the wallenda family - Gatehouse Media

A HERALD-TRIBUNE SPECIAL SECTION STAFF ILLUSTRATION / JENNIFER BORRESEN

Chasing the Ghost Even after his fall in Puerto Rico, the Wallenda family’s patriarch casts his shadow across generations of acrobats and daredevils

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story By Billy Cox / photos by thomas bender

n the eve of his televised skywalk across Georgia’s Tallulah Gorge in 1970, Karl Wallenda told Sports Illustrated why he never looked down. It was the high-wire nightmare at Detroit’s State Fair Coliseum on Jan. 30, 1962: Attired in the cummerbunds and billowing sleeves of the circus’ most famous family, four cast members took their spots atop a 5/8inch diameter steel cable, strung 32 feet above the arena floor. As always, there was no net below. The four were yoked into pairs by padded shoulder bars, upon which two more standing teammates, also stabilized by balancing poles, harnessed themselves into a second-level shoulder bar. In a chair above them, secured by her own balancing pole, sat Wallenda’s niece, Jana Schepp. This was the seven-person chair pyramid, Karl’s signature creation and a marvel of kinetic human architecture. Fragility belied by strength and synchronization, the bottom four were set to hoist the assembly to the opposite platform. And midway through, Schepp would stand on her chair, the way she’d done countless times before. Only, this time, in a flash, the formation collapsed.

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Additional glimpses of the Wallenda family are available online. Go to heraldtribune.com/chasingtheghost for first-person video testimonials, a photo gallery, and other digital exclusives on Sarasota’s showbiz dynasty.

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The Great Wallendas walk the high wire during their three-tier, seven-person pyramid performance at the State Fair Coliseum in Detroit on Jan. 30, 1962. From left to right, bottom row, are, Dieter Schepp, 23; Mario Wallenda, 21; Richard Faughnan, 29; Gunther Wallenda, 42. Second row, left to right, Karl Wallenda, 57; Herman Wallenda, 60. Sitting on chair is Jana Schepp, 17. Karl’s son-in-law Faughnan and nephew Schepp were killed when the pyramid formation collapsed and the performers fell to the ground. Dieter’s sister Jana and Karl’s son Mario were injured. AP Photo

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olted by a misstep on the bottom tier below, hit by Jana falling from above, Wallenda grabbed the wire as she clung to his back. He and nephew Gunther held on to Jana long enough for the floor crew to spread safety padding below. But it was hardly enough. “There is a picture in my mind of the ring down there...and the boys,” Wallenda said. “They are broken and still, and around them there are the balance poles and bars and the chair...just pieces. That picture is in my mind and I never lose it. If I look down once I know I will see it again...those boys. If I look I go mad. I don’t look.” Dead in the wreckage below was nephew Dieter Schepp and son-in-law Dick Faughnan. Adopted son Mario would ride a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Instantly-widowed daughter Jenny called her dad a murderer for allowing Dieter, the ostensible weak link, to walk the line that day. The tragedy could have ripped lesser clans apart. But by sheer force of personality and example — he returned to the wire the very next day, fighting through the pain of a broken pelvis — Karl Wallenda would reassemble the fragments once more into a tight unit, family and otherwise. And in so doing, he set a standard bar so high, his descendents have never caught up. Witness the success of Nik Wallenda, who earned a superstar reputation by traversing Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and the Chicago skyline, venues his great grandfather never attempted. “Nobody gets rich in the circus — not even in America,” Karl once remarked. Yet, at age 36, Nik’s globally televised exploits have pulled in the kinds of dollars his inspiration could only dream of. Even so, Nik confesses a mystical awe of the man he knows only through newsreel footage, pictures and family stories. He celebrates Karl at virtually every stop and says, “He whispers in my ears.” But it doesn’t stop there. The patriarch whose most

enduring presence in the YouTube afterlife is his own shattering demise reaches out across time and space, rematerializing in dreams, urging the impossible: “We will walk to the moon. Are you ready?” Today, however, the dynasty Karl Wallenda worked so hard to create in America is splintered into internecine rivalries that no bandages are likely to heal. What remains is a ghost story, and perhaps a showdown with destiny in a Northeast Georgia wilderness. But as Karl Wallenda admitted in a 1973 magazine article, five years before his mortal plunge in Puerto Rico, “I tell you the truth, the only time I was ever really frightened was at Tallulah Gorge in Georgia.” § erpetuating the legacy of Karl Wallenda — testing the limits of skill, strength, imagination, nerve and persistence — is an enterprise whose DNA haunts his descendants. But when the leader of the pack collided with the violence of physics 37 years ago, he took something with him that has yet to be recovered. Grandson Rick Wallenda traces the schism with a family-tree spreadsheet that diverges along maternal lines. Grandson Tino Wallenda volunteers a melancholy smile and says the aftermath of Karl’s death is as familiar as the Old Testament: “This goes back to Abraham’s two wives in the Bible, and their children. So now we have conflict

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between the Muslims and the Jews.” The modern version of that ancient tale playing out in Sarasota involves one of the most unique and competitive dynasties in showbiz history. It finds the patriarch’s heirs lionizing “the old man” in ways Karl Wallenda likely never envisioned. They have revisited his venues, scaled the same heights, recreated the dizzying journeys, step for step. Last year, the greatgrandson he never met announced the most audacious tribute yet, one no family member has attempted to recreate. In the summer of 2015, Nik Wallenda would cross Tallulah Gorge on the 45th anniversary of Karl’s most spectacular wirewalk. The appointment seemed pre-ordained. At Sarasota’s Ringling Circus Museum, the casual attire Nik Wallenda wore in 2008 when he set the world record for highest and longest distance traveled on a bicycle is on display. Several feet away, the spangled bolero jacket Karl wore during the 1,000-foot long, 750-foot high crossing in rural Georgia is a museum fixture. But Nik would up the ante. By employing the same technology the Sochi Winter Olympics producers applied to downhill skiing, he would visually resurrect his ancestor’s performance by matching him, move for move, against an overlay of Karl’s phantom images. “There were six camera angles on my great-grandfather at Tallulah Gorge, and it’s all on video,” Nik said last year. “Now I can walk up there with my hero.” The twist: Nik’s hero completed not one but two headstands midway through his 19-minute skywalk. Nik has yet to perfect the headstand and does not incorporate them into his shows. By March, Nik was calling it off, saying the graphics technology “isn’t there yet — it’s under development, and we’re waiting for that.” He called his designs on Tallulah Gorge a question of if, not when. Carla Wallenda, Karl’s daughter and Nik’s aunt, contends there was another

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reason for the delay. “Nik can’t do headstands,” she says. “It’s that simple.” Her son, Nik’s cousin Rick, is lobbying Georgia officials for permission to do the walk himself. “My grandfather did two headstands,” he says. “I told them I’ll do three.” § ere’s how it started. You may need a flow chart: Karl Wallenda and first wife Martha got divorced in 1934. It was jagged and messy, the way divorces often are. But fast-forward a few years, and: Karl and Martha have both remarried and started new lives. Except they’re backyard neighbors. And the families they started together — as well as the new ones they’ve begun separately — co-mingle easily. Furthermore: Martha doesn’t like to be alone. So when her new husband goes on the road with the circus, Martha regularly spends the night next door with Karl and his second wife. Helen. And this is how Happily Ever After played out at the Arlington Street residence in mid-century Sarasota. Sort of. “It was a Peyton Place,” recalled Karl’s son Mario. “You wouldn’t believe some of the shenanigans that went on in the family.” Charismatic, bon vivant, a magnetic presence both on and off the stage, the fearless, strapping, martini-sipping immigrant from Magdeburg, Germany — along with his four-person pyramid — was automatic box office in post-World War I Europe. When circus mogul John Ringling brought Karl, brother Herman, partner Joe Geiger and Helen Kreis to Sarasota in 1928 as his headliner act, the sensation was certified mainstream by that staple of American culture — the Wheaties cereal box cover. “The Wallendas always include Wheaties among their carefully selected foods,” crowed General Mills. “A bowlful of Wheaties with plenty of milk or cream and sugar with some kind of fruit.” Once in the States, Karl’s 1927 marriage to Martha Schepp, a dancer, would

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dissolve as his fling with Helen became a wedding in 1935. Karl and Martha produced daughter Jenny. Karl and Helen had a daughter named Carla, and they adopted a son, Mario. Martha, following the divorce, married famed Ringling veterinarian J.Y. “Doc” Henderson. With circus animals prowling the Hendersons’ home like housecats, life on Arlington Street would never be dull. And from there, the family roster grew more complex with an expanding series of begats: Jenny begat two children with Alberto Zoppe — Tino and Delilah. (Nik, and his sister Lijana, come from Delilah and husband Terry Troffer.) Jenny’s second husband, Faughnan, would die in Detroit, but she would marry aerialist Andy Anderson, the only member of the Motor City disaster to escape unharmed. Jenny and Andy had a daughter, Tammy, whose lion-taming skills would come of age with a “Jungle Princess” act. Carla married circus veteran Iginio Bogino. They had two sons, Mario and Rick. Carla would also have two daughters, Rietta and Valerie, one from each of two subsequent marriages. Karl’s only male heir, Mario Wallenda, was paralyzed in the Detroit spill at age 22. Mario and his wife Linda bore no children. Which means extending the Wallenda name legally involves completing a pile of paperwork. And for all the disparate fortunes and trajectories in the wake of Karl’s fatal accident, those who knew him agree on this — there was more to his mystique than balancing poles and shoulder bars. Granddaughter Rietta, 54, watched Karl die with her own eyes. She tries to keep that image roped off, and focuses on a bigger picture: “Not only is he a patriarch and icon, he was a loving, caring, genuine person. He always told us you attract more bees with honey. He had friends all over the

Nik Wallenda will share his story on an upcoming episode of WEDU Arts Plus premiering Thursday, July 23 at 8:00 p.m. The episode focuses on his desire to continue his family's legacy through new and daring feats, and his inspirational message to "never give up."

