth took a bus downtown from his northwest Detroit apartment, spent the day at the track, “and went back in the hospital the next day.”
In short order, he was gone, leaving his friends to second-guess the same self-reliance they admired.
“It’s been a blur,” Humphrey says — an appropriately swift term, at least, for the memory of Leaping Larry.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or via Twitter at @nealrubin_fp.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit's wheelchair-racing skydiver dies after Grand Prix
