The Age of Daredevils by Michael Clarkson

Author:Michael Clarkson [Clarkson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781503935426
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2016-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

An inspector for the US Immigration Patrol said that foul play could not be proven because the rocks and rapids often obscure the cause of death, but he believed they were all members of the “bootlegging fraternity.” Red Hill was not one of the dead rumrunners; in fact, he was on the other end, recovering some of the floaters.

The stock market crash also produced a number of suicides, but there weren’t any daredevil stunts in 1929, although Mrs. Susan D. Grove, a sixty-nine-year-old gray-haired widow from Hagerstown, Maryland, active in her church and looking for thrills, said she would go over the falls in a rubber ball made in Akron the first week in September. “What’s a little danger at my age?” she said. “I have great faith in God and I know He will help me.” Her five children helped her more—they wrote to the Niagara Falls Chamber of Commerce to have her stopped. She never made the trip. In 1930, the price of gasoline soared to seventeen cents a gallon, and lines formed for soup and for moving in with the in-laws. If you were making ten bucks a week salary, you counted yourself blessed. There were still dreamers in Niagara Falls, though. There were always dreamers in Niagara Falls—perhaps that’s why people always came, year after year, winter and summer, for vacations, honeymoons, day trips, and imagining Oz. Niagara had motels with mirrors on the ceilings, wax museums with Teddy Roosevelt as the doorman, and men and women planning barrel rides over Horseshoe Falls. Even River Man was telling the newspapers he would produce a barrel to become the fifth person to go over with his own rubber ball, and he already had a steel barrel in his yard.

Red Hill Sr. was restless. He was tired of rescuing others, who had the fun. Over the next two years, he made two barrel trips down the rapids into the Whirlpool. On Memorial Day weekend in 1930, he took his barrel into the gorge; six feet long and 620 pounds, including 150 pounds of railroad steel on its bottom to act as a keel. The barrel, which floated on its side, had a manhole entrance fourteen by eighteen inches with a sliding door of steel protected by a rubber gasket. The five-hour ordeal was filmed by the Toronto Star Newsreel, starting at the Maid of the Mist docks and spiraling through the swirling rapids, through the Whirlpool and all the way to Queenston, with Hill prone inside on a special hammock, broad straps over his shoulders keeping him in place during the watery rock and roll. The crowd along the banks was in the thousands, and he was elated to be the center of attention again. His wife, Beatrice, who had just given birth to their infant child, Wesley, wasn’t so impressed: “The river rats rolled his barrel past my bedroom window. I had to go, so I wrapped my baby in blankets and went down to the Whirlpool. It was cold.

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