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Karl Wallenda celebrates after completing the tightrope walk across the Tallulah Gorge in Georgia on July 18, 1970. AP Photo/Bob Schutz

Karl’s survivors also agree on something else — walking nickel-thick steel wire can be easier to master than diplomacy. Son Mario: “Once dad got killed, all these feuds started. He made everybody go together, he was the glue that held us together.” § arl Wallenda’s early years sound like an Old World Horatio Alger story. A boy tracing a lineage of jugglers, funambulists, clowns, acrobats and lion-tamers back to 18thcentury Bohemia is raised — at least briefly — by an abusive father. Before abandoning the kid, his siblings and their mother, Englebert Wallenda left young son Karl with a permanent reminder. “People would sometimes ask him a question and he may have answered something completely different,” says grandson Tino. “He answered what he thought he heard because he was practically deaf in one ear. When he was a little boy his father hit him in the head and destroyed his hearing in one ear.” Necessity forced Karl to grow up fast. “At one point, when he was 7 or 8,” Tino continues, “his sister got sick. He carried her to the

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hospital and she died in his arms.” By age 11, with Germany at war, Karl was helping put food money in his family’s pockets by doing handstands for tips on stacked chairs in beer halls. He also worked a coal mine, and pulled time with a traveling circus. Karl’s career as an aerialist took off when he answered a trade-magazine ad for “an experienced hand balancer with courage.” Initially renowned for his upperbody strength, by 1922, the teenaged Wallenda was sure-footed enough to command his own troupe of aerialists, where the human pyramids started. Six years later, under contract to Ringling after a tour of Cuba, Wallenda’s team opened its campaign in America by playing to a standing ovation at Madison Square Garden. “It is wine,” marveled the young Wallenda. “It intoxicates.” Settling into Ringling’s circus winter retreat in Sarasota, Karl began buying parcels of real estate across town. He also expanded his repertoire on the wire with the complex seven-person chair pyramid. Karl broke away from Ringling and formed his own circus, only to discover his limits.

“Great performer, lousy businessman,” lamented Mario. “The circus went down the toilet in 1947. He owed all these performers money so he paid them in land.” Karl refused to declare bankruptcy. It took some 20 years to settle his debts. Grandson Tino, 64, remembers the day Karl told him he had balanced the ledger with everyone he owed: “That gave me a sense of the integrity of my grandfather. There was something about him people just loved. And he didn’t have to say much.” The family sold off the Arlington place years ago. The remainder of Karl’s original 22-acre investment off Lockwood Ridge is still in Wallenda hands. Reaching what was once called the “Wallenda Grotefent Training Winter Quarters” (named for Karl’s half brother Arthur) requires passing the residence of both Tino’s family and Nik’s parents — they’re next-door neighbors — and swinging south on Henrietta Place. This is where, for more than 50 years, Karl’s son Mario watched the world go by from his wheelchair on his carport. Fresh rains have left puddles in the crunchy

unpaved lane that leads past Rick Wallenda’s trailer and buttonhooks past their mother Carla’s place. It ends in a clearing where aerial and swaypole platforms await the next training session. This is the neighborhood where youngsters Tino, Delilah and Rick enjoyed happier days together. This is where they started climbing and falling down and bouncing back before fear could lock in. This is where imaginary games — cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians — couldn’t compete with their parents’ real-life exploits under the big top. “Most kids don’t know what their parents do — they can’t go into the operating room if their father’s a surgeon and watch him operate,” Tino recalls. “But we were there with our parents, we saw them working, we heard the applause and we wanted to get in the middle of all this, because there’s such excitement to it. The applause tells you there’s a connection between you and the audience. A friendship develops. There’s nothing like it.” And nobody drew the applause like their grandfather. §

“He (Terry) tried to pull a power play with my grandfather and take over the act in 1978. My grandfather fired him. His plan backfired. Now he sheds tears on TV crying that if he had been in Puerto Rico the accident would not have happened.” Rick Wallenda, pictured

Tightrope legend Nik Wallenda answers questions during a news conference after walking over Hellhole Bend’s Little Colorado River Navajo Tribal Park, June 23, 2013.

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The Wallenda family in Mexico City. From left, Tino Wallenda, Richard “Chico” Guzman, Carla Wallenda, Rick Wallenda and Karl Wallenda. 1969 Provided by Rick Wallenda

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y the 1970s, at an age where athletes have long since hung up their spikes and gloves, Karl Wallenda’s act was finding bigger audiences. During a 1976 bicentennial moment at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, eschewing his traditional showman’s costume for a baseball cap, a tie, white shirt and trousers, The Great Wallenda attached contemporary and colonial American flags to his balancing pole. And in an iconic snapshot from the nation’s year-long birthday party, Sarasota’s emissary to the world wirewalked above a Phillies doubleheader. He teamed up for thrill shows with the most electrifying motorcycle daredevil of his day — the star-spangled, Elvis jump-suited, bushopping, bone-splintering Evel Knievel. A 1973 flyer for a twin-bill at JFK Stadium implored fans to “See Them Before They Die!!” In February 1978, a month before his death, Karl’s heroics — often celebrated with a victory martini — were dramatized in a made-for-TV film “The Great Wallendas,” with Lloyd Bridges and Britt Ekland. But fissures were appearing before Karl stepped onto his final stage, at age 73, in Puerto Rico. “He wanted to continue performing forever,” says Tino, who measures his words with the caution of an election-year incumbent. “He had several family members who said — uh, let me say this politically correctly. They essentially gave him a choice, that they would no longer perform with him if he continued to work because they felt he was too old.” Was Karl Wallenda too old? “Not in my eyes, not in my mind,” Tino says. “He was more skilled at the end of his career than almost anybody that performed with him currently in the troupe.” Like cousin Tino, Rick Wallenda, 60, once did the rigging for and performed with his grandfather. Rick is more blunt than Tino — “I’m not a very good diplomat” — and names Nik’s dad, Terry Troffer: “He tried to pull a power play with my grandfather and take over the act in 1978. My grandfather fired him. His plan backfired. Now he sheds tears on TV crying that if he had been in Puerto Rico the accident would not have happened.” Troffer, a Sarasota native who joined Team Wallenda in 1972 and married Karl’s granddaughter Delilah in 1974, says there was no power play involved. In November 1977, four months before Puerto Rico, Troffer says, a backyard rehearsal shook him to his core. They were practicing a three-man bicycle pyramid — two bicycles on the wire,

both riders connected by a shoulder bar — some 18-20 feet off the ground. Karl, balancing pole at the ready, mounted the shoulder bar and arranged the chair in preparation for the stand. Troffer, the front rider, didn’t see what happened behind him. “People gasped, the wire shook, and my balancing pole went from horizontal to completely vertical,” recalls Nik’s father. “When Karl tried to sit down, the chair was so crooked he fell over backwards.” Troffer says his grandfather-in-law was briefly hospitalized for a fractured neck vertebra. But a more important link had been severed. “It was an obvious mistake and it was a dealbreaker for me,” says Troffer. “I didn’t have the courage to work with him, the trust was gone. I said ‘Karl, I can’t hold the pyramid for you anymore.’ Karl was the greatest, he was a phenomenon. Muhammed Ali was the greatest. But everyone reaches a certain point, and to me it was clear that Karl was at the end of his game.” Troffer says Karl took his resignation in stride, and calls their professional dissolution amicable. Upon announcing that he and Delilah wanted to start a separate tour, Troffer says, “Karl said that’s great — anything to keep the Wallenda name out there.” Troffer says he is unfazed by the resentments of his in-laws. “I try for the most part to ignore them all,” he says. “I have no interest or desire to know what they’re doing.” Ultimately, Troffer says, Karl called his own shots. And in the end, albeit unintentionally, The Great Wallenda upstaged his own greatest fear and a worst-case scenario. Troffer remembers Karl’s words after visiting a long-time manager adrift in a fog of dementia. “Karl told me, ‘I will not die in bed.’” § f all the Wallenda survivors, maybe Rick comes closest to connecting with the free-fall horror of Karl’s last act. One would suspect Rick’s uncle Mario, crippled during the pyramid accident 53 years ago in Detroit, might have had the inside track in that department. But the impact knocked Mario’s recollections sideways and his memory of Detroit remained eternally blank. Rick has survived two major mishaps he’ll never forget, in 1987 and 1996. The first venue was a Shriner circus at the old Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Rick lost traction on the wire while attempting to leapfrog over first wife Debbie and land on his feet during a

