[This is the eighth in a series of posts about overcoming the setbacks we all face in sales. For the first in the series, click here.]
It was one of the most spectacular and dangerous high-wire acts circus audiences had ever seen. Yet the Wallenda family performed the seven-person pyramid successfully hundreds of times from 1948 until tragedy struck.
Here’s what a crowd of 7,000 adults and children saw at the Michigan State Fair Coliseum in Detroit on January 30, 1962.
Four men balanced on a wire strung about 40 feet above the ground. A shiny metal pole joined each of two the pairs.
The poles were anchored on their shoulders by padded yokes covered in red velvet. The men wore dark pants, soft-soled shoes, puffy white shirts and red vests. Each carried a long, springy balancing bar whose tips sagged toward the ground like a smooth arc across the top of a very big circle.
They worked without a safety net – nothing beneath them but the concrete floor of the ring.
Two more men, identically dressed, balanced on the bars running between the shoulders of the men on the first level. These two were again connected by a bar running between their shoulders.
One of these two men was Karl Wallenda, age 57, the patriarch of the family and the originator of this feat. The pole joined him to his brother Herman, 60.
The four men on the first level were Karl’s son Mario Wallenda, 22; Gunther Wallenda, 42; Karl’s nephew, Dieter Schepp, 23; and Karl’s son-in-law, Richard Faughnan, 29.
Dieter’s sister Jana, 17, was wearing a costume cut like one-piece bathing suit, white and with sequins. She carefully stepped off a platform at the end of the wire and onto the bar between Karl and Herman.
Jana took a 35-pound balancing bar and a wooden chair from the platform where Richard’s wife, Jenny Wallenda Faughnan, 33, was standing. Jana, holding both the balancing bar and the chair, carefully worked her way toward the center of the bar hung between Karl and Herman.
Jana then placed the chair on the bar, and with great concentration, sat down. The air was tense with the danger of this move.
The crowd applauded wildly when Jana completed it successfully.
Then the clapping stopped quickly as Jana moved to prepare for her next feat. The crowd could see the fragility of the pyramid and seemed to understand the danger of Jana’s next move although the Wallendas had done it successfully so often before.
Jana was to step up from the bar onto the chair. She would then stand tall, balanced upright on the chair. The chair would be balanced on the horizontal rod between the shoulders of Karl and Herman. Karl and Herman would be balanced on poles between the shoulders of Mario, Gunther, Dieter and Richard.
As Jana prepared to stand up, Richard lost his balance. Jenny later said Richard seemed to be trying to change a bad grip on his balancing bar. Dieter called out that he couldn’t hold the formation any longer. He tossed his balancing bar to try to catch it toward its center. Dieter also lost his balance.
The pyramid tumbled. The crowd gasped in horror as Richard, Dieter and Mario fell to the ground. Gunther regained his balance and continued standing on the wire. Then Karl and Herman fell from the second level to the wire, and Jana fell onto Karl.
Balancing on the wire, Karl grabbed Jana and held her until the circus could improvise a net.
The shocked crowd was near panic. Some spectators tried to run down to the ring. Some women cried. Others, including children, seemed paralyzed where they sat.
A clown named Blinko, who wore grotesque makeup, tried to calm the crowd from where he stood in the center ring.
Richard suffered a skull fracture. He and Dieter died later that night. Mario survived but was paralyzed from the waist down. Jana sustained a concussion. Karl had a cracked pelvis and a double hernia.
The situation was especially charged for the family. Dieter and Jana had escaped from East Germany only a few months before the accident. Richard was making his debut with the Wallendas that night.
Despite the deaths of both Karl’s nephew and his son-in-law, and despite serious injuries to Karl’s niece, his son and himself, Karl joined other surviving Wallendas in performing the feat again the very next night. They did so in honor of Richard and Dieter.
Karl, who often said he felt alive only when he was performing, continued working with a smaller troupe. He began doing “sky walks” between tall buildings and across stadiums.
At age 65 he performed a 1,200-foot sky walk across Tallulah Falls Gorge in Georgia. A crowd of 30,000 spectators watched as he did two separate headstands on s wire stretched 700 feet above a waterfall.
Karl Wallenda fell to his death performing a sky walk in Puerto Rico in 1978 during heavy crosswinds.
What does this story have to do with setbacks and success in sales? I’ll explain next time.
– Scott Silverback