FOOLHARDINESS

Evening Star, Issue 20151, 16 April 1929, Page 4

FOOLHARDINESS

SOME AMAZING FEATS A man called Shipwreck Kelly has been touring America performing a, novel feat. He spends eight day* seated in a boatswain’s chair fixed on to|'i of a flagpole. This “human flag” does not get much sleep. Now and again he sins a little soup, coffee, water, or warm milk, and spends most of his time in reading. Bizarre as such a performance certainly is, it has nevertheless no startling features. Now and again, however, the public are thrilled' and popular iuagiiiatiou is fired by amazing feats of foolhardiness—exploits, moreover, which aro performed ordinarily, cither for no profit at all, or for a trifling fee out of all proportion to the fearful risks involved (writes “Hillman,” in tho ‘Newcastle Weekly Chronicle’). For example, two firemen one cold November day actually climbed tho 145 ft high Nelson Column in Trafalgar square, just “ for a lark.” When, they descended they were promptly locked up, a cheering mob following them to the police station. One man walked on stilts from his native village in Holland to the Baris Exhibition, sleeping upright at night against trees or houses; but it was an Englishman who set out for this same exhibition from Oporto on his hands and knees. One humorist walked through Loudon backwards to Wembley; while another eccentric tried to roll himself thither in a barrel.

A Mississippi lumberman named Barton made a journey down the river Thames balanced on a narrow, slippery, nino-foot-long hollow tin. Captain Alills, cousin of Viscount Lascelles, once swung from a rope ladder under an aeroplane and leaped on the hack of a wild horse.

One of the most exciting pranks over played was a billiards match which took place some time hack between two men in a cage of lions. A billiard table was placed in an curly lions’ den. Then the lions were let in and thev moved growling to a corner, Tlie two players—armed with cues weighted so that they might he used as weapons—then entered the -cage, and with trembling hands began to play. For a time the lions looked on curiously at an erratic game which was for the most part misses. But when one of the ivory balls fell from the table and rolled towards tho crouching “spectators” the roar Unit came from the great beasts brought the game to a speedy termination. One day—merely in order to win tho trifling sum of ss—a worker on a Mew York skyscraper clambered along a. girder projecting high over the .street, and, reaching the very end, there stood on liis head.

Hnrry Young, the Chicago “human fly.” did not, know tlm meaning of Tear. For yea. he performed mid-air blunts for the moving i 'cturos. Once ho .scaled the outside of a thirty-cight-story building blindfold.

Home time afterwards, as he was climbing un the face of the Hotel Martinique, in New York, his claw}ike 'rigors failed him for the first time, and. am.” the cries of horror of the massed crowds below, ho fell from the fourteenth story, and was instantly killed.