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live show. He dislocated his shoulder when he snatched the cable and slammed into the concrete 30 feet below. He partially broke his fall by grabbing lion-cage bars on the way down. “I landed head first and shattered my left wrist. I broke my eye socket in two places, I fractured my skull in back, and I broke my right arm and hand,” he says. “I broke two or three ribs on my right side, and my right hip.” Rick spent three weeks at Baptist Medical Center. Five months later, he was on the wire again. The spill at Arnold’s Amusement Park in Iowa occurred during setups nearly a decade later. While attempting to change clamps on a high-wire pole, the entire pole toppled and took Rick — feet first, this time — with it. In addition to suffering a spinal compression fracture, “my calcaneus,” he says, tapping both heels, “shattered like you’d dropped a piece of glass. They said I’d never walk again.” Born in Chicago between family road shows, abandoned before age 3 by his father, raised by grandparents Karl and Helen, Rick’s life path has been mercurial. He dropped out of ninth grade — “I didn’t have much desire for anything other than the circus” — dabbled in weed and LSD as a teenager, got suspended from Karl’s operations, traded hallucinogenics for Christianity, and by age 19 “I was literally my grandfather’s right-hand man.” But by the end of the 1990s, he had walked away from a circus career he estimates was pulling in $1 million annually at its peak. Divorce, the Iowa accident, the loss of 36-year-old brother (not uncle) Mario in 1993 to AIDS, a drinking habit that crested at a case of beer a day — the weight was too much. Rick sold off most of his circus gear. He gave the performance name bequeathed to him by grandmother Helen — “The Great Wallendas” — to Tino. Rick’s mother Carla passed “The Flying Wallendas” onto Tino. Having earned a GED, Rick went on to college and acquired writing degrees. But the tug of history was as irresistable as gravity. In February, 2001, five years after Iowa, he joined Tino in staging an outdoor coup in Sarasota that would numerically surpass their grandfather’s schematics — an eight-person, three-level pyramid. Once in place, they briefly squeezed two additional walkers onto the wire to drive the total to 10. Later that year, the Guinness Book of World Records, which recorded that event, would sponsor Nik Wallenda’s eight-person, four-level pyramid assembly in Japan. Guinness recognized both

Karl Wallenda and his band of acrobats came to Sarasota in 1928 after signing on with John Ringling’s circus. Clockwise from left: Karl, Joe Geiger, top, Herman Wallenda, right, and future wife No. 2, Helen Kreis. Photo by Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin.

feats. Rick and Tino would perform the seven once more in 2001, in Indianapolis. But it would be the last time they teamed up together. Recommitted to the high wire, Rick attempted to reacquire the performance names he gave to Tino. Tino refused. “I don’t want to bring up a lot of negative stuff here,” Tino says. “But I continue to hold it. To a certain extent I want to hold it because I want to ensure that all the Wallendas are not going to have any repercussions from anybody else by going under the Wallenda banner. And if I own that title then I can also mantain that standard. It’ll go to my kids.” In July 2007, Rick was arrested by sheriff’s deputies on allegations of molesting his daughter. Rick says he got framed in a childcustody squabble, and in December 2007, following an investigation by the Florida Department of Children and Families, the state attorney’s office declined to prosecute. Rick’s arrest made news in the the Herald-Tribune, but the paper failed to run a followup about the dropped charges. Rick claims competitors have attempted to sabotage his career by forwarding the original story — which referenced his given name, Enrico, not his stage name Rick — to other parks and circuses. He declines to name the suspect(s) on the record. “It destroys a person’s life,” he says, “and the travesty of the whole thing is, there’s no consequence to the accuser.” Nevertheless, Rick continues to tour with his own performance troupe today. Its motto: “Exceeding The Limits of Tradition.” “Faith,” Rick says of his comeback, “provides a reference point for me. I walk according to God, and the Bible provides moral guidance.” As for alcohol: “I don’t even take Nyquil now.” In 2008, some 34 years after his grandfather completed a skywalk at Kings Island amusement park in Ohio, Rick returned to the scene and staged his own version. At 2,000 feet long, his performance under soggy skies broke Karl’s distance record. In 2013, Rick walked the wire during Evel Knievel Days, an annual daredevil extravaganza in Butte, Montana. He continues to talk with Robbie Knievel — son of the late great bus-jumper — about teaming up like their forebears during the heydays of disco. § hen Karl fell for the final time on March 22, 1978, Rick was at a missionary training school in

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Germany. Tino was working one of Karl’s road shows in Sioux Falls, S.D. Delilah and Terry were in Sarasota. She was recovering from a miscarriage. Karl’s last stand — a 200-foot walk between the towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel — was not an epic drama but an unscheduled afterthought, a publicity stunt to boost circus-ticket sales in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A couple of hundred people gathered in the street to watch. But the video has been seen by millions: 11:15 a.m. local time. Karl’s dark trousers and white shirt sleeves flutter in the brisk spring winds. Rigged largely by local workers, the entire webbing begins to wobble. Instead of being attached directly to the cable, the stabilizing guy wires are suspended from shackled extensions hanging inches below the cable, a mistake that creates more slack. Karl tempers his stride, but the sway and gusts in excess of 30 mph are twisting his balancing pole into a dangerous see-saw. He begins to crouch, but before he can settle into a safe perch, the 35-pound pole tilts against him. He topples to his left and loses his grasp of the wire. Plunging four seconds and 120 feet into instant obliteration, the Great Wallenda continues to resist the inevitable — he reaches for his pole in mid-air and hangs on with both hands. He bangs onto a parked taxi at maybe 100 mph before crashing into the sidewalk. Monitoring the guy-wire connections on the ground, granddaughter Rietta is just 50 feet from impact. She is 17. Rietta dashes upstairs to the hotel suite and breaks the news to her grandmother who, out of fear, never watches Karl’s acts. Rietta then phones Carla to alert the family. Rietta does not accompany her grandfather’s body back to Sarasota, nor does she attend the funeral. Within hours of his death, Rietta and her colleagues are back under the big top in San Juan, doing pyramids and aerials. She completes Karl’s scheduled booking, which runs for about a week. “I was emotionally shaken up,” Rietta says. “But nerve-wise, I was fine. My grandfather always taught us the show must go on, and I knew I needed to honor him that way.” § hocked. Shocked,” grandson Tino recalls of the moment he heard the news. “Completely shocked. “He was the master we all looked up to, who was invincible. And if this could happen to him, you begin to focus on yourself and think, it can happen to me.”

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Linda Wallenda, top left, looks on as her husband, Mario, seated in wheel chair, talks with Flying Wallenda members following a successful completion of the seven-person pyramid at Detroit’s state fairgrounds in 1998. In vests, from left: Terry Troffer, 43, Nik Wallenda, 19, and Tony Hernandez, 22. In 1962 two members of the original act were killed and three injured, including Mario, who was paralyzed in the fall. AP Photo/Richard Sheinwald

Rick Wallenda, continuing his family tradition, barks commands in German during his rehearsals. He wants to wirewalk Tallulah Gorge.

Karl’s widow Helen greeted by relatives and friends in Sarasota following The Great Wallenda’s fatal plunge in Puerto Rico, in March 1978. Photo by Ken Torrington

Tino Wallenda is still performing with his family.

Nik Wallenda, left, with cousin Blake and sister Lijana, perform during Circus Sarasota’s opening night in 2013.

Thirty-seven years later, Tino and wife Olinka are keeping a sharp eye on two busy grandchildren in their back yard, which is crowded with circus props. Like most healthy youngsters, their legs are spinning wheels — only, these kids are big on climbing, as high as they can get away with it, which isn’t very far. Their parents, Robinson and Alida Cortes, are fourth- and seventh-generation circus stars respectively. Alida is the one with Wallenda blood. By time these youngsters come of age, living memory of Karl will be even more remote. With a little prompting, for a moment, in his mind’s eye, Tino is back in South Dakota, 1978, contemplating his next move atop the high-wire platform for the first time since the disaster in Puerto Rico. His cousin Mario — Rick’s brother — is there too, preparing to join him on the human pyramid. But Karl is dead, and the axis has tilted. You can mask fear on the ground, but upstairs on the wire it can become a menacing quiver. Tino describes

the performance as “very tedious.” Mario took his spot above Tino on the shoulder bar, and Tino could tell immediately. “It was one of those vibration moments,” he remembers. The Wallendas pulled it off — indeed, they completed the entire run in Sioux Falls without mishap — but something inside Mario shut down. “Oh, he was on the wire later on, but never on the pyramid,” says Tino. “Maybe he didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, but during rehearsals, during the show, he was very uncomfortable and nervous. Eventually he had to quit because he just couldn’t handle it.” Sometimes, voluntarily stepping aside can require as much courage as walking the wire. Especially in this family. Tino’s daughter Andrea, for instance, started performing for live audiences at 12. “My parents never forced me to do it,” she says. “I wanted to be like everybody else.” But by her late teens, her dad noticed something Andrea wasn’t ready to admit to herself. Tino says it began

when Andrea’s older sister Alida left the troupe to get married, leaving a vacancy on the pyramid. “So Andrea really began to push herself, and she excelled greatly,” Tino recalls. “But she began to develop a fear, to the point where in the end she couldn’t even go on the platform anymore because she started to shake. And we had to get her off the wire because I knew she would’ve just continued on.” Now 37, Andrea says she still enjoys practicing on the cable, so long as she has no one else’s life in her hands. “I guess I never trusted myself completely,” she says. “I trusted my father more than I trusted myself.” § ntil her death in April at age 87, Jenny, Karl’s oldest child, lived a mile or so north of the old neighborhood where Delilah, Rietta, Rick and Carla have spent most of their lives. Despite the ensuing family tensions, Jenny and Carla remained inseparable. In fact, Jenny’s DeSoto Road home was Grand Central

