15. There Was Only One Shipwreck Kelly
Shipwreck Kelly was publicity hungry and a born showman. He played up to the crowds on site and to a fascinated public across the country, and gave them what they wanted with ever longer stints atop a pole. In 1929, he set a new record when he sat atop a flagpole in Baltimore for twenty-three days. The following year, before an audience of 20,000 admirers, he shattered that record by sitting atop a 225-foot-high flagpole in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for a whopping forty-nine days and one hour. Plenty of others tried to imitate Shipwreck Kelly in the 1920s and 1930s as flagpole sitting went viral. However, none achieved his level of popularity and fame, or racked up as many hours atop a flagpole as he did.
By Kelly’s calculations, in a two-decade career, he spent 20,613 hours atop flagpoles. That included 210 hours in sub-freezing temperatures and over 1400 hours in the rain. He earned a fortune in the 1920s from endorsements. He also charged admissions to his trials of endurance, and pre-leased and then rented out apartments with sight lines for his entertainments. However, flagpole sitting’s popularity waned after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and vanished during the Great Depression. By 1934, Kelly was broke, and had to work as a gigolo in a Broadway dance hall to make ends meet. He eventually died in obscurity in 1952. His body lay unclaimed in a New York City morgue for days, before somebody realized it was the once-famous Shipwreck Kelly.
