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."