“Purkey the Plucky,” née Lou Ella Purkaple, a nineteen-year-old telephone plug operator, made the headlines on May 15, 1927. “Girl Daredevil Floats to Earth” described Purkaple, whose bold stunt made her the first Colorado woman to parachute out of a plane. 

Lou Ella, former student at North Denver High School, long had hopes of being a parachute jumper, but her jump that Sunday in May was the first she had ever dared, other than an attempt at leaping from a barn roof with an umbrella to cushion her fall. (The umbrella collapsed, dropping Lou Ella to the ground). A fangirl of parachuting stunts, she kept an album of newspaper clippings of famous parachutists and collected bits of wood from planes that had “cracked up.” She started talking with pilot Jack Euler about making her own attempt and he introduced her to Frank Van Dersarl who owned the Favan Airport, a small strip on the north side of Denver. For a year, Lou Ella kept at Van Desarl to let her make a jump, until he relented.  He was quoted in the Rocky Mountain News as saying, “I suppose she won’t be satisfied until she has the chance. She has the nerve, and I know she will do it.” The stunt was promoted in the Rocky Mountain News, with articles and photos and an invitation for folks far and wide to come to Favan Airport at 52nd Avenue and Colorado Boulevard and witness Purkey’s leap. She was asked if she had done anything else as startling as jumping out of a plane and she replied, “Well, I dance the Black Bottom.”

On the day of the jump, 75,000 spectators gathered to watch, from the Favan airfield all the way over to City Park. Wearing a white silk sailor suit, goggles, and hair bobbed in the flapper style, Lou Ella climbed into the cockpit of the plane piloted by Jack Euler. She blew a kiss and Euler gunned the motor. They were off, climbing into the sky. At 1,000 feet, Lou Ella looked down at the specks of cars and people and in a Rocky Mountain News article recollected thinking, “Watch me closely, folks, I’m coming back to you in a big hurry.” Once they hit 3,000 feet, Euler hooked the parachute, a Baldwin bundled inside a large metal can mounted to the plane, to Lou Ella’s harness as she clung to a little ladder on the side of the plane. “Then I fell,” said Lou Ella, relating her experience to the Rocky Mountain News. “O-o-o-o! It was the most wonderful thrill of my life.” But as she descended toward the ground, a buckle on her harness broke. The quick-thinking Purkaple grabbed the loose rope and righted the parachute. “That rather spoiled my parachute ride, for I had to hang on to the ropes to keep straight up.” Nevertheless, she glided to earth at the airfield to the relief of her mother, Ida, and sister, Fern, careful not to alight on a cactus patch. Her safe arrival was also awaited by John Carl Clement, who held a bouquet of red roses for the intrepid young woman. “Where’s my powder puff?” she quipped upon landing. 

After her thrilling stunt, Lou Ella went back to working the plugs in the Gallup exchange of the Mountain States Telephone Company, where she was better known as “Purkey, the Plug Pusher.” Reminiscing in a 1977 Rocky Mountain News article, she said “I wanted to do it again. I’d have gone up the next day, but my parents wouldn't let me.” Lou Ella Purkable, by then Lou Ella Clement added, “I didn’t care anything about being the first woman to jump. I just did it because I wanted to…That jump was the greatest thrill in the world.”