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Station for the disparate family factions — Rick (“The World Famous Wallendas”), Tino (“The Flying Wallendas” and “The Great Wallendas”) and Nik (“King of the Highwire”). By multiple accounts, those interactions were often superficial and brief. With her mother in failing health, Tammy and some of her kids moved in with Jenny in 2012. Within days of Jenny’s death, grandson Nik -- who holds the deed to the house -- served Tammy with an eviction notice. He declines to discuss the dynamics on the record. Tammy, unemployed, has refused to leave. Legal action is proceeding. Trained as an aerialist and raised around circus animals, Tammy says the family’s tug-of-war over the highwire legacy drove her away from it. “I was 12 or 13 when my grandfather died and all I heard was ‘I’m a Wallenda, I’m a Wallenda.’ We’ve all got Karl Wallenda’s blood in us,” she says, “what difference does it make? I didn’t want to compete with my

own family and this business is so competitive already. So I got into lion and tiger training.” Tammy, 50, says her detour into the big cat ring was such heresy, she didn’t tell her mom about it until Jenny caught her live act in Las Vegas. Tammy says Jenny freaked out and screamed at her during the show. “My argument was, Mom, how many people have died from falling? We’ve lost so many people from aerials,” Tammy says. “Then I said how many people do you know who’ve died from being mauled by their tigers? Then boom — three happened right in a row.” In 1997, trainer Wayne Franzen was killed by a 400pound Bengal tiger during a live performance in Carrolltown, Pennsylvania. The following year, outside Gainesville, Chuck Lizza had his neck snapped by a tiger named Jupiter after Lizza accidentally tripped into the cat. Just five weeks later, Jupiter attacked and killed fellow performer Joy Holiday. STORY CONTINUED / PAGE 8

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heraldtribune.com/chasingtheghost heraldtribune.com/chasingtheghost | Sunday, 19, 2015 |7 heraldtribune.com/chasingtheghost | July Sunday, July 19,

Karl Wallenda, 71, walks on a cable 200 feet above the playing field at Veterans Stadium between doubleheader baseball games in Philadelphia, May 31, 1976. Wallenda unfurled a bicentennial and American flag from his balancing bar after doing a headstand midway across the 640-foot span steel cable. The walk took 18 minutes. AP Photo/Bill Ingraham da, 71, walks Karl on a Wallenda, cable 200 feet 71, walks aboveon the a cable playing 200 field feetatabove Veterans the Stadium playing field between at Veterans doubleheader Stadiumbaseball betweengames doubleheader in Philadelphia, baseballMay games 31, 1976. in Philadelphia, Wallenda unfurled May 31, 1976. a bicentennial Wallendaand unfurled American a bicentennial flag from his andbalancing Americanbar flag after from doing his balancing a headstand bar midway after doing across a headstand the 640-foot midway span across steel cable. the 640-foot The walk span took steel 18 minutes. cable. TheAP walk Photo/Bill took 18 Ingraham minutes. AP Photo/Bill Ingraham

