When I was growing up and heard the name, WALLENDA, it could only mean two things—either one or more of the family had successfully performed a walk across the “high wire” really up high and dangerous and had thrilled the audience, or one or more of the family had fallen, often with disastrous results! Being “afraid of heights” for my entire life, I always thought the “high-wire act” was foolish, but I nearly always shut one eye and watched with the open one to see if they “made it.” The closest I ever came to walking the wire was once when I walked a tightly-stretched rope about ten or fifteen feet above the ground—and I had on a HARNESS and was still scared and did slip off the rope!
More than one month ago, CARLA, the final surviving child of the “highwire” troupe’s founder (Karl Wallenda, 1905, in Germany) died of natural causes (COPD and diabetes) at age 85 in Florida. She had a sister and brother, Jenny and Mario, and the three of them and parents, Mati and Karl, travelled the country and performed with the Ringling Brothers Circus. She continued to actively work with the “act” as she reached 70 years of age and beyond and finally retired at age 81—after doing a head-stand on top of a prop, called a “sway pole.” She did so as a guest of the Steve Harvey show.
I found it interesting to note that she felt about the “job” of a “high-wire” act the same way I feel about mowing and cutting and digging and chopping in the outdoors. Carla said, late in life, that “When I am out (up) there, all of my pain and ‘all that’ goes away, and I am in a ‘world of my own.’”
Another quote (2014) I find interesting and also echoes how I felt about my job is the following: “Accidents can happen any place. I have to make a living, and this is the only way I know or want to. I have done waitress work and hated every minute of it. Why should I go and do a job that I hate?”
Her Dad, Karl, once told her, “Never mind the money; it’s the APPLAUSE that is important!” (Well-said, by a great performer!)
Her biography says she was a part of the family’s show already in 1947 (born 1936), but not “walking the wire.” Her father told her to do a “headstand” on top of the family’s seven-person-pyramid if she wanted to be a part of the wire act, and she did so in 1951. Carla had been first “shown to the public” as her mother sat upon her father’s shoulders and held her as Karl rode a bicycle across a high wire in an area of Sarasota. Carla formed her “own” act in 1961, and within a year, lost two members of the family’s “pyramid,” killed in an accident, while her brother was paralyzed in a Detroit performance.
The Family has, for as long as I have known about them, refused to ever use a “safety net” during public performances!
In 1965, she re-joined the “family troupe” to replace an aunt who had died while performing “solo.”
In 1972, Carla’s husband, Richard Guzman, died in West Virginia after falling 60 feet, and her Dad died after falling from a “wire” in Puerto Rico. It had been stretched across a street! Despite the numerous deaths of “family,” she would not be kept from doing what she loved. She had first been filmed, learning to walk the wire when she was three years old, but she was only 6 weeks of age when her Mother held her as described earlier.
At her death, she had sixteen grandchildren, so who knows how long we might hear of one or more WALLENDAS! Will they be called The Great Wallendas (earlier name) or The Flying Wallendas (as known now)? As I understand things, they are into the 7th Generation of Flying, going back for generations in Europe!
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