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Nation: Sit Down, Poppy, Sit Down!

5 minute read
TIME

A last warning before Karl Wallenda fell to his death

When Karl Wallenda was a boy in Germany, the story goes, he answered an ad asking for someone who could do a handstand. The ad did not say just where the handstand was to be done.

The prospective employer, a circus performer named Louis Weitzman, agreed to try the boy out. He led him up a ladder to a platform 40 ft. in the air. “Just walk behind me,” said Weitzman as he started out on the high wire, “and when I bend a little, you get up and do a handstand on my shoulders.” Karl Wallenda looked down. “I can’t,” he said. “You do it,” said Weitzman, “or I’ll shake you off the wire.”

So Karl Wallenda did a handstand on Weitzman’s shoulders. So Karl Wallenda became a high-wire stunt man. Probably it was in his blood all along. His father was a catcher in a wandering troupe of aerialists; his mother performed with the troupe too. But when Wallenda first began performing his own high-wire act, he soon showed the daring that was to make him the greatest of his strange breed. He not only walked the wire but rode a bicycle on it— with his brother Herman on his shoulders. He invented an act that had never before been performed, the pyramid— Karl and Herman and another man all teetering across the slender cable. The act premiered in Milan in 1925 and proved a sensation. John Ringling hired Wallenda to bring the act to New York City, and there the first performance won a 15-minute ovation.

There were no safety nets underneath: Karl Wallenda did not believe in them. “Gott give us the courage and gift of talent to do our acts,” he once told an interviewer, “and when he be ready to take us, he will.”

In 1947 Wallenda devised a more complicated form of his pyramid— seven people in three tiers, six men connected by shoulder bars and one young woman perched on top on a chair, all swaying at the edge of the void, preserved only by their incredible combination of skill, balance and courage. Old Karl billed them as “the Great Wallendas,” and he did his best to keep the act in the family.

Dieter Schepp, a nephew recently arrived from East Germany, was making his first appearance in the great pyramid in Detroit on the night of Jan. 30, 1962, when he suddenly began losing his grip on the balance pole. There came a terrible cry: “Ich kann nicht mehr halten “(I can’t hold on any more). Then the pole slipped, Dieter fell, and the whole pyramid of Wallendas came apart in midair, some clinging to the wire, others plunging to the concrete floor. Dieter and another man died there; Karl’s adopted son Mario was paralyzed from the waist down.

Karl Wallenda, the patriarch, would not give up. “It is our pride,” he said. “I feel better if I go up again. Down here on the ground I break all to pieces.” Some of his partners were less determined. “I’m scared silly every time I go on,” said Gunther Wallenda, a nephew. Karl’s second wife Helen, who once performed in the act, refused even to watch it any longer. “I always sit in a back room and pray,” she said. Wallenda was adamant. “The rest of life,” he said, “is just time to fill in between doing the act.”

“The wind is my worst enemy,” Wallenda once said of his outdoor performances. Last week, as he prepared to walk a wire strung 300 ft. between two beachfront hotels in San Juan, P.R., he was warned that the winds blowing in off the sea were tricky. There was a steady breeze of 12 m.p.h., but with gusts up to 23 m.p.h.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Karl as he checked the wire at the tenth-floor window, some 100 ft. above the sidewalk. “The wind is stronger on the street than up here.”

Karl Wallenda was 73 by now, but still strong, hard-muscled, his eyes a bright blue, his gray hair tufted around his ears. He had said he would make the walk, and so he would. There were 200 people watching. Among them was his granddaughter Rietta, 17, the only relative then performing in his act.

Wallenda had no sooner started than a gust of wind made the cable vibrate. Wallenda stopped, steadied himself. A hush fell over the crowd.

He started again, crossed a little more than halfway. The cable began to sway. Wallenda leaned forward to keep his balance. One young member of his troupe, waiting on the roof at the far end of the wire, warned him to crouch down for better balance.

“Sit down, Poppy, sit down!” the youth cried.

Wallenda started to crouch. A gust of wind suddenly jarred him. Then, as the horrified crowd watched, he started to fall, very slowly at first. He reached out for the cable with one hand, but he was still holding the balancing bar and could not get a grip on the cable. Down he went, still holding onto the pole. Ten stories below, he landed on the roof of a taxi and bounced off onto the sidewalk. At the hospital, he was pronounced dead of massive internal injuries.

Five hours later, two of the old man’s protégés joined Rietta Wallenda in doing the high-wire act under the big top in San Juan. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. She bowed and smiled. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

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