THE WALLENDA FAMILY THE THE WALLENDA WALLENDA FAMILY FAMILY

Karl Wallenda

Jenny Wallenda

Tino Wallenda

Carla Wallenda

Mario Wallenda

Rietta Wallenda

Delilah Troffer

Rick Wallenda

Tammy Anderson

Nik Wallenda

Blake Reed

daughter of Karl and The adopted son of Karl and Karl Wallenda’s grandCarla’s son was assisted by patriarch Daughter of Karl and Martha, unending squabbles The most commercially x The German By Billy Cox of a Wallenda Blake Reed Mario Wallenda Mario Wallenda Rietta Wallenda Rietta Wallenda Delilah Troffer Delilah Troffer Rick Wallenda Rick Wallenda Blake Reed Tino Wallenda Tino oldest Wallenda The TammyCiting Anderson Tammy Anderson Nik Wallenda Nik Wallenda For Karl’s granddaughter, Karl Wallenda’s Helen still executes 100-foot Helen, Mario lost brother-indaughter and Tino’s sister cousin Tino for a televised 200-year-old entertainment first-born Jenny served as over the rightful heirs to Karl successful member of the heraldtribune.com [email protected] A latecomer to the high wire, The adopted son of Karl The and adopted son of Karlwords and mean things. “I feel Karl Wallenda’s grand-Karl Wallenda’s Carla’s grandson was assisted Carla’s by son was assisted by squabbles Carla Wallenda Carla Wallenda Citing unending Citing unending The most squabbles commercially The most commercially Jenny Wallenda Jenny Wallenda grandchild began attemptWallenda Wallenda law and fellow wirewalker was wirewalking by age 3. At NBC special in 1980 as Rick dynasty showed the world the focus of family activWallenda’s high-wire legacy, clan, Karl Wallenda’s greatFor Karl’s granddaughter, For Karl’s granddaughter, Karl Wallenda’s oldestKarl Wallenda’s oldest high swaypole perforTammy’s son worked Helen, Mario Helen, Mario lost brother-indaughter and cousin Tino’sTino sister for a televised cousin Tino for a the televised The daughter of Karl and lost brother-inlike a dead man on the daughter and Tino’s sister over rightful heirs over to Karl the rightful successful heirs to member Karl of successful the member of theto theoldest llenda Karl Wallenda Daughter of Karl and Martha, Daughter of Karl and Martha, ing circus acts at age 7The anddaughter of Karl and high A wire, latecomer to the mances at age 79. Coping Dick Faughnan, cousin words mean things. “I words age 6, after she contracted completed Karl’s fateful how easily the repetition of ity until her death in April Jenny’s youngest daughter grandson made a major A latecomer feel mean things. “I feel grandchild began attemptgrandchild began attemptexclusively with big cats, like law and100-foot fellow wirewalker law and fellow wirewalker was wirewalking by age was 3. wirewalking At NBC special by age 3. in At 1980 asNBC Rickspecial Wallenda’s in 1980 as Rick ground,” Karl stated after Helen still executes 100-foot Helen still executes high-wire legacy, Wallenda’s high-wire clan, Karllegacy, Wallenda’s greatclan, Karl Wallenda’s greatwould perform alongside first-born of Jenny as Jenny served as an patriarch The of a German patriarch a servedfirst-born oldest son worked Tammy’s oldest son with chronic obstructive Dieter Schepp, and the use journey at the Condado perfection can be eclipsed 2015 at age 87. Feisty ing andcircus acts at age 7ing bucked the trend and abanstatement prior to his 2012Tammy’shis like a dead man on thelike a dead man on the a fever and her arm swelled and circus acts at age 7 and mother did, until age 19. Dick Faughnan, cousinDick Faughnan, cousin the 1962 tragedy in Detroit. age 6, after she contracted age 6, after she completed contracted Karl’s fateful completed Karl’s fateful high swaypole perfor- high swaypole perforJenny’s youngest daughter Jenny’s youngest grandson daughter made a major grandson made a major focus of family activthe focus of family activ-Karl on the wire. In 1998, ld entertainment 200-year-old the entertainment exclusively with big cats, exclusively like with big of his legs during the 1962 following a polio booster Plaza Hotel in San Juan. by a single misstep. Archidemanding, the Germandoned aerial performances skywalk over Niagara Falls. ground,” Karl stated after ground,” Karl stated after would perform alongside would perform alongsidepulmonary disease, Carla 27, Blake is among the “I can handle the grief better Dieter Schepp, and theDieter use Schepp, and the use a fever and her arm swelled a fever and her journey arm swelled at the Condado journey at the Condado mances at age 79. Coping mances at age 79. Coping bucked the trend and abanbucked the trend statement and abanprior to his statement 2012 prior to hisNow 2012 ity until her death in April ity until her death in AprilTino and a family troupe owed the world dynasty showed the world his mother did, until age his 19. mother did, unt quit smoking two years ago pyramid catastrophe in shot, Delilah hid her condiLeery officials made Rick tect of the seven-person born matriarch survived the decades ago. Instead, she That’s when, after two years the 1962 tragedy in Detroit. the 1962 tragedy in Detroit. Karl on the wire. In 1998, Karl on the wire. In 1998, and talented from up here. The wire isfollowing a polio booster his legs during the 1962 of his legs during the 1962 following a polio Plazabooster Hotel in San Juan. Plaza Hotel in San Juan. performances with chronic obstructive with chronicof obstructive doned aerialskywalk performances over Niagara Falls. skywalk over Niagaramost Falls.versatile 2015 at age 87. 2015 at age 87. Feisty andthat would include young the repetition howofeasily the repetition of Feisty and is among Now the27, Blake is am Detroit. He spent the next from father Alberto use safety devices. After doned aerial chair pyramid, pausing for Soviet invasion of Berlin, began staging big-cat acts, of working with local and Now 27, Blake “I can handle the grief“Ibetter can handle the grief tion better Tinoand and a family troupe Tino and a family troupeand hopes to continue her wirewalkers in the WalNik successfully revisited pyramidCarla catastrophe in pyramid catastrophe inmy life.” Ushered into the shot, Delilah hid her condishot, DelilahLeery hid her officials condi-made Rick Leery officials made Rick pulmonary disease, Carla pulmonary disease, decades ago. Instead, decades she ago. That’s Instead, when, sheafter twoThat’s years when, after two years demanding, the Germandemanding, the Germancanbreathtaking be eclipsed perfection can be eclipsed and talented most versatile and aerial acts until she turns 50 years of his life confined because she feared surviving two high-wire falls steel-cable in 1947 rejoined her father in where the risks are no less federal governments in themost versatile from up here. The wirefrom is up here. The wire Zoppe is that would include young that would include young lenda line. He has toured circus business by mother the seven-person pyra-quit smoking two years Detroit. He spent the next Detroit. He spent the next tion from father Alberto tion from father use safety Alberto devices. After use safety devices. After quit ago smoking two years ago began staging big-cat began acts, staging of working big-cat acts, with local and of working with local and born matriarch survived born the matriarch survived misstep. Archiby a single misstep. Archiin the Walwirewalkers 80. Although she has never to a wheelchair in Sarasota. he might pull her from the – in 1987and 1996 -- Rick left headstands during skywalks, the U.S. to pursue the Nik circus profound. She was mauled United States and Canada,wirewalkers my life.” Ushered into the my life.” Ushered into the successfully revisited Nik successfully revisited with uncle Tino and cousinsin the Carla “as soon as I couldZoppe because she feared years ofher his life confined 50 yearsharboring of his life confined Zoppe because surviving she feared two high-wire surviving falls to two high-wire fallsare nowhere and hopes tosuffered continue and her hopes to50continue where thetwice, risks less the risks federal are no governments less in federal the governments inHe thehas toured Soviet Soviet andinvasion of Berlin,mid andat the site of the 1962 seven-person tect of act the –seven-person lenda line. lenda line. a serious acciFamously grumpy, show. After performing the family business earn Wallenda’s last his fatalinvasion as of anBerlin, equestrian and aerialmost seriously in he managed to convince circus business byRietta’s mother circus business by mother the seven-person pyrathe seven-person Rick and Nik – so often atHe has t walk,” worst injury Detroit disaster. Threeaerial yearspyrato ashe wheelchair Sarasota. to afor wheelchair in Sarasota. he might pull her from he themight pull – her in 1987and fromcollege the 1996 degrees -- Rick – inleft 1987and 1996 -- Rick left acts until turns aerial acts until turns profound. She was profound. She United was mauled States and Canada, United States anduncle Canada, in pausing 1947 father in 1947 in her father in mid,1978 pausing forPuerto pyramid, forist. her dent,she Carla in 1972 lost her littlein patience Wallenda with her grandfather, she in writing, Tino and cousins with uncle spillchair in Rico at rejoined Jenny lost herrejoined husband 2003, by amauled tiger who – unbemyriad bureaucracies to with Carla “as soon as I could Carla “as soon as I could mid at the site of the 1962 mid at the site of the 1962 odds – and has designs onTino and has been a broken leg. Itshow. After performingshow. After performing later, he participated in Famously grumpy, harboring Famously harboring the familybut business to the earn family business toknownst earn 80.the Althoughhusband, she has never 80. Although she has never twice, most seriously in twice, most he seriously managed in to convince he managed to convince the U.S. the circus the U.S. pursue circus ng steel-cable breathtaking steel-cable Chico Guzman, arguments – “I’m not grumpy, getting and husband Terry Troffer the hiatus was shortanddeveloping Nik – so often at Nik – so of age 73 – endures millions of to pursue Dick Faughnan in to Karl Wal- the to her – had killed overturn a century-old banRick walk,” Rietta’s worst injury walk,” Rietta’s worst injury Detroit disaster. Three Detroit years disaster. Three years hisRick ownand show. happened when was on with the her grandfather, she record-setting construction little for Wallenda little for Wallenda with two her grandfather, college degrees she in writing, college writing, suffered a serious accisuffered serious acci- in between, aatiger who owner. – unbe2003, But by asome tiger myriad whobureaucracies –on unbemyriad to bureaucracies tohas designs as an equestrian anddeadly aerialas an seven-person equestrian and aerials during skywalks, headstands during skywalks, who died when the a pole he patience it’s apatience lot of interwent on to raise circus lived. He returned todegrees the 2003,inby replays on YouTube. Brought lenda’s previous daredevil stunting at the odds – and odds on include – and has des has been a broken leg. has It been a broken leg. It later, he participated in later, the he participated in the His latest interests ground, wearing high heels. of an eight-person pyramid arguments –family “I’m not getting arguments – “I’m not getting and husband Terry Troffer and but Terry theTroffer hiatus was shortbut the hiatus was shortdent, Carla in 1972 lostdent, her Carla in 1972 lost her knownst to her –you hadcan’t killed knownst to her overturn – had legendary a killed century-old overturn ban His a century-old ban ist. Jenny lost her husband ist. Jennyinlost her husband last – his Wallenda’s fatal last act – his fatal was holding atop a scaffoldrivalry and jealousy” Nikhusband and Lijana. circus in 2001 and joined the to act Sarasota in 1928 by circus pyramid accident Detroit things train for, cascades. developing his own show. developing his own happened when waswith on happened the when was onentertainers, the record-setting record-setting working poisonous She was her grandfain construction Sarasota. President husband, of construction in between, it’s a lot of in interbetween, it’s a lot of interwent on to raise two circus went on to raise lived. two He circus returned to the lived. He returned to the Chico Guzman, husband, Chico Guzman, a previous owner. But a some previous owner. on daredevil But some stunting at on the daredevil stunting at the with Dick Faughnan in Karl Dick WalFaughnan in Karl Waln Puerto Rico 1978 at spill in Puerto Rico at ing touched a live wire. One – Mario actually returned to Among other things, Delirecord-setting eight-person baron John Ringling, Walin 1962. Quick to laughofbut like the time an improperly reluctant agreement to wear His latestsnakes. interests include His latest ground, wearing high heels. ground, wearing high heels. an aeight-person pyramid of an eight-person pyramid “I analyze every-interests ther in Puerto Rico in 1978, the local stagehands union, family jealousy” family rivalry and jealousy” entertainers, Nik