Tell us your Wallenda stories.
Things have not always been happy with the Wallendas.
January 30, 1962, Detroit, Michigan. Alan Smithee was an impressionable youth living in nearby Ann Arbor.
On January 30, 1962, while performing at the State Fair Coliseum in Detroit, the front man on the wire faltered and the pyramid collapsed. Three men fell to the ground, the rear anchorman alone remained standing on the wire. Karl and his brother Herman fell to the wire from the second level. The girl at the top level landed on Karl as he miraculously held her until a makeshift net could be held beneath her. Two of the three men who fell to the earth died that night The third, Karl's son Mario, survived, though he is paralyzed from the waist down. The girl suffered a concussion. Karl's injuries included a cracked pelvis and a double hernia. In the midst of such a great tragedy, the Wallendas exhibited "the show must go on" tradition in the highest possible manner by performing the very next evening! "I feel like a dead man on the ground," Karl told his wife. "I can handle the grief better from up there. The wire is my life. We owe it to those who died to keep going." The Seven was only done again on two subsequent occasions: In 1963, to prove that life does continue and that disaster does not have to end in defeat, and again in 1977, recreated primarily by Karl's grandchildren for the movie The Great Wallendas. |
