On Saturday, April 5, former Denmark Mayor (1978-1981) Woody Binnicker dedicated a monument at Denmark’s Brooker Park recognizing the first 24- hour parachute endurance world record of 201 jumps on January 13, 1973.

Thirty five years ago, January 13, 1973, two men, both natives of Denmark, S.C., one the pilot of a small aircraft, and another a parachutist, made history after having made 201 jumps from a small airplane within a 24- hour period. That’s about 8 1/3 jumps an hour if based on a continuous 24-hour clock. Woody Binnicker was the parachutist and his pilot was Bobby Frierson, known as the “Vikings of Denmark”.

In 1964, Binnicker taught Frierson how to parachute-jump while Frierson taught Binnicker how to fly a plane. Frierson was an advanced freefall instructor and was the only qualified tandem instructor in South Carolina at the time.

“It was all teamwork,” Binnicker said. They had a team of parachute packers, assistants to help him take off and put on his rig as he ran from one jump to another to board a second plane revved up ready for takeoff - 201 times. “We had a good team. Actually,” he admitted, “we tried it the year before, but it was raining and we had to abort.”

The two men organized the Parachute Center at the Barnwell Airport, at Barnwell, S.C. in June 1967. When their parachute careers ended, Binnicker had made 3,600 jumps, and Frierson had more than 6,000.

Sixteen years later, in 1989, Frierson and Walt Inabinett, then a radio and television news personality, jumped in a tandem harness, with Binnicker as pilot, performed an anniversary parachute jump.”

In May, 1989, former House of Representatives Thomas Rhoad introduced a Concurrent Resolution in the SC General Assembly recognizing Bobby Frierson … for “his outstanding efforts and accomplishments as the pilot in the 1973 event in which the world's record for the number of parachute jumps from a plane in a twenty-four-hour period was broken and was commemorated in 1989 by the ‘anniversary parachute jump’".

The record has since been broken. The latest was Jay Stokes who made 640 parachute jumps in a 24-hour period at Greensburg Municipal Airport, in Greensburg, Indiana on September 8-9, 2006.

Frierson, a graduate from Clemson University with a degree in horticulture, served as a Ranger and an officer in the United States Army; and as officer- in-charge for the South Carolina Air National Guard.

In 2005, Frierson, at age 73, died during a parachute jump in Georgia when his parachute did not open.

Binnicker, who is now retired and resides in Eutawville, was the former owner and operator of Eutawville IGA in Eutawville.