By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
December 5, 1999
Amy and Stephen Hess fell for each other . . . from an airplane.
The newlyweds met two years ago at Chicagoland Skydiving in Hinckley, Ill. She was a novice preparing for her first solo jump. He was a seasoned pro.
“I had done maybe one tandem jump (with an instructor) a year for about five years,” Amy says. “He had been jumping solo for about two years at that point. I figured that I’d do my last tandem, and then train to do my first solo jump later that day. I thought that I’d have it all out of my system.
“But as soon as I did that jump, I fell in love with skydiving . . . and with Steve. It’s something we do together every weekend now.”
They met on a Saturday. On Sunday, thanks to a little manipulating on his part, they went out to dinner.
“I didn’t have a car,” she remembers. “About five people offered to give me a ride, including Steve. I took up the offer of the one woman. I remember the weather was pretty bad that day and I still had to get through a six-hour training session.”
At this point, Stephen went up to the woman and said: “I know the weather’s rotten and you’re just waiting around for the student. If you want, I can give her a ride home.”
Asked if she was apprehensive about riding home back with him, Amy, 32, says: “Not at all. We had chit-chatted on Saturday. The (skydiving) community is such a small one that everyone knows everyone else. That was pretty much it. We went out to dinner that night, and again a couple of evenings later. We started dating almost immediately after meeting.”
An adventurous woman, Amy got a kick out Stephen’s style.
“Once, he asked the pilot to `drop’ him off at a barbecue he had to go to,” Amy recalls with a laugh. “He just jumped out of the plane and made an entrance. He didn’t do it to impress me. That’s just how he is.”
The couple got engaged this March. But before he asked her, Stephen – now 30 – asked for her parents’ permission first.
“He drove to Connecticut to ask my parents if he could marry me,” Amy says. “I didn’t know this at the time, although I suspected that something was going on. Then he came back to Chicago. A few nights later, he said he was going to come and cook dinner for me. When I got home, I knew something was up.”
Stephen had left 80 ring boxes scattered around her apartment. Inside each was a handwritten note.
By now, she guessed what was next. The last ring box, which actually contained an engagement ring, was hidden in his pocket.
“It was such a fun, different way to propose,” Amy says. “I loved it.”
Married Nov. 20, the couple left their parachutes at home when they went on their honeymoon. They opted for scuba diving in Belize.
