Octogenarian takes plunge for ill friend

Don Hobbs, 85, jumped 192m off the Sky Tower in an effort to gain attention for a friend who needs a kidney transplant. Picture / Martin Sykes

Don Hobbs, 85, wanted to donate a kidney to a family friend on dialysis. The tissue and blood type matched, but doctors said he was just too old.

So to try to generate publicity and perhaps persuade someone else to help Mary Albert, who has been waiting four years for a transplant, he jumped off Auckland's Sky Tower.

Mr Hobbs, who says he was a "joatman" - a jack of all trades and master of none - before he retired, isn't the oldest to fall off Sky Jump's 192m platform attached to a cable. Those honours go to a 96-year-old man and a 91-year-old woman.

But the Pakuranga pensioner is probably the most entertaining, with a ready grin and a mouth full of one-liners, a fluorescent pink walker, and an earring in his left ear (his much-pierced grand-daughter Cherise, whom he and late wife Anne raised, thought it would be a good idea).

More than anything, he has a big heart: "I just thought that perhaps out there someone might like to come forward and donate a kidney".

As he was helped to the platform above Victoria St in brightly coloured jumping gear, onlookers asked - with alarmed looks on their faces - if he was intending to jump.

Mr Hobbs said he wasn't scared, exactly. "I was in the Army in the Pacific in World War 2, and had a lot of frights". His heart was in good nick, he said, "except now and then I fall in love".

Shuffling out to the jump zone was evidently hard work, but he jumped without hesitation, and pronounced himself "exhilarated" once on the ground.

The original plan had been for Mrs Albert, 50, an old nursing friend of Mr Hobbs' late wife, to jump with him off the tower. However, her health precluded it.

Speaking from Kawakawa, Mrs Albert, who has 15 hours of dialysis a week, described Mr Hobbs as "mad, but he's a great friend of mine, and has been for years and years". Her voice wobbled as she described his gesture as something few would do: "It's really lovely of him."

Sky Jump manager Steve Weidmann gave Mr Hobbs the $195 experience for free. "He's trying to help somebody else and I admire that."