Toni’s ankle slowly healed, but she grew increasingly anxious as she realized the training would now take five months, not four. And when, after three weeks, the doctor pronounced her fit and whole—a day on which she should have been jubilant—she instead burst into tears in Ella’s car on the way back.
“Ella, I’m so sorry,” she said, “but I—I can’t go on. I can’t stay.”
Ella looked at her, dumbfounded. “What! Why not?”
Her shame, anxiety, and guilt all came out in a rush: “Because I only had enough money for four months’ training and room and board and I wasted a whole month on this stupid ankle and I’m sorry, I’m sorry I wasted your time, I’ll never be a high diver!”
And then she collapsed into sobs. Ella pulled the car over to the side of the road, parked, and put a hand on Toni’s shoulder.
“Honey, calm down,” she said gently. “First off, accidents happen to all of us, it comes with the territory. Second, you don’t have to pay me another red cent. Third: you will be a high diver. I personally guarantee it.”
* * *
One month later, Toni was standing on the diving platform, a few rungs below the top of the ladder—the ninety-foot mark—savoring the view. The tower faced east, and at nine stories was taller than many of the buildings in St. Petersburg. She looked northeast and saw the green sprawl of two golf courses enclosed by the waters of Placido and Coffee Pot Bayous, and beyond that, Tampa Bay. She looked southeast and saw the gables and cupolas on the rooftops of the Old Northeast neighborhood.
But looking straight down, she was seized by an unexpected vertigo. The tank—which hadn’t seemed that much larger at eighty feet, had it?—looked about the size of a Dixie cup. She was going to jump into that?
“I feel like I’m standing on the top of the Empire State Building!”
A seagull glided on an air current about twenty feet below her, only heightening the surrealism of the moment.
“It’s just psychological!” Ella called up. “You’re only ten feet higher than you were yesterday. We all felt the same way the first time we did it!”
Toni gauged the distance, time, wind direction—her usual pre-jump checklist. Ella was right—it was only ten feet higher, she could do this.
No fancy somersault on the first try—she just launched herself into space, soaring briefly higher than the diving platform, then began to drop.
And what a drop! She was falling at thirty-seven feet per second, as the buildings, trees, sky, everything seemed to be falling upward, away from her. Her heart trip-hammered with excitement and terror as the Dixie cup turned into a water dish, then a dinner plate, a wading pool—
Her feet struck the water, which at fifty miles an hour felt like hitting concrete. As she penetrated the water, she extended her legs, tipped back her head, raised her arms … and then she was underwater, slowing, drifting toward the bottom like a leaf. She smiled, mirroring the attitude of her body. She felt both calm and exhilarated, safely cocooned in water.
When she surfaced, Ella was standing on the catwalk, grinning.
“Where’s your tailbone? Has it migrated up your rectum?”
“Nope,” Toni said. “It’s right where it should be.”
“Congratulations. You are now, officially, a high diver.”
18
Largo, Florida, 1950
TONI’S MIND WAS SPINNING with excitement, like the Ferris wheel revolving gaily behind Ella’s diving tower. It was the first day of the Pinellas County Fair, the first performance of the day—and the first day of the life she had previously only dreamed of. She stood behind the tank, adjusting the straps of her colorful, one-piece bathing suit—an arched rainbow of red, orange, yellow, and green splashed across her chest and a sky-blue background. She felt a bit uncomfortable with the amount of décolletage on display, but Ella had assured her, “You’re an attractive young lady and crowds