The patriarch of the Kennedys of the circus world (in terms of often avoidable tragedy), Karl Wallenda was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1905, into a circus family whose history of high-flying acrobatics could be traced back to the eighteenth century. He began performing at age six and at seventeen put together a high-wire act with his brother, Herman, a man named Joseph Geiger, and the teenage Helen Kreis, whom he’d later marry. The Great Wallendas performed across Europe and around the world. John Ringling saw them perform in Cuba and hired them to perform at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the United States. When they made their debut at Madison Square Garden in 1928, the Wallendas added a new degree of difficulty to their high-wire routine: they performed without a net. They had no choice. The net they worked with had been lost in transit. Their determination that the show would go on led to standing ovations at the Garden. From that point on, the Great Wallendas were the aerial daredevils who worked without a net.
The Great Wallendas became known as the Flying Wallendas—a play in their native German on the title of the Wagner opera The Flying Dutchman—after the term appeared in a news article following their fall from the wire in the 1940s. It stuck.
In the years to follow, the troupe would leave such an impressive trail of injuries and death in its wake that, to some, the title “Falling Wallendas” was more fitting.
When the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train rolled in to Hartford, Connecticut, on July 5, 1944, the trains were so late that one of the two shows scheduled for that day had to be canceled. Missing a show is very, very bad luck among circus folk, and although the evening show went on as planned, many superstitious roustabouts, clowns, and performers were aware that some calamity could be in the offing.
The next day was a Thursday; on this very humid July 6 afternoon, nearly eight thousand people, mostly women and children, crammed into the five-hundred-foot long big-top tent on a field at the Barbour Street Show Grounds in the city’s North End. Whip-cracking lion tamer Alfred Court had finished his act and the Great Wallendas were about twenty minutes into their own, when the circus bandleader Merle Evans spotted flames. They were licking the southwest wall and crawling toward the roof of the tent.
Evans had a signal known to all the circus folk that alerts them to an emergency. He immediately directed the band to play “Stars and Stripes Forever.” At the orchestral sound of the universal distress code, the Wallendas scrambled down ropes and poles.
Ringmaster Fred Bradna tried to address the crowd, tell them to keep calm, and get them to leave in an orderly fashion. It was too late. Within seconds, hundred-foot flames were chewing through the tent and spreading quickly across the canvas, waterproofed with a mixture of gasoline and paraffin. There was panic and a stampede to the exits. Within eight minutes, the tent collapsed, trapping hundreds beneath it.
(Charles Nelson Reilly, the actor, director, and 1970s television game show panelist, was among the survivors. He told the story in his one-man stage show: “A little girl went past me, and her face had been burned away. And she kept screaming, ‘My mommy’s gonna kill me, my mommy’s gonna kill me, my—’ She was already dead. Her mother wasn’t gonna kill her. The circus did that.”)
The Hartford Circus Fire was one of the worst fire tragedies in American history. The cause was never determined; neither was the exact body count. Official tallies run from 166 to 169, but there were probably more. Many bodies were never identified, and some smaller bodies may have been lost. Seven hundred people were injured.
None of the Wallendas, however, were hurt.
This wartime era proved very important to the Wallendas’ legacy. While they’d always be associated with the Hartford circus fire, Karl Wallenda was developing a new aerial high-wire act that was not only unique but most definitely death-defying: the Seven-Person Pyramid. This marvel of design and physics included three levels of performers: two pairs of men walking the wire, each pair yoked by shoulder bars and supporting another person on a tier above them. Those two aerialists, above the four, carried a pole upon which the seventh member of the troupe balanced in a chair. The walk, three stories above the ground, without a net, put the Wallendas on the map. They were fearless. They were indestructible.
The Great Wallendas performed the Seven-Person Pyramid for decades, hundreds of times, safely and death-defyingly, until January 30, 1962, when they performed with the Shrine Circus at Detroit’s State Fair Coliseum. Seven thousand children and adults watched as they performed their act three stories above the concrete floor.
