Karl Wallenda

Karl Wallenda (January 21, 1905 - March 22, 1978) was the founder of The Flying Wallendas, an internationally known daredevil circus act famous for performing death-defying stunts without a safety net.

Personal life

Wallenda, born in Magdeburg, Germany in 1905, started performing at age six with his family.^[1]

The Great Wallendas

The Great Wallendas were noted throughout Europe for their four-man pyramid and cycling on the high wire. The act moved to the United States in 1928 and began an association with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus. Later they performed as freelancers. In 1947 they developed the unequaled three-tier 7-Man Pyramid. The Great Wallendas, a 1978 made-for-TV movie starring Lloyd Bridges as Karl Wallenda, depicts the act's comeback after a fatal accident involving several family members during a performance. ^[2]

Daredevil stunts

Site marker at Tallulah Gorge State Park

On July 18, 1970, a 65-year-old Karl performed a high-wire walk across the Tallulah Gorge, a gorge formed by the Tallulah River in Georgia. An estimated 30,000 people watched Karl perform two headstands as he crossed the quarter-mile-wide gap.

Death

Despite being involved in several tragedies in his family's acts, Karl continued with his death-defying stunts. In 1978, at age 73, Karl attempted a walk between the two towers of the ten-story Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on a wire stretched 37 metres (121 ft) above the pavement, but fell to his death when winds exceeded 48 kilometres per hour (30 miles per hour). The Wallenda family attributes the tragedy to "several misconnected guide ropes along the wire" and not the windy conditions. A film crew from WAPA-TV in San Juan taped the fall, and the video, featuring anchorman Guillermo Jose Torres' anguished narration of the fall, circled the world. Rick Wallenda went back the following year and completed the walk successfully.

He was quoted as saying, "Life is being on the wire; everything else is just waiting."

Family Members

Nik Wallenda, a direct descendant of Karl Wallenda, continues the family tradition of performing death-defying stunts on highwire without a safety net. On October 15, 2008, during a live broadcast of Today (NBC program), Wallenda walked and then bicycled across a suspended highwire twelve stories from the ground off the roof of the Prudential Center in Downtown Newark, New Jersey for a Guinness Book of Records World Record for longest and highest bicycle on a highwire. ^[3]

In popular culture

• Wallenda's death is mentioned in Stephen King novels The Tommyknockers and Gerald's Game. It is also mentioned in Tom Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears.

See also

• Tightrope walking
• Nik Wallenda

References

1. ^ The Flying Wallendas web site
2. ^ The New York Times movie review
3. ^ http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27178568/

External links

• The Wallenda family's site
• Rick Wallenda site
• Information about Tallulah Gorge State Park
• Condado Plaza Footage
• Karl Wallenda at Find A Grave