Duina Zacchini, 82, Human Cannonball
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Duina Zacchini, who died Saturday at 87, found fame as half of a sister act of human cannonballs, flying 150 feet into a net. Usually, as the Zacchinis were a family act, the cannoneer was her own father, Edmondo.
The Zacchini family, proprietors of the Italian Circus Olympia, is generally credited with developing the human cannon. Edmondo Zacchini is said to have broken his leg on being shot for the first time from the spring-loaded contraption, in 1922. While still in traction, he redesigned it to use steam power.
The American circus impresario John Ringling spotted the Circus Olympia’s human cannoneering at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. He brought the act back to America in 1929, and the Zacchinis moved to America permanently in the early 1930s.
Edmondo used his sons as his primary projectiles for many years. When the sons enlisted in the armed forces during World War II, Edmondo trained his daughters to be cannon fodder. Duina Zacchini and her sister Victoria were billed as “The Zacchini Sisters” and often toured with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
They appeared on television shows while dressed in their protective suits and were celebrity spokesmen for Quaker Puffed Wheat — a product that is created in a cannon shot-like process.
It was a double life for Duina, touring for two months a year while raising a family in Nashville, Tenn., where she lived with her husband, a lawyer. “I keep saying each year, this will be my year to retire,” she told the United Press in 1958. “But I don’t know. I like to be with my family and I like to be with show people. We say we have sawdust in our eyes.” A life expert in protecting fragile things, she eventually retired and opened an antique shop.