and Lijana. entertainers, circus Nik and in 2001 Lijana. and joined the in and joined the train who died when thefew pole who he died when polethe heand things yousecured can’t for, things youand can’t legendary trainafor, cascades. His legendary cascades. His poisonous lenda’s deadly seven-person lenda’sofdeadly seven-person ndures millions age of 73 – endures millions of of the circus tricks shethe rivalry high wire three times, lah’s superstar son has been pyramid withcircus Tino. In 2001 2008, lenda was married twice, fierce defender herin family aerial pole fell safety harness assuaged working thing with working with She was with her grandfaShe was with her grandfaSarasota. President in of Sarasota. President of they do,” he says of poiso monitoring guy wires onAmong other things, Delisubject of the criticallywas holding atop a scaffold–atop Mario actually returned – Mario to 2006 actually returned to Among otherrecord-setting things, Delieight-person was holding a scaffoldlikeeight-person the time an improperly like the time reluctant an improperly agreement toreluctant wear agreement toanalyze wear everypyramid accident in Detroit pyramid in Detroit YouTube. replaysSchepp, on YouTube. never indulged is the human in 2001, 2005, and by able to extend her career. he broke his record-setting grandfather’s first to Brought Martha then Brought tradition, she onceaccident hurled “nearly cut my leg half off. the fears of ABC’s lawyers snakes. “I snakes. “I analyze e ther in Puerto Rico in 1978, ther in Puerto Rico in 1978, the local stagehands union, the local stagehands union, his relatives, “the way they the ground below when lah’s he superstar son haslah’s acclaimed 2012 documenthe high wire threeof times, the high wire three times, been superstar pyramid son has with been Tino. Inlong 2008, pyramid withsecured Tino. Inaerial 2008, ing touched cannon a live wire. ing One touched a live wire. One pole jumped fellsecured and back aerial a safety pole fell harness and assuaged a safety harness assuaged inoften 1962.by Quick to laugh inbut 1962. aBrooks Quickduring to laugh but a a into 1928 by to circus Sarasota in 1928 circus ball: “You’re dependmeans a custom-built In 2011, she and Nik paid 1,800-foot skywalk Helen Kreis. Tension rocks at Garth If I hadn’t it and established his reliabilthing they do,” he says thing of they monitoringfell guy wires on monitoring guy on subject of the critically of the critically handle rigging, costumes.do,” he s of wires tary “The subject Show Must Go in 2001, 2005, and 2006inby 2001, 2005, and 2006 by to his death. Insteadable to extend hertocareer. able extend he her broke career. his grandfather’s he broke grandfather’s of the few circus ofshe the fewdevice circus tricks she cut my leg been half“nearly off. cut my theleg fears half ofoff. ABC’s lawyers the of ABC’s lawyers“the wayhis fierce defender of her fierce familydefender n Ringling, Walbaronhis John Ringling, Wal- arena ing ontricks a mechanical contraption he called the tribute Karl byto returning record at King’s Islandhis by“nearly characterizes descentune-ups while acclaimed her of her family would’ve my head.” ity for playing by fears the rules; his relatives, relatives, “the w the ground below when the he ground below when he 2012 documenacclaimed 2012 documenI’m constantly they searching returning to Sarasota forIn 2011, she and Nik paid means ofhuman a “psycho-cycle.” custom-built means of a custom-built she and 1,800-foot long skywalk 1,800-foot never indulged theyour human never is the If I skywalk hadn’tWhen jumped IfitIyounger hadn’t jumped and established back his reliabiland established his rigging, reliabil- costumes. tradition, shelion-tamer once hurled tradition, once hurledOn,” Tino and his family married lenda was married twice, andisnot ownindulged talent.” Expected toto his death. Instead toof the sceneInof2011, his death in Nik paid traversing 2,000 feet. “Ilong don’t dants’twice, relationships with daughtershe Tammy sheback was and theitlong-term payoffs gavehandle handle fell fell of to his death. Instead for what would be therigging, best cos tary “The Show Must Go tary “The Show Must Go the funeral, Rietta and the continue to tour, and he uses ball: “You’re dependcontraption he called the contraption he called the tribute to Karl by returning to paths Karl record by returning at King’s Island record by at King’s Islandstill by working cannon cannon “You’re dependwould’ve been my head.” would’ve been ity my for head.” playing byability the rules; ity playing the rules; searching rocks at Garth Brooks rocks duringatnearby. Garth Brooks during rthaeach Schepp, first then to Martha Schepp, then She dismisses the ball: dangers live no more than 15 years Puerto Rico,tribute crossing sugar-coat words,” says other today. He left was performing aerials, Tammy him the tofor write hisI’mbyconstantly I’mwhat constantly returning torest Sarasota for returning tosome Sarasota for brand for me or would sear On,” Tino anda his family On,” Tino and his family of the troupe took prison ministry to chalExpected “psycho-cycle.” to Expected to to the scene of his death to the in scenetraversing of his death 2,000 in “So feet. “Itraversing don’t 2,000 don’t ing on a mechanical device ing on awith mechanical device When she“I was younger and she was theyounger long-term and payoffs the gavelong-term gave be the for arena tune-ups while her arena while her reis.behind Tension often Helenphilosophy Kreis. Tension often of her profession a“psycho-cycle.” following his career-ending Rick. that’s perceived as feet. a to simple “Something badtune-ups happens, remembers aWhen reporter own rules at subsequent forpayoffs whatbe would best what would the most proficient. You be t the funeral,more Rietta andthe thefuneral, Rietta and on thea cable 100 feet above the continue to tour, he continue uses to tour, and he uses lengeand inmates to turn their live notalent.” morefall, than years live no than 15 years words of Karl’s to Puerto Rico, crossing In paths Puerto Rico, sugar-coat crossing paths words,” says sugar-coat words,” says and not yourquestion: own talent.” and not your own still working aerials, Tammy still working him aerials, the ability Tammy tolike write him his the ability to write hisor what would lion-tamer daughter Tammy lion-tamer daughter Tammy zesfor histhem descencharacterizes his descen“How many people he15 outlived hismore wiferest pavement. February 2015, being mean. But the Bible to interpret in their something rages inside and asking if she was ever venues the Grand brand for me brand for me or wh always have to do something of the troupe took rest some of the troupe took some a prison ministry to chala prison ministry to chalheart – “The dead are gone, lives around. “It probably his career-ending following his career-ending on a cable she 100 anchored feet above onthe athe cable 100 Rick. feet “So above that’s perceived Rick. “Sowounds that’s perceived as “I said,remembers She dismisses dangers She dismisses the dangers remembers a reporter a own reporter rulesCanyon at subsequent own rules atbe subsequent was performing nearby. was performing tionships with dants’ relationships with I don’t diethe in car wrecks?” On following the Linda by one year and died sevensaysthe faithful are as the own unique ways: “Life is on even know what I’mnearby. afraid. actually, no. and Chicago. The the most proficient. be You the most proficie that’s bigger and better than more words of Karl’s to more words of Karl’s to lenge inmates to turn their lenge inmates to turn their and the show must go on” – would’ve happened somefall, he outlived his 2015 wife fall, his wife pavement.person In February 2015, February mean. 2015, the Bible being mean.are But theifBible of her profession of a she hernever profession with a in April asking she was if shevenues was ever like the Grand venues like the Grand “Something happens, “Something bad happens, today. He left each other today. other with hand, forgot at he ageoutlived 74. chairpavement. pyramid atInbeing of aBut friend and deceitful the wire; everything else is He left bad doing,” reflected one of I have noever fearasking whatsoever. multiple Guinness worldalways have to dobefore.” something always have to do s the year heart – “The dead are gone, heart – “Thedate dead are gone, lives around.where “It probably lives around. “Ithis probably and finished the family else,” Tino says of Linda by one year and Linda died by one year and died she anchored theSarasota.. sevenshe anchored says thefaithful seventhe of wounds says faithfulI’d are the“Iwounds question: “How many people question: “How people afraid. said, afraid. no.then “I said, actually, and no. Chicago. Canyon Chicago. The and better something rages inside something and rages inside and mple behind a simple philosophy the advice on romance hermany Circus “Darn it,” theare kisses an enemy. justphilosophy waiting.” Sarasota’s most unforgetAnd Iactually, knew, right – aCanyon record holderThe praises and Karl that’s bigger that’s thanbigger and be and the show must go and on” the – show must go on” – would’ve happened somewould’ve happened somegrandfather’s deadly tumble in April On 2015 at age 74.in April 2015 at age 74. in San Juan. For the petitperson chair person of pyramid a friendat and deceitful are a friend and deceitful are die in car wrecks?” Ondie thein car wrecks?” the I have no chill fear whatsoever. I have fear multiple whatsoever. Guinness multiple Guinness worldI don’t even know I don’t I’m even know o interpret infor their them to interpret in their father passed along years shepyramid says. “I at used to chair be Tino’s rather have aoffriend come tablewhat circus characters. “I what I’m went down my no back, Wallenda worldat every event and the year before.” the year before.” and finished the family and date finished the family date where else,” in Tino says where of his else,” Tino says of his eighth-generation aerialist, Puerto Rico, “because I’mhand, she never other Circus Sarasota.. “DarnCircus it,”Nik’s Sarasota.. the kisses “Darnand ofit,” an enemy. the I’d ofAnd an enemy. I’d other forgot hand, she never forgot I knew, right then And – a Idoing knew,the record right then holder – a praises Karl record holder praises Karl doing,” reflected oneit,of doing,” reflected one of e ways: “Lifeown is on unique ways: “Life is just on do ago. “Daddy always said, sister. Now, I’m mom.” tell me in mykisses face the I attack.” because if you’re sidesteps public discussions in San Juan.a For the beyond petit in Santhe Juan. Foristhe petit grandfather’snot deadly tumble grandfather’s deadly tumble career circus sure he would havethe ever she says. “I used to beshe Tino’s says. “I used rather tohave betruth Tino’s a friend rather than have to achill friend come advice on romance heradvice on romance her went down myyou back, chill Wallenda my back, atfamily every feuds. event Wallenda and at every event and Sarasota’s Sarasota’s most unforgetverything else theiswire; everything elsemost is unforget‘Don’t you the marry an acrobat, aboutcome myself wire and don’twent havedown the of “I saw my eighth-generation aerialist, eighth-generation in Puerto Rico, “because in Puerto I’m Rico, “because I’m unthinkable: “This is my pas- aerialist, retired.” sister. Now, I’m Nik’s mom.” sister. Now, I’m andNik’s tell me mom.” in my facewords.” and the tell me in my faceifrespect, the father passed alongall years father passed along years because you’re doing because the if you’re sidesteps public the discussions sidesteps public discussions table “I circus characters. “I g.” just waiting.”table circus characters. they’re old cripples.’” sugar-coat you get put back in doing immediate family struggle a career beyond thelove, circus a career beyond the circus is not sure he would havenot ever sure he would have ever sion, my myislife.” truth about myself than truth to about myself than todon’t ago. “Daddy always said, ago. “Daddy always said, wire and you have wire theand youofdon’t family have feuds. the “I saw of my family feuds. “I saw my just do it, I attack.” just do it, I attack.” your place.” financially, I saw the chalunthinkable: “This is my unthinkable: pas“This is my pasretired.” retired.” sugar-coat words.” sugar-coat words.” ‘Don’t you marry an acrobat, ‘Don’t you marry an acrobat, respect, you get put back respect, in youimmediate get put back family in the struggle immediate lenges, turmoil they family struggle sion, my love, my life.”sion, my love, my life.” they’re all old cripples.’” they’re all old cripples.’” your place.” your place.” financially, I saw the chalfinancially, I saw the chalwent through to try to make lenges, the turmoil they lenges, the turmoil they a living while pursuing their passion.” went through to try to went makethrough to try to make a living while pursuingatheir living while pursuing their passion.” passion.”