The bottom level of the moving pyramid consisted of two pairs of men. Leading the way across the wire was Karl’s nephew Dieter Schepp, a twenty-three-year-old refugee from East Germany. Dieter had been in the United States for only four months; this was his first appearance with the troupe. Following was Richard Faughnan, twenty-nine, the only American in the group and husband of Karl’s daughter Jenny, who watched from a platform at the end of the wire. Karl’s twenty-one-year-old son Mario Wallenda and nephew Gunther Wallenda, forty-two, were the second pair.
The second level consisted of Karl and his brother Herman, standing on long rods that ran along the younger men’s shoulders. Dieter Schepp’s sister Jana sat on a chair on a rod, balanced on the older men’s shoulders. She was just seventeen.
The troupe was midway across the wire when Jenny, on the platform, noticed that Dieter didn’t appear to have a good grip on the thirty-five-pound balancing bar. “It looked like Dieter didn’t feel so good,” she told the Associated Press.
In fact, the pole was slipping from his fingers. Dieter shouted to the others: “Ich kann nicht mehr halten!” (“I can’t hold it any longer!”)
“He threw the pole into the air to grip it in the center and lost his balance,” Jenny said. “This threw everybody else off balance, and down they went. I screamed. I heard myself scream. I don’t know nothing after that.”
The pyramid collapsed, and everyone came tumbling down in a collision of flesh, bone, and rosin. Dieter, Richard, and Mario plunged thirty-six feet and slammed brutally to the hard concrete.
Amid the tangle of poles, Herman and Gunther managed to grab onto the wire. Jana tumbled out of the chair, more than fifty feet in the air, on the way to the longest fall of all, until Karl instinctively reached out and grabbed her hand. The teenager crawled onto his back and all four balanced precariously.
Panic spread through the arena. Some men tried to run into the ring. Women wept. Far too many children sat frozen, traumatized by the mayhem. There may have been a surge to the exits, or worse, if not for Blinko the Clown. Standing center ring in his greasepaint and clown costume, the clown known off-hours as Ernie Burch soothed the crowd while circus rescuers rushed into the ring and stretched a blanket as a makeshift net below the dangling performers. Jana, hanging by Karl and Gunther’s hands by now, dropped to the blanket, but she hit so hard and fast that the impact tore the blanket from the men’s hands. She bounced, slammed into the concrete headfirst, and wound up with a serious concussion.
Richard Faughnan died soon after the accident. Dieter Schepp died in the hospital three hours later. Mario Wallenda was left paralyzed from the waist down for life and faced years of rehabilitation. (In later years, before his death in 2015, Mario returned to the high wire strapped onto his “sky cycle,” a two-wheeled electronic bike.) Karl Wallenda suffered pelvic injuries.
The fall did not deter the Great Wallendas. The night after the tragedy, Herman and his son Gunther, the only ones not injured, returned to the wire. Gene Mendez flew in from Stockholm to be the third man. They improvised a performance to deafening cheers.
Karl’s sister-in-law Yetta had left the act about a dozen years earlier and on April 18, 1963, was performing a solo aerial act with the Shrine Circus in the Omaha City Auditorium. She was billed as “Miss Rietta, skirting on the borderline of eternity.” She performed in a very scanty, sexy outfit—and also performed without a net.
On this evening, 4,666 spectators craned their necks to watch Yetta in the spotlight, atop a swaying, forty-five-foot-tall fiberglass pole. Yetta was beginning to attempt a headstand when she paused to adjust a footstrap. She slipped, fell backward, and plummeted toward the floor. The spotlight followed her down as she dropped thirty feet, struck a guy wire, and spun around. Yetta smashed onto the floor, facedown in the green sawdust. The spotlight widened around her crumpled body. Then children and adults alike began to scream.
A United Press International reporter wrote, “A clown act which followed in the Shrine Circus performance came on as scheduled. But most of the eyes in the audience, many of whom were school children, followed an ambulance crew as they put the broken performer on a stretcher.
