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The Flying Wallendas—couldn’t. Okay that’s a little dark, because we’re talking about a world famous 73-year-old high wire walker who fell to his death.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 22, 1978--
Karl Wallenda was born into a circus family in Germany in 1905 and began performing with them at the age of six. The acrobatic assemblage he began was Hard. Fucking. Core. Riding bikes on high wires. Doing seven-person human pyramids across a high wire. No fucking nets. Did I mention I hate heights? For research, I had to watch the video of Karl’s fall. A lot of people watched it. ABC News broadcast his death.
While Karl was part of a circus family, he was the one who branched off into wire walking in his teens. He’d seen an ad looking for a “hand balancer with courage.” Okay. I’d rather scrub Taco Bell toilets. But he found a mentor in Louis Weitzman and brought in his brother and another guy and a teenage girl who later became his wife, to start the death-defying dynasty.
They toured Europe and were discovered by Ringling Brothers and became part of that circus. They performed in 1928 at Madison Square Garden and the fucking net was missing in transit and rather than say well I guess we’re not performing today they said we don’t need no stinking net and did the show and got a standing ovation. Again, Taco Bell toilets. Sign me up.
But when you defy death, death often says I don’t fucking think so. In 1962, while performing in Detroit, a pyramid walk collapsed. Two men died, one man was paralyzed, a woman got a head injury, and Karl injured his pelvis. The following year Karl’s sister-in-law fell to her death.
In 1970, 30,000 people watched Karl walk a quarter mile across the Tallulah Gorge in Georgia. Seven-hundred feet up, he did two headstands during the crossing. He also wore a mic and narrated his crossing.
On March 22, 1978, the now 73-year-old Karl Wallenda was in Puerto Rico to promote a circus act he was performing with his granddaughter by walking without a net between two 10-story buildings in San Juan, 121 feet in the air. You don’t want to google the video. He was at the halfway point, and suddenly the wind picked up. He fought for his balance. His knees wobbled. He dropped his balance pole and tried to grab the wire, but … that was it. He landed on a parked taxi and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
Karl’s great-grandson Nik Wallenda has continued the family tradition as a famous wire walker, breaking numerous world records, including walking over Niagara Falls, and an active volcano in Nicaragua. In 2011 Nik and his mother Delilah, Karl’s granddaughter, traveled to Puerto Rico and completed the same stunt that took Karl’s life. They began at opposite ends and met at the point where Karl fell. Delilah sat on the wire, Nik stepped over her, and they carried on. I expect Karl would have approved.
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