Dimple Potter goes skydiving June 26 to celebrate her 87th birthday.
Contributed photoRinggold resident Dimple Potter is leaping right into her 87th year after celebrating her birthday over the weekend with a six-minute free fall over Cartersville, Ga., during a skydiving trip.
“I’m on Cloud 9,” Potter said after completing the jump. “I just can’t begin to say how much I enjoyed it. It was out of this world. It’s just indescribable. The clouds, oh my goodness, the clouds were just gorgeous.”
Potter’s tandem jump June 26 was a family event, planned at Christmas by her two daughters and son.
“I’m just so thankful that I’m as well as I am for my age,” Potter said, adding that her children have told her they credit her attitude for her health.
She said her pilot eased their parachute smoothly back onto the earth, where she enjoyed three birthday parties with her family over the weekend.
“I’d go again in a heartbeat,” Potter said. “The only thing that bothered me was my ears popping. I was the first one out of the plane and that was a little bit scary, but I didn’t hesitate – I just jumped right out.”
Potter said that after her group jumped – the first of the morning – ominous clouds delayed the next few groups for two or three hours.
She giggled while describing her doctor’s reaction when he heard the skydiving plan, only divulged after prodding by her friends.
“His eyes got so big and he looked so funny,” she said. “He said, ‘You go for it but you tell your friends I had a heart attack.'”
The former red convertible-driving Potter’s strenuous walking habit and other stunts have landed her in the news before.
Potter said the name Dimple really is on her birth certificate – she was cheerfully named for one of her mother’s friends in Dalton. Potter grew up in Ringgold from 10 years old and later opened a beauty shop there.
“I knew everybody almost in the county then,” she said. “Course, it’s not that way anymore. Ringgold has grown.”
Though Potter moved all over the country while her husband, Wayne, was in the military and working for Tennessee Valley Authority, she said they were always in and out of Ringgold.
“We always came back home,” she said. “We kept our home.”
She has volunteered at the information desk at Hutcheson Medical Center for almost 20 years and she said she’s enjoyed every minute of it.
“My children say they can never find me home,” she said.
Potter is one whose book “What Happy People Know,” given to her by her children, is signed by the author, “To one who personifies happiness.”