Washington DC, USA
(Unknown / Library of Congress)
‘Jammie’ Reynolds went under a number of names: John Reynolds, Jack Reynolds, Jug Reynolds, ‘The Human Fly’,’The Climbing Wonder’ and ‘The Lizard’. He began his vocation at the age of four, astonishing his parents and neighbors by balancing on the back of the furniture.
Jammie’s first public appearance came two years later, aged six, balancing with his father – a steeplejack – on a fifty-foot high flagpole, on a ninety-foot high building in Buffalo. Aged twelve, Jammie ascended the side of Boston’s Old South Building. He crowned this achievement by then balancing on four chairs on top of five tables, one on top of the other. He repeated the stunt at New York’s Flatiron Building, in 1912, aged twenty-one.
Jammie was twenty-six when this picture was taken. He is balancing over the Lansburgh Furniture Building on 9th Street NW, Washington DC. Soon after, with America’s entry into the Great War, Jammie was stationed at Kelly Field Air Base. After the war he developed a Vaudeville theater balancing routine.
‘If you can stand on your head in one place, you can do it in another.’
Jammie Reynolds, Evening Public Ledger, Philadelphia, February 5, 1915