Jenny Wallenda’s son Tino and daughters Tammy and Delilah look on during the ‘Celebration of Life’ in honor of their mother. Jenny was laid to rest amid the Wallenda family plots at Manasota Memorial Cemetery in Bradenton in April. Pallbearers were Chuck Becker, Alex Wallenda, Blake Wallenda, Nik Wallenda, Quentin Wallenda and Rick Wallenda.

Not long after Germanborn magician Roy Horn was critically injured in 2003 by a white tiger during a show in Las Vegas, Tammy’s number came up. While rehearsing with a 650-pound male Siberian named Marley at an armory in Dodge City, Kansas, Tammy was bitten in the back of her leg as her two children played outside the caged performing area. “I knocked myself out of his mouth, and then he grabbed my back and he was shaking me around like a rag doll and I kept punching back. When he got me by the throat, I’m like, that’s it, I’m dead, my god, don’t let me die in front of my kids, please.” Marley retreated after Tammy gave him a shot to the throat with her elbow. She later discovered Marley’s sellers neglected to tell her the cat had killed his previous trainer. Tammy wound up with a broken nose, black eyes and 67 staples in her leg following seven hours of surgery. She says it took her two days to catch up with the next show, but only because “I couldn’t get out of the hospital sooner. Plus I was driving the semi.” For two kids who watched

mom survive the Marley encounter, the memory is just another childhood postcard. A decade later, both are apparently aiming for circus careers. Quentin, 18, is a trained aerialist but volunteers at Big Cat Habitat. “I want to become a very good trainer like Gunther Gebel-Williams,” he says, alluding to the fabled Ringling Brothers trainer. Seventeen-year-old sister Zoryah loves swinging ladders, lyra hoops and “a little bit of everything.” Like her brother, when it comes to exotic pets, the extraordinary becomes common. “We’ve grown up with all kinds of animals around the house, lions and snakes and iguanas and prairie dogs,” she says. “We had a very mean prairie dog that would attack our lion so we had to keep him in a cage. And sometimes he’d attack the lion through the cage.” § hen people ask Carla Wallenda if she’s kin to Nik, his aunt has a swift reply: “No, he’s related to me, I was here first.” And she’s still here. At 79, Carla continues to taunt gravity, a good six years

W

longer than her father did. And she is undeterred by the casualties. Her aunt and Karl’s sisterin-law, Rietta Grotefent, tumbled to her death at 43 in Omaha, Nebraska, from a 100-foot-swaypole in 1963. And in 1972, Carla would lose her husband, Chico Guzman, to a fall. Guzman, 39, had just relieved Karl of his balancing pole following a performance in Wheeling, West Virginia, when the pole struck a live wire. The shock knocked Guzman onto some electrical wiring 10 feet below, from which he fell an additional 50 feet in front of 6,000 spectators. Carla’s only major accident was a fractured tailbone from a 15-foot spill in practice. She may never give up the swaypole, because viewing the Earth from bird’s-eye heights is a rush for which terrestrial activity apparently has no cure. She has executed “ironjaw” mid-air suspensions by her teeth, countless hanging perch configurations, dangled from hot air balloons and pulled helicopter neck spins until “you break your veins in your eyes.” “Accidents,” she says,

“can happen anyplace. I have to make a living and this is the only way I know or want to. I’ve done waitress work and hated every minute of it. Why should I go and do a job that I hate?” When she was younger, Carla planned to retire by 70. At 70, she reset the timetable for 75. Today, she’s gunning for 80, with only chronic obstructive pulmonary disease standing in her way. She gets by with an inhaler. She quit smoking in 2013. Carla keeps in shape by regularly climbing a 45-foot alloy sway pole, each step 16 inches above the next. In live performances, she mounts a 100-foot pole, secures one foot and/or one hand in a loop strap, and strikes dizzying poses with each swirling shift of her weight. Winds permitting, she also does headstands at the summit. Headstands are a hallmark of the Wallenda tradition, and are among the reasons Nik’s celebrated triumphs have generated skepticism with some of his relatives. “Nik never could do a headstand,” Carla says. “We’ve all got callouses on our heads. I felt my father’s head in his coffin, and it was still there.”

§ hen you attempt a headstand on steel, your entire body weight rests upon a 2- to 3-inch sliver of your skull. The Wallendas call it the “sweet spot.” Its location varies with individual centers of gravity, and scar tissue is painfully acquired. Carla recalls an understudy from Chile who strapped part of a rubber tire to his head in training. Her son Rick says Karl’s brother Herman cut the top out of a fedora for cushioning and “wore it almost like a yarmulke.” Rick’s own sweet spot is located near his crown. You can actually see Tino’s sweet spot, just north of a thinning hairline. “Feel it,” Tino commands, lowering his head in an invitation to inquisitive fingers. “That’s from doing it for 40-some years.” The sweet spot is like anything else. Use it or lose it. “At one point,” Tino says, “I went for pretty much the winter months without practicing any headstands because I was confident about doing it. When I started doing headstands again and developed a callous over the top of my callous, which ended up being a blister down underneath and in between, it was murder.”

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Nik Wallenda’s mother, Delilah Troffer, rehearses the seven-person pyramid for Circus Sarasota in February. At 62, Delilah has few opportunities to do aerial work. Other performers include Alec Bryant, Nik’s wife Erendira, and Michael Richter, far left.


Carla Wallenda practices the 40-foot high sway pole in 2014 in her backyard.

Tino was the subject of a critically acclaimed 2012 documentary “The Show Must Go On,” a somewhat gritty look at life on the road. In one dramatic sequence, blood is streaking from his head to his face, but the wound was from dismantling the platform after the show, not from reopening a sweet spot callous. Tino, who also performs for inmates with Champions for Life prison ministries, obliges a request by taking the wire again and pulling another headstand. The president of the local International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union holds a perfectly vertical pose for a good fivecount and relaxes. A photographer spots Terry Troffer next door and waves to get his attention. Tino says Terry won’t look this way. Why not? Tino smiles and says “No comment.” Outwardly, Tino is sanguine about his nephew Nik’s successes. “It’s Nik’s time. He wants to have his own brand separate from the Wallendas, and that’s fine.” But Tino also volunteers a reminder that drama and success on the wire are often interior experiences. The last time he did the seven-person pyramid was in Europe. An original member left the team and the substitute was an awkward — and potentially dangerous — fit. “I had my son on my shoulders, I had three kids on top

of me, and after the last show was over, I didn’t fall down but I essentially collapsed,” he says. “I just couldn’t stop the tears, I couldn’t stop the emotion welling up inside me. It wasn’t joy, it was just knowing that I had brought my whole team through safely.” § ino’s sister Delilah says she never had to tell her kids about what happened to their great-grandfather. Death was a part of their consciousness long before they were old enough to understand it. Delilah remembers being on tour in California — Nik’s 1 year old, Lijana’s not quite 3 — and fielding the same media questions over and over again: How do you feel about the way your grandfather died? What about the seven, and Detroit? “Nik’s heard about it since he was a baby,” she says. Delilah, who took her first steps on the wire at 3, grew up without that knowledge. The Great Wallenda was immortal. She toured with him. The family was cohesive. She was once a member of Tino’s seven-person pyramid posse. And she can still do aerials today. Even in death, Karl inspired her in ways she could never have predicted. “I was always about making him proud. I wanted to be the greatest woman doing these things.” And then? “How do you say I haven’t gotten

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there, but that’s OK because Nik’s getting there? People ask me, how can you watch your son do that? But he’s living my dream.” What happened to the family after Karl’s fall is more difficult to discuss. “Jealousy is a horrible thing. It causes a lot of disease,” she says, “a lot of cancer in families.” She prefers to keep the specifics off the record. She’ll say this about her brother Tino: “We’re not as close as we used to be, but we still love each other. We do each have our own lives, we live next door and I’m busy, Tino’s got his thing he’s doing all the time, so we don’t really spend a lot of time together. But he is my brother, and I’m always going to love him.” In 1993, Delilah was so discouraged about her family’s circus future, she wrote a book-length elegy titled “The Last of The Wallendas.” Her son has obviously reinvigorated the name brand. But for any entertainer at age 62, contemplating the end of things is never an abstraction. With palpable anguish, she recalls a 2012 performance in Atlantic City, an invitation from Nik: “I thought this might be it. It’s a hard thing, it’s a part of you you’re giving up, it’s a piece of you being taken away. It’s kind of heartbreaking when that’s your life, you know? I was born in this business. It’s like something you mourn, it’s gone, it’s finished.”

On Christmas morning 2013, Nik surprised her with, among other things, an invitation to accompany him, during the summer of 2014, on a 10-week run at Darien Lake Amusement Park in western New York. In 2010, he had asked her to team up for a skywalk some 32 stories above Fort Myers. And this past February, she rejoined him in the seven-person pyramid at Circus Sarasota. But in 2012, she turned the tables and persuaded her son to include her in his wirewalk at the Condado Plaza Hotel. She had wanted to walk that site immediately after Karl’s death, but authorities wouldn’t clear it and she settled for a skywalk tribute performance at a San Juan stadium nearby. The 2012 mom-and-son skywalk at the Condado went off without a hitch. When it was over, Delilah could close at least that part of the circle: “It brings tears to my eyes right now. My grandfather — he was the one I was always chasing.” § n a more merciful universe, Delilah’s uncle Mario would’ve gotten one more crack at walking the wire, too. On the other hand, if the cosmos followed the law of averages, he wouldn’t have lived long enough to envy those who do. But The Great Wallenda’s son never wasted much time trying to figure it out. Last

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year, he said he already knew where his train would stop. “Where I’m going,” he said, “the wheelchairs have square wheels.” Mario was the last living male survivor of the 1962 pyramid collapse. He met his future wife, a nurse named Linda, in a Detroit hospital where the prognosis was bleak. Not only would he never walk again, doctors told him he had maybe 15 years to live, on the outside. But he outlived Linda, his wife of 50 years who died in 2014. “It ruins the whole plan,” he said, “because I was supposed to go first. Because she could live a hell of a lot better without me than I could without her.” At least his family members lived nearby. If only they could’ve quit bickering. “I don’t take sides, this one against this one, this one against this one,” Mario said. “And six months later it’ll change and this one’s against somebody else and I just say piss on ‘em, let ‘em do what they want, I’m not getting in between, they’re all family.” After Linda’s death, Mario began dreaming big again, in spite of himself. Linda never understood. “She used to say we were all nuts.” He remembered her agony during what turned out to be one of the most exhilarating moments of his life as a paraplegic. “She was crying when I was doing the psycho-cycle for Guinness,” Mario said, “she was crying and carrying on, saying they don’t care if I get killed doing this ...”


