CAYUGA/DUNNVILLE — Cloudy skies and the threat of a summer storm couldn’t dampen the mood as a large group of friends and supporters gathered by the landing site of Cayuga’s Skydive Ontario to witness a special event take place on June 21, 2025.
What event, you might ask?
“I’m jumping out of an airplane,” said Dunnville resident Marion Chapman, speaking to The Press the day before her 90th birthday. “It sort of was on my bucket list.”
She credited her neighbour, Tim Mageran, for the idea as he previously recounted his own experiences jumping to her: “He said it’s a blast.”
For Chapman, the jump was just another in a long line of impressive life experiences.
“I’ve travelled extensively, I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve gone down in a submarine, I’ve flown up onto glaciers, etc., etc. I just thought it might be kind of neat to do it for my 90th birthday,” she mused.
Further checks on Chapman’s bucket list include visiting all seven continents. Experiences include walking the Great Wall of China, with a stop in Xi’an to see the famous Terracotta warriors; extensive travel to Africa where she’s “seen all the big animals”; several trips to South America; and multiple sojourns to famous waterfalls around the globe, including Iguazu Falls in Brazil, Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and Angel Falls in Venezuela.
“I added it up one day and I’ve been to 76 different countries,” said Chapman.
Most of those adventures took place after her late husband, Graham, retired early due to a cancer diagnosis.
“Doctors told him he had a short time to live. As it turns out, we went to naturalistic as well as traditional medicine and instead of the five years they gave him, he had 28 and a half years and six kinds of cancer,” said Chapman.
Extensive travel is far from the only notable thing about Chapman. She is also the recipient of a Golden Jubilee Medal issued by none other than Queen Elizabeth II in celebration of her 50th year of service in 2002.
The prestigious medals were meant to honour sustained work in public-facing roles. Chapman reminisced on the half-century of volunteer work that earned her the distinction.
“I was a schoolteacher, I was organized, and I did a lot of things outside of the daily classroom to help kids, spent extra time with them tutoring and so on,” said Chapman. “I’ve just had always had a very strong interest in community and anything I could do to help, because there’s such a need.”
In addition to volunteering at local churches and hospitals over the years, Chapman sponsored a classroom in Africa for five years after meeting a teacher there on a trip.
“I was only briefly there to see what she was doing, but I helped her with supplies and so on, and advice,” she said.
A member of the British Commonwealth Monarchists Society of Canada, Chapman and her four sisters all donned red cowboy hats and flew off to England to celebrate the Queen’s 50th jubilee in style, noting, “I’ve been invited to a couple special things where the Royals were there, so it was very exciting.”
By now you’re surely thinking there’s not much more that Chapman could have accomplished in her 90 years of life to date. On that front, you would be wrong.
“I’m an Ontario Golfer, which means I have a special certificate. You have to win a major tournament to get one of those,” she shared.
In addition to her love of golf, badminton, and painting, Chapman remains an active community volunteer to this day, engaged with local Dunnville clubs like Friends of the Library, the Optimist Club, and the Horticultural Society.
Another long-time hobby was scrapbooking, with Chapman accumulating 457 scrapbooks over the years chronicling the Royal family.
Less enthused with King Charles than she was his predecessor, Chapman decided to purge her collection, donating them “10-12 every two weeks” to Grandview Lodge, where many volumes now belong to the on-site library and have been read extensively by residents of the long-term care facility.
Chapman’s friend Colleen O’Reilly called her a “real role model” who “surprises me with everything she does.”
“She’s now talking about the next decade. That’s her attitude,” said O’Reilly. “I just thought telling her story might be a real inspiration for other people.”
That love was clear and evident last weekend amongst those gathered to see Chapman’s big moment through the skies. Binoculars were pointed up, and cries of “There she is! That’s her!” rang out as the yellow and orange parachute opened far up above them and made its way to the landing site below.
Asked about the jump once safely back on the ground, Chapman said, “It was a fantastic experience. I’ve done similar things, but never jumped out of an airplane.”
She recalled the moment the gravity of her decision fully hit her.
“When they open the doorway and you get that gust of wind inside the plane, I thought ‘oh my god, we are really going down.”
She concluded, “It was just super. It was the experience of a lifetime.”
