French Daredevil Walked a Wire and Became an American Superstar

The Great Blondin on the rope high above the gorge below Niagara Falls.  He had to freeze in this posission for several moments to accommodate the long exposure on a glass plate negative..

Back in 2012 the young scion of a legendary circus family, Nik Wallenda, strolled above Niagara Falls on a high wire.  The act was promoted by the local tourist industry which has been hurting.  Evidently pilgrimages to gawk at the Falls were not as popular as they used to be and newlyweds who can afford a honeymoon now seem to prefer localities with sandy beaches and palm trees.  ABC Television broadcast the event, to tepid ratings.

Still, it was quite an accomplishment and Wallenda was the first to cross directly above the great cascades rather than over the gorge below the Falls.  ABC also demanded that the acrobat remain tethered to the wire so that in event of a slip he would not fall into the water.

Nic Walenda on his 2012 nationally broadcast walk directly above the cascades of Niagara Falls.

But on June 30, 1859 French born acrobat Charles Blondin took a stroll across the gorge bellow Niagara Falls on a rope 1100 feet long, 3¼ inches in diameter, 160 feet above the swirling water. 

Over the next few months he crossed 17 more times in front of ever larger, more astounded crowds, each time with a new twist.  He crossed blind folded, hopping in a sack, pushing a wheelbarrow, on stilts, and carrying his manager on his back. He balanced a chair on the rope and then stood on it.  He stopped to take pictures of the crowd with a bulky glass-plate negative camera.  Once he carried a small stove, stopped in the middle of the wire to cook and eat an omelet.

His picture graced the covers of popular magazines and newspapers were filled with his exploits.  He became one of the first popular entertainment celebrities in American history, known and admired even by those who would never see him perform. 

Born Jean-Francois Gravelet in St. Omer, France, on February 28, 1824 his gymnast father encouraged his early interest in circus acrobatics.  He tried to duplicate a high wire act that he saw in a traveling circus at age 5 by stringing a rope between two chairs.  He showed such remarkable agility and great balance that his father enrolled him in the Ecole de Gymase in Lyon. After six months of training was good enough to start performing successfully as The Little Wonder. 

His father died leaving him an orphan and on his own at age 9, but he had no trouble finding work in circuses and in other venues.  By 1851 he was so well known in Europe that the American theatrical impresario William Niblo recruited him to come to New York City to perform with the Ravel Troupe of acrobats at his famous Niblo Gardens. 

The popular act toured the country for several years.  Gravelet adopted the stage name Blondin or the Great Blondin because of his blonde hair.  Blondin and the Ravel Troupe performed with an early incarnation of P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth and later he became part owner of his own circus. 

Blondin married his first wife Charlotte in New York.  The couple had three children, two of them born while on the road.  In 1858 the troupe performed near Niagara and Blondin became obsessed with crossing the gorge on a tightrope.  It took more than a year to secure the necessary permissions and make arrangements. 

A  British newspaper illustration of Blondin duplicating his Niagara stuns plus a bicycle ride over an English river.

The Niagara stunts made him in demand everywhere.  He abandoned his long association with the Ravel Troupe and with the able assistance of manager Harry Colcord parlayed his fame into riches.  He demanded a $500 minimum for a performance and at the height of his career made the astonishing sum of half a million dollars a year. 

In 1861 he built a stately mansion named, aptly, Niagara Villa in Ealing, a village near London.   Intending to retire, he found himself still in demand. 

The Prince of Wales, who had witnessed one of the Niagara crossings, arranged for him to appear at the Crystal Palace where he duplicated many of his Niagara stunts in front of a painted backdrop of the falls.  The renewed celebrity led to extensive tours of England and the continent. 

A favorite of the Prince of Wales, Blondin starred at the famous Crystal Palace exposition in 1967.

 His stunts only gained in audacity, including pushing a lion across the wire in a wheelbarrow.  He frequently performed before as many as 10,000 paying customers.  During another stint at the Crystal Palace Charles Dickens may have explained his popularity, “Half of London is here eager for some dreadful accident.” 

Blondin continued to perform for three more decades adding new twists to his act, including using a bicycle.  Other tightrope walkers complained that we was ruining their careers and risking their lives—audiences would accept nothing else but Blondin’s sensational stunts.  He made occasional trips back to the United States in addition to shows in Britain and Ireland. 

In his long career Blondin had occasional accidents, mostly due to equipment failure, but escaped serious injury.  The worst accident occurred in Dublin in 1861, not long after he resumed performing.  While performing 50 above ground his rope broke.  Blondin was able to grab a hand hold, but the supporting scaffolding collapsed killing two workers.  The acrobat was held harmless in an investigation but a judge said that the manufacture of the 2 inch diameter rope “had a lot to account for.” 

At a Liverpool performance around the same time a guy wire snapped while he was pushing the lion in the wheelbarrow entangling the wheelbarrow.  Blondin extracted both himself and the cat from the mishap. Such displays of aplomb only won him a more devoted audience. 