Mario’s psycho-cycle, or sky cycle, was a sideshow to the Wallenda 8-person pyramid in 2001 as Guinness cameras rolled. The one-of-a-kind motorized two-wheeled gizmo was placed on a wire 40 feet high between two cranes. Mario controlled speed and forward/reverse via electronics built into his balancing pole. “I don’t know how the hell they put it together,” he recalled. “But once I got on the wire, it was like old times . . . I had a ball.” He rode the psycho-cycle in Sarasota again in 2005. And in 2006, as part of a Windy City radio station stunt, Mario psycho-cycled over the Chicago River on a wire. The stunt fell flat on the thrill meter. “It was kinda boring, watching me go out and back again,” he conceded. “I wanted to sell it a little bit.” But as nephew Nik prepared for his Chicago skyline walk last year, Mario’s inevitable meditations on the past filled his head with savory possibilities, however remote. “I want to go upside down with a counterweight. I think Jenny Wallenda, grandmother of Nik and daughter of Karl Wallenda. The family matriarch survived the Soviet invasion of Berlin. it’d be great, get up there and revolve around. Hell yes! Come on — I’m over 70, why not? I loved my wife dearly, but she’s gone and she’s probably up there looking down saying that idiot’s out of his (bleep)in’ mind.” A more merciful universe would have provided a storybook ending. Mario had already glimpsed an alternative scenario, which made him shudder. “Before I go back to a nursing home,” he said, “I’ll blow my cottonpickin’ brains out.” Mario died in a hospital bed in April following a series of setbacks from colon-removal surgery. § ike his mom, Tammy’s 27-year-old son Blake has worked lions and tigers all his life. He also wrestles alligators and plays with pet snakes. Lately, he is being mentored in venomous serpents by David “The Cobra Kid” Weathers in Punta Gorda. Like everyone else, Blake’s ambitions are spurred by Karl’s ingenuity, stunts like the “one-finger stand,” an illusion concocted by The Great Wallenda involving a buried revolver and a glove. Or handstands on two heads, or handstands on two crutches while lifting one crutch in the air. But wirewalking was never on Blake’s radar until he turned 19, when “Nik kind of razzed me about it.” Blake not only got the hang of it, today he manages to work the wire with Nik, Tino and Rick. This kind of balance requires more than athletic versatility. It’s also about navigating family politics with discretion. An off-the-record chat reveals how tricky that can be. On the other hand, “I learn something new each time I see them,” says Blake, apparently content with playing second fiddle to the stars, at least for now. “Everything they do has a purpose. And they’re very helpful to me when anything bad happens.” Setups, breakdowns, rigging, pacing on the wire, touch pressure on the Tino Wallenda performs a head stand on the high wire at the Sarasota Yacht Club in 2012 as part of the Sarasota Film Festival. shoulder bars, stride styles — each camp has different approaches, and Blake’s job parents’ back yard, but he, before the show? A couple into place, Blake will have way, it’s just an inkling that is to complement them all. of times,” he says, “I felt his wife Erendira and three “Look at what they wear his own full-blown show, I have.” combining animal acts with On the other hand, when myself cry.” kids live miles from the orig— their costumes are all difaerials. He talks of getting inal Wallenda reservation. he stands on the platform, § ferent. Tino likes to look very He says family members are ick is so confident he prestigious with the tuxedo. vipers onto the wire, of com- surveying the crowds, gaugcan beat cousin Nik at plicated pratfalls involving ing the buzz of anticipation, not his rivals. At least, not Ricky likes the loose shirts; headstands, he wants anymore. it kind of reminds me of a trampolines and lions and Blake can find himself overto challenge him to a high“I realized, from the very hippie rocker. Everybody all manner of what he calls come by thoughts of his role wire showdown with the beginning, from seeing my “the lost arts.” in the family continuum. gives Nik issues about him whole world watching. Rick parents and the way I grew All this from a guy who “That fear, the butterflies wearing jeans when he does says he has financial backers up,” Nik says, “they had insists he has a fear of in your stomach, whatever skywalks, but it helps him who can make it happen. you want to call it — you competition from cousins relate to people and on top heights. “I feel comfortAlthough Nik declines to just have to push against it, able doing pyramids, but I and brothers, and I tried to of that, he’s gotten sponsordiscuss family divisions on say how can I step away from that recoil. Sometimes it’s ships from jean companies.” trust an animal more than a an emotional thing, being up the record, he dismisses his that? What can I do that’s Blake is keeping mental person,” he says. “If I die, I cousin’s challenge with a different so people would think it’d be something from there, the announcements. notes about what works “Like, in Nik’s act, they quick “Rick who?” hire Nik Wallenda over any and what doesn’t. Some- the wire, not from an animal. Nik still practices in his of them? talk about the history day, maybe, if things fall I don’t know why I feel that

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Karl Wallenda challenges Georgia’s Tallaluh Gorge with a 1,000-foot high cable on July 18, 1970. AP Photo/Bob Schutz

“We all walk the same wire. We all risk our lives just like anyone else. I would say the family members who are older than me are better wirewalkers than me. Let’s face it: they’ve done it many many more years than I have. They better be, they’ve got a lot more experience.”But with Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon scratched off his bucket list, the distance is now dramatic. Nik’s “grandeur on a larger scale” strategy has put him in a higher tax bracket. He has endorsements from an apparel company and a high-end watch manufacturer. His most recent public performances — at Sarasota Ford in December, the 400-foot tall Orlando Eye Ferris wheel in April, in which he wore a VisitOrlando jersey, and at a Mashantucket, Conn., Tanger Outlets mall opening — were comparatively routine commercial ventures. He has yet to announce a blockbuster project for 2015. “I hope that everything I do shines a positive light on my entire family,” Nik says. “I hope it raises not only the awareness but the respect

for my family. Whether it helps further them in any way, hopefully they get more gigs out of it.” Once his performing career runs its course, Nik has said he could envision testing Sarasota’s political waters. § n a family tract designated by a marble marker that reads “The Wallendas Aerialists Supreme,” Karl is buried in Manasota Memorial Park, south side. In the accompanying photo — the master in performance gear, fuchsia vest, matching slacks — something is slightly askew. His balancing pole isn’t level, but in a stressed diagonal position. Perhaps “the sell” is reaching out from the crypt. Moreover, engravers have etched 1904 into the tombstone as his birth year. But Karl was born in 1905. In 1980, Rick traveled to where that story ended in Puerto Rico. The goal was to laud his grandfather by wirewalking the Condado Hotel towers. Like his cousin Nik at Niagara Falls — forced to wear a safety harness by squeamish network

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Karl Wallenda was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1905 to an old circus family, and began performing at the age of six. He was buried in 1978 at Manasota’s Memorial Park and Funeral Home in Bradenton. The gravestone has the wrong year of his birth.

suits — Rick was told by authorities his televised performance was a no-go unless he installed safety netting. More than 30 years later, Nik and his mother got permission to do the walk without the net. In March 2014, Rick’s troupe pulled a weekend stand at the Mixon Fruit Farms Orange Blossom Festival — wire stunts, headstands, a bicycle pyramid, swaypole, a comic skit.

Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s feature writer Billy Cox interviews Mario Wallenda.

About the authors Photojournalist Thomas Bender has been capturing live news events with his own distinctive flair for the Herald-Tribune for 30 years. His eye for producing poignant images during fleeting moments of live news events is a

Nik Wallenda makes an unprecedented skywalk 1,500 feet above a dry riverbed to cross the Grand Canyon in June, 2013. It was a ratings bonanza for the Discovery Channel. Tiffany Brown/AP

daunting task, which he masters with split-second precision. As a result, his skilled work reaches the viewer not only visually, but emotionally as well. Preferring to use only available natural light, Bender maintains a

Following a Saturday afternoon show, a small crowd gathered around the autograph table. The fans wanted to know: Where’s Nik? Rick shrugged it off: “We left Nik at home — we don’t have enough money for Nik.” Similar scene a month earlier. Rick huddled with officials about securing permits for Island Cityfest at Anna Maria Island in April. “They were saying ‘Hey, we enjoyed your show

last weekend at the Georgia Dome,’” Rick recalls. It was Nik who wirewalked the Georgia Dome — for Winter Jam 2014, a Christian music festival. Rick was raised by the legend Nik memorializes. Rick was wirewalking decades before Nik was born. Rick has a sweet spot on his head, like his grandfather. And, with Tallulah Gorge still unclaimed by Karl’s heirs, Rick goes off the record when discussing family disputes. But when asked about Nik’s impact on the family brand with a camera rolling, Rick springs into full performance mode and, like a true Wallenda, nails it in one take: “I think it has been a positive effect on not just us, but wherever we work . . . People are attracted to us now. They want to have a Wallenda on their show or event, and maybe Nik’s not available. Maybe he’s unaffordable. They go to us . . . We kept the name up there and Nik just gave it a big blast. It’s great. We’re happy about it.” Cut.

Jenny Wallenda and Sarasota Herald-Tribune photographer Thomas Bender.

purist approach to his art. From the thrill of a space shuttle launch, to tender human emotions, Bender captures the essence of the moments. Reporter Billy Cox has covered news, sports and features in Florida for nearly 40 years and has been with the Herald-Tribune since 2006.

His investigations have spurred Congress to grant presumptive compensation to American veterans exposed to nuclear fallout, and pressured Firestone to recall defective ATX tires from Ford Explorers. He has reported from Florida’s Death Row, Kennedy Space Center and Louisiana cockfights.

He also writes a UFO blog called De Void. Bender and Cox have followed Nik Wallenda’s skywalking exploits on-site since 2012, from Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon to Chicago. They began working this Wallenda family story in early 2014.

Taking your breath away. Creativity and artistic merit are as important to our community as sun and sand. The Herald-Tribune is proud to report on all the elements that make this community a wonderful place to live and play, including our many arts and cultural endeavors. For nearly 90 years, we have covered the news and shared the information that matters most to you.

Nobody delivers like we do.

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HERALD-TRIBUNE PHOTO | RACHEL O’HARA