“She was dead on arrival at a hospital.” Yetta Wallenda was forty-two.
On November 5, 1963, a television crew from NBC’s Show of the Week was filming at the Wallendas’ winter headquarters in Sarasota, Florida. The surviving Wallendas were going to attempt the Seven-Person Pyramid for the first time since the tragic fall in Detroit less than two years earlier. Three of the group, Karl, Gunther, and Herman, were part of that doomed pyramid. Jenny Faughnan, who watched her husband die that day, was in the chair at the top this time. The wire was only twelve feet above the ground. That’s a good thing: as the television camera rolled and the Wallendas’ pyramid began to move across, the wire that was stretched between two trees gave way with a loud twang. The pyramid came tumbling down. Gunther received deep face lacerations and lost four teeth. Karl again injured his pelvis and went to the hospital for X-rays.
“We wanted to do the pyramid once more to show we weren’t afraid,” Karl told the Tampa Bay Times. “It was to be a farewell to Herman and Gunther before they retire.”
On November 20, 1963, in Fort Worth, Texas, the Wallendas performed the Seven-Person Pyramid once more. This time, they used a net. After the engagement, Karl announced his family would never again perform the routine.
In the years after the Detroit disaster, Karl Wallenda continued to perform with a smaller troupe and gained new attention for his “sky walks” between buildings and across stadiums. He was sixty-five when he crossed the Tallulah Gorge in Georgia on a high wire on July 18, 1970. The thousand-foot, eighteen-minute walk, 750 feet above the ground, included two handstands. When he stepped off the wire, his wife handed him a martini. (A friend once asked Wallenda why he risked his life on the high wire. He replied, “To get to the martini on the other side.”)
The Wallenda-Leontini Circus had rolled into Wheeling, West Virginia, on Friday night, July 28, 1972. It was opening night and a benefit for local Shriners. Six thousand people spread out through the twelve-thousand-seat open-air Wheeling Island Stadium, most all of them looking upward to watch legendary Karl walk a high wire strung between two light towers, sixty feet off the ground.
Stories of Wallenda tragedies and of course the deaths in Detroit had only added to his mystique and the drama every time he set foot on the wire. Potential disaster was certainly on the minds of many spectators. For sixty-seven-year-old Karl Wallenda, though, this was a breeze. Holding his balancing pole, he navigated the dangerous walk and was reaching the end. There was but one hitch.
“I was pretty steady,” he told the Associated Press, “but I didn’t know how to get down.”
Son-in-law Richard Guzman was on his way to help. Guzman was twenty-nine and also performing that day. Married to Karl’s daughter Carla, he’d been a Flying Wallenda for the past six years. Everyone called him “Chico.”
Now he was climbing one of the light towers to take Karl’s pole so the old man could get off the wire. Chico reached the top and was just about to grab the balancing pole when he touched a live electrical wire. The shock was massive. Thousands of volts burned through his nervous system in a flash, knocking him back into the air. He fell backward and landed ten feet below on a pair of electrical wires. For a moment he lay there, enough time for a police officer to run beneath him to try to catch his fall. Then, Richard “Chico” Guzman dropped another fifty feet. He landed on the cop.
A nurse at the scene managed to revive him, but Guzman died at a local hospital. Death was attributed not to electrocution but to head injuries.
His wife Carla and three of their four kids were at the circus. The next day, Carla was supposed to join her father on the wire, and the kids were going to do their bicycle act.
Interviewed that next afternoon, Karl Wallenda noted that Chico Guzman had fallen from a wire seven years earlier and spent nine months in the hospital. “Our life is show business,” he said. “Without show business, we don’t survive. And we have to exist.” Karl Wallenda returned to the wire for Saturday’s show.
