02:09:00
Jenny Wallenda
prepared in a dressing room before appearing at the opening of the Shrine
Circus in Detroit in 1964.Alvan Quinn/Associated Press
Jenny Wallenda, the
matriarch of the Wallendas, probably the most famous of all circus
families, died on Saturday at her home in Sarasota, Fla. She was 87.
Her death was announced by
her grandson Nik Wallenda, who has carried on the family tradition of daredevil
feats, most memorably by walking
on a high wire over Niagara Falls in 2012 and across
a gorge near the Grand Canyon in 2013.
Ms. Wallenda was the older daughter of the high-wire
walker Karl Wallenda, who formed the Wallendas (also known
as the Great Wallendas or the Flying Wallendas) with his brother Herman and
others in 1922.
The troupe made its
American debut with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in
1928.
She spent much of her
childhood in Germany, where her parents sent her to live with her grandparents
in 1934, when she was 6.
She survived the invasion
of Berlin by Soviet forces at the end of World War II and came to the United
States in 1947 to join the family act.
Her husband, Richard
Faughnan, was also a member of the troupe.
He was killed in 1962
while performing the Wallendas’ signature
trick, a seven-person pyramid.
In the trick, four men stood on a
wire 35 feet in the air carrying platforms on their shoulders, with two men on
top of them and, at the top of the pyramid, a woman sitting (and then standing)
on a chair.
On this occasion, in Detroit, the front man in the pyramid, Dieter
Schepp, lost his footing and the entire pyramid collapsed. Mr. Schepp and Mr.
Faughnan were killed.
Karl Wallenda died in 1978
when he fell while trying to walk between
the two towers of a hotel
in San Juan, P.R.
Ms. Wallenda helped create
the Circus
Ring of Fame and was inducted into it in 2008.
“In your honor,” Nik
Wallenda wrote of his grandmother on his
Facebook page, “I will never give up.”
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