Shipwreck Kelly, on Top of His Game
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
To irascible journalist Westbrook Pegler, the Roaring Twenties, the decade of raccoon coats, Prohibition, and goldfish swallowers, was the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Few men better incarnated the times than flagpole sitter Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly. Kelly sought celebrity as others chased sex, alcohol, or narcotics. He had pursued glory as merchant seaman, oil rigger, structural iron worker, human fly, stunt man, high diver, boxer, pilot, aerialist, soldier of fortune, sign painter, stunt man, and window washer (he challenged colleagues to work without a safety belt, as he did).
Whether in a bar, a park, or on the street, Kelly told anyone who would listen that he won his nickname for surviving 32 shipwrecks as a sailor. A lifelong inability to keep his stories straight sometimes inflated that figure to 62. Others believed it stemmed from his boxing days: Billed as Sailor Kelly, he hit the canvas so often that crowds supposedly chanted, “The Sailor’s been shipwrecked again!”
The flagpole sitting started in 1924. Sometimes, he claimed that, while staying in a hotel on the eve of the 1921 heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Charpentier, he had defended Dempsey in an argument with some drunks. They defenestrated Kelly, and grabbing a convenient flagpole on the way down had given him the idea. At other times, he claimed he had once provoked Dempsey into chasing him up a tree. Parenthetically, Dempsey denied having ever chased Shipwreck or anyone else up a tree, though the two may have met at some time, somewhere.
In any event, Kelly could climb to high places and stay there without discomfort. After performing a steeplejack stunt in a 1924 movie, Kelly had agreed to spend 10 hours on a flagpole to promote another picture. He sat over a Los Angeles movie house for 13 days and 13 hours, coming down a national phenomenon to wildly cheering crowds. Tens of thousands had gathered to watch his feat of endurance; the media, in following the crowd, had publicized the movie. Advertisers realized Kelly, just sitting on a flagpole, could advertise nearly anything. They began paying him to advertise products, buildings, and fairs. He traveled from one event to another, such as his 22-day, six-hour stay atop a flagpole at Madison Square Garden.
Shipwreck used an 8-inch disk that fitted on the poles, providing him with a platform, and a small chair. He could last almost indefinitely by catnapping for five minutes or so every hour by locking his thumbs into holes in the disk.
If he swayed while dozing, the twinge of pain in his thumbs prompted him to right himself without waking. He hauled up food and drink in a basket and concealed the performance of essential bodily functions with a blanket, disposing of waste through a hose run up along the pole.
When elevator operator Frances Vivian Steele slapped a passenger’s face for ridiculing Shipwreck’s New Year’s act atop the Dallas hotel in which she worked, Kelly asked to meet her. He was still up on the pole, so she was raised to him by rope and tackle. Some time later, they married and had a son, naturally nicknamed Little Shipwreck. The marriage failed, however, as Kelly became obsessed with flagpole sitting to the neglect of nearly everything else.
By 1928, Shipwreck was making $100 daily, which was serious money then. He was aloft for 145 days in 1929, including one 23-day stint. In the summer of 1930, Shipwreck set a world’s record for flagpole sitting at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier: 1,177 hours, or more than 49 days, before an audience of 20,000. Later that year, Kelly spent 13 days, 13 hours, and 13 minutes atop Manhattan’s Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street, all in zero-degree weather amidst snow, sleet, and freezing rain.
But as public attention shifted to Great Depression realities, Shipwreck found diminishing demand for his act. Shipwreck obsessively persisted, sure he would catch on again, surviving with stints above saloons to lure thirsty clients. An NYPD threat to cut the pole cut short a 1935 Bronx performance. On October 13, 1939, he promoted National Doughnut Week by eating 13 doughnuts while standing on his head on a plank extending from the Chanin Building’s 56th floor. But by 1942 he was reduced to painting flagpoles at New Jersey’s Palisades Amusement Park. One day he slipped, fell 5 feet, and injured himself. His stunting days were over.
His money long gone, Kelly went on welfare, living in a seedy 51st Street apartment between Eighth and Ninth Avenues with nothing to show for his 20,000 hours as the world’s most famous flagpole sitter but a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. He always carried it with him to show anyone who could be pestered into viewing it. It was under his arm when he dropped dead in the street on October 11, 1952.