“The only place I feel alive is on the wire,” Karl said. “To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting.” It was March 22, 1978; Karl Wallenda was seventy-three years old. Four members of his immediate family were dead, and his adopted son was paralyzed from the waist down, but nothing was going to stop him from walking the high wire without a net. He’d first walked the wire in 1920, and this morning he was about to walk a high wire strung ten stories over a street between the two towers of the beachfront Condado Plaza Hilton and Condado Holiday Inn hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The ocean breezes were kicking up. It really was a bit windy for such a walk, but two hundred people had gathered below and news cameras were rolling. Local television station WAPA was broadcasting the event live. This was a splendid promotion for the Pan American Circus, in which the Great Wallendas were the featured act. Karl, his seventeen-year-old granddaughter Rietta, and two nephews performed each show on a wire, fifty feet in the air. So, in long-sleeved white shirt and red trousers, with a long balancing pole in his hands, the old man prepared to take his steps 121 feet above the pavement.
Gary Williams had a bird’s-eye view, perched on the rooftop, above the spot Karl Wallenda intended to reach. A photographer for El Nuevo Día, the local newspaper, Williams had been invited by Wallenda the previous day. The old man wanted as much publicity as possible for his circus appearances. “I set up my camera on the chimney that was right above the wire, and I put on a wide-angle lens,” Williams tells us, recalling the moment like it happened yesterday. “I was going to get up there when he got close to me and take the picture with the crowd down below.
“So he starts walking. I take my pictures. I’m shooting with a very long lens. A 300 millimeter lens. And he’s walking, walking, walking to me. And then the pole starts going back and forth. Up and down. And he’s having trouble controlling the pole. And people were going, ‘Ooh! Ooh!’ And one of the people who work with him in the act was watching from the roof. He yelled, ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ And he takes what they call—I found this out later—he took what they call a ‘three-point position,’ where he sits down. He can hold that position for hours. But he had no strength.”
Karl Wallenda had made it more than halfway across the wire. The winds suddenly picked up, gusting to 30 knots (about 34.5 miles per hour). “And soon as he grabbed that three-point position, he spun,” Williams says. “And he fell. And he went all the way down. My finger froze on my motor drive. Thank God I had a motor drive. There were two other photographers on the roof with me. But they didn’t have a motor drive, so they didn’t have anything of the fall.”
Victor Abboud, an accountant from Montreal, was also a witness to the horror. “I saw him go down on his knees on the wire and I thought he was kneeling to rest,” he said in a report filed by the Associated Press. “But then I saw he was shaking, the winds blew him off and he went all the way down, head first.”
Karl Wallenda had made a desperate grasp for the wire before plunging to the driveway of the Holiday Inn below. His head smacked against a parked taxi before he smashed to the pavement. The sight led to some hysteria among the spectators. Several fainted or collapsed.
“I couldn’t see the hit, because there was a ledge sticking out from the first floor where the casino was, and it was covering the entrance of the hotel,” Williams continues. “I heard a hit. And then, I think it was a family member to the left of me, collapsed on the roof. And she started wailing. I took another camera and I shot a picture of that and then I ran downstairs. And I saw some people there. I took a couple of pictures of a woman and I realized that I didn’t have my wide-angle lens. It was up on the roof. So I had to go back up to the roof and get the lens, came down, and I took the wide-angle picture of him lying on the ground. And there’s a woman from the hotel praying over him and the crowd around him.”
The police were concerned about the crowd, Williams says, but local law made it difficult to simply move the body to a secure location. “In Puerto Rico you’re not allowed to remove a body from a crime scene or an accident until the district attorney shows up.” But one of them hit on a solution. “A policeman yells, ‘He’s still alive!’ And they moved the body. They put it in the backseat and they took it to the hospital. The policeman there used his head, because there were so many people there—threw him in a cab and got him out of there.”
Karl Wallenda was pronounced dead at Presbyterian Hospital at 10:20 AM.
In the aftermath, the obvious question was whether Wallenda thought of calling off the stunt because of the winds. James B. Harrington, manager of the circus, said he didn’t. “He thought it was fine. He tested and installed the wire himself.” Ultimately, the wind and faulty wire rigging took the blame for the tragedy (others cited Karl’s age and health as factors; Gary Williams says a doctor friend informed him that his photos indicate a heart attack).
When news of his uncle’s death reached him at home in Sarasota, Florida, Gunther Wallenda told United Press International, “If Karl would have had a choice, this would have been the way he wanted it.” Gunther, who had retired in 1962, after the Seven-Person Pyramid collapse in Detroit, insisted, “The show will definitely go on, in the finest of circus tradition. That’s the way Karl would have wanted it.”
His prediction proved to be very accurate, for on the afternoon of Karl’s death, granddaughter Rietta and the Great Wallenda nephews went on with the show. “My editor said, ‘You got to go to the circus. The Wallendas are going on,’” Gary Williams recalls. “I said, ‘They just lost Karl Wallenda. What do you mean they’re going on?’ ‘The show must go on.’ And so I went to the circus. And sure enough, I get there, I’m standing right under the high wire act. I’m still in shock, I guess. And she was up there doing something like a small pyramid. The girl. Two guys with a pole go on top. And I thought she was going to fall. And she got down and stepped into the spotlight. The same girl [who’d collapsed] on the roof overlooking the wire. And as she’s taking the bow, she just breaks down in tears.”
On June 4, 2011, Karl’s great-grandson Nik Wallenda and his mother Delilah returned to the Condado Hilton to attempt the same 135-foot walk in Karl’s memory. Mother and son started at opposite ends of the wire. When Delilah reached the middle, roughly where Karl had fallen, she sat down and Nik stepped over her before the two continued to opposite ends. Before completing the walk, Nik knelt on the wire and blew a kiss in honor of Karl’s memory.
While several branches of the Wallendas continue to perform today, it’s Nik who’s inherited Karl’s mantle as the Great Wallenda of the twenty-first century. Born in 1979, Nik holds a dozen world records and has walked the high wire where no one had been allowed before, including Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. He also prefers to perform without a net.
“The myth is when you use a net, just because you have a safety device, it means that you’re safe,” he tells us. “I wore a tether over Niagara Falls because it was mandated by my partner at the time, ABC. I was more worried that that was going to tangle up and kill me than actually just walking without it.”
Nik supersized the Wallenda legacy when he added one more body to the infamous Seven-Person Pyramid. Nik and his troupe were rehearsing their eight-person pyramid under the Circus Sarasota Big Top in Sarasota, Florida, on February 8, 2017. Nik and three others were on the bottom, two, including Nik’s sister Lijana, were the next layer, and the man above them held Nik’s fifty-six-year-old aunt Rietta on his shoulders. They were rehearsing without a net.
When Lijana lost her balance, the pyramid collapsed. Five of the troupe fell to the ground. Rietta plummeted forty feet from the top. Nik and two others managed to hang on to the wire. No one was killed, but Lijana, who landed on her face, was injured most severely.
“Yes, it was the roughest day of my life,” Nik says. “After our fall, I’ve chosen that when we do the big pyramid, we’ll use an airbag. I think that pride plays a role in what we do, and it was tough on me to put an airbag under us, but I felt like it was the right decision. I feel like society is changing. I don’t think anyone who comes to a circus wants to see someone die. We toured for the last year, and everywhere we went, we used [an airbag]. And to be honest, the audience’s response was no less than it was without one. Now, when I’m walking alone, it’s a little different. I’m not responsible for the others, I don’t have people on my shoulders, so I prefer not to use a net or wear a safety device.
“But I think wisdom has to play a role in our lives and you can’t be arrogant, cause that’ll kill you.”
Nik explains he doesn’t intend to die on the wire and takes no comfort knowing that his great-grandfather died “doing what he loved.” “No, I don’t think anyone in the family wanted to see that. We did learn from my great-grandfather’s death that there is a time to retire. And I think I will retire. The challenge is when it’s your life and passion—and this is our passion—but I’ve already begun to prepare myself for that.”