He made his final performance at Belfast, Ireland in 1896.  He died the following year at his beloved Ealing home of complications of diabetes.  He was mourned the world over, but nowhere more the Ealing, where he had become a beloved resident.  He was buried next to his first wife and the mother of his children, Charlotte, who had died in 1888.  His second wife, Katherine would be buried with them when she died in 1901. 

This whimsical statue in Ladywoo, Birmingham, England commemorates Blondin's crossing of the Edgbaston Resevoir.

A statue to Blondin was erected in Birmingham, the site of one of his most famous and daring shows, the 1873 crossing of Edgbaston Reservoir.  In Ealing his memory is honored by two roads, Blondin and Niagara Avenues, and in 1997 the Blondin Community Orchard was planted to make the centennial of the acrobat’s death.

An Airplane, a Grapefruit, and Casey Stengel—Need I Say More?

Brooklyn Manager Uncle Robbie Robertson in 1916.

Baseball lore is rife with stunts, gags, and pranks.  Old timers and hot stove league denizens could while away the dreary winter hours not just with epic tales of on field prowess, but off-field high jinx as well.  Old time sports writers like Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon mined those yarns for their short stories.

Modern corporate baseball, carefully overseen by the image conscious honchos at Major League Baseball, armies of public relations flacks and player agents, has done its best to drain the color from the sport.  We are left with thin gruel like of a losing managers rant, perpetually repeated old clips of Harry Caray leering at a ball girl, and odd ball goofs by the traditional left handed pitcher.

But back when, way back when, ballplayers and even managers new the value of a good stunt.  Even better if compounded by a practical joke.

By consensus the greatest stunt of all was pulled on March 13, 1917.  It involved two of the most colorful figures in the game.  Wilbert (Uncle Robbie) Robinson was the jovial manager of the fledgling Brooklyn franchise in the National League.  One evening during spring training in Daytona Beach, Florida Robinson was sharing a few beers with his players in their hotel bar.  The story of Washington Senators catcher Gabby Street came up.   Street had gained a bit of immortality in 1908 when, on the 13th try he had caught a baseball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument, a fall of 550 feet.

The 53 year old Robinson, a former catcher in the famous rough and tumble old Baltimore Orioles of the old American Association, boasted to his players that he could beat that.  

Casey Stengel's 1912 rookie photo.

The players, led and egged on by young outfielder Casey Stengel, urged the rotund manager to back up his claim.  Together they cooked up a scheme to have Robinson catch a baseball dropped from an airplane.  Pioneer aviatrix Ruth Law was enlisted to fly the plane.  As Stengel, a famous talker and yarn spinner in his later days as Yankees and Mets manager, told the story years later, he was in the second seat with Law and it was his idea to drop a grapefruit rather than a baseball.  But, as everyone knows, Casey would never let mere facts get in the way of a good yarn.

Law, more reliably, would later recall that she flew solo.  She had forgotten, however, to bring a baseball from her hotel and there was no time to get one.  Instead she borrowed a grapefruit from the lunch of an aerodrome mechanic.

At the appointed hour Law dropped the fruit flying at least 50 miles per hour at an altitude above the 555 feet.  Robinson danced around on the field below trying to adjust for the movement of the plummeting orb.  Amazingly he got a glove on it.

Ruth Law, right in a Curtis pusher biplane.

The impact knocked Robinson to the ground and the fruit exploded drenching him in warm, sticky juice.  Stunned and convinced he was mortally wounded Robinson called out to his laughing team, “Help me, lads, I'm covered with my own blood.”

It was no wonder that those early Brooklyn teams were so fond of their manager that the news papers often called them the Robins.

Robinson led the team through both glory and lean times until 1932 after which his protégé Stengel took over the team.  He led the team to National League Pennants in 1916 and 1920.  He oversaw a colorful era where the team became known as the Daffy Dodgers after the arrival of star Daffy Vance.  Their antics endeared them to loyal Brooklyn fans even in years when play on the field was lack luster.  Robinson, as much as any man, made Ebbets Field a baseball shrine.

He had come up through the Orioles with his best friend John McGraw and had gone with McGraw to become a pitching coach with the Giants s.  Despite great success winning consecutive Pennants in 1911, 1912, and 1913, a drunken McGraw had fired Robinson after a loss at home in the ‘13 World Series.  Their once close relationship shattered and the two men became bitter National League rivals.

The two met at the 1930 National League Annual Meeting and finally mutually reconciled.  They remained close until McGraw died of a heart attack in February 1934.

After Robinson retired from the Dodgers, he took over managerial duties of the minor league Atlanta Crackers.  He was depressed to learn of McGraw’s death, but was sure he would long outlast him

That was not to be.  A few months later Robinson slipped in a bathtub and broke his arm.  He jokingly told the ambulance drivers, “Don't worry about it fellows. I'm an old Oriole. I'm too tough to die.”  But he was wrong.  The fall had also caused a cerebral hemorrhage.  He died on August 8, 1934.

In 1945 Robinson was elected by the Veteran’s Committee to the Baseball Hall of Fame.