One Summer: America, 1927

had come close to being swept overboard from the Memphis three days out from Cherbourg. The headline in the New York Times read:
     
    L INDBERGH IN P ERIL
AS W AVE T RAPS H IM
ON C RUISER’S B OW
     
    The world’s most beloved hero, it turned out, had gone for a stroll after dinner in rough seas, and was standing in the bow when a sudden succession of big waves crashed over the deck from the side, isolating him from the rest of the ship. Lindbergh had to hold tight to a lifeline to keep from being knocked off his feet and possibly swept overboard. B. F. Mahoney, the owner of Ryan Airlines, was also present, but safely on the other side of the crashing waves. Lindbergh waited ten minutes or so for the waves to ease, then strode smartly back to safety. ‘It was an exciting experience,’ he related afterwards. It was not, however, a good omen for any nervous crew, of whom there were almost certainly many. This USS Memphis was a recent replacement for an earlier USS Memphis which was sunk by a mysterious rogue wave in the Caribbean in 1916, with the loss of some forty lives. It would not have escaped many of the sailors that ‘Memphis’ was something of a cursed name.
     
    With Lindbergh temporarily unavailable, what America needed was some kind of sublimely pointless distraction, and a man named Shipwreck Kelly stood ready to provide it. At 11 a.m. on 7 June, Kelly clambered to the top of a fifty-foot flagpole on the roof of the St Francis Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, and sat there. That was all he did, for days on end, but people were enchanted and streamed to Newark to watch.
    Kelly had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan’s toughest district, in just about the grimmest circumstances possible. Seven months before he was born, his father, a rigger on construction sites, had plunged to his death when an assistant accidentally pulled the wrong lever on a derrick he was working on. Kelly’s mother, heartbroken and bereft of a breadwinner, then died inchildbirth. Kelly was adopted by the assistant and thus raised by the man who had accidentally but carelessly killed his own father. Kelly ran off to sea at thirteen and spent most of the next fifteen years as a sailor. He got his nickname, according to Time magazine, by surviving the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but that seems to have been just a bit of inventive whimsy by a Time reporter. In fact, it came because he briefly tried to make a career as a boxer under the name Sailor Kelly, but he was beaten so often – he lost eleven bouts in a row – that he became known as the Shipwrecked Sailor. According to Kelly himself, he survived five other shipwrecks, two aeroplane crashes, three car crashes and a train wreck, all without a scratch, during a busy career as a steeplejack, aeroplane stunt performer and ‘human fly’ (which is to say, someone who climbs buildings for publicity purposes) before taking up flagpole-sitting in 1924. By 1927, he had pretty much made the business his own.
    Kelly would reside for days or weeks on a tiny perch – a padded disc about the size of a bar-stool seat – attached to a flagpole on the top of a tall building. The most devoted admirers paid 25 cents to go on to the hotel rooftop, where they could see Kelly at comparatively close range and even engage him in conversation. The rest crowded the streets below, causing traffic jams and even trampling flower beds and breaking down fences through their force of numbers. Food, shaving implements, cigarettes and other vital items were conveyed to Kelly by rope. To sleep without tumbling off, he would lock his ankles around the pole and jam his thumbs into two small holes drilled into the side of the seat. Normally he dozed for no more than about twenty minutes so that he didn’t fall into a deep and forgetful slumber. Periodically, to please the crowds and relieve stiffening muscles, he would stand up on his precarious platform – an action that took considerable agility and not a little courage, especially if the wind was blowing. During the whole of his time aloft, he didn’t leave the perch. No record appears to indicate how he dealt with bodily functions. For two days beforehand and throughout the sitting he took no solid food – just milk, brothand coffee – which may partly answer the obvious question. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. Otherwise he just sat. He billed himself as ‘The Luckiest Fool Alive’.
    Newark proved to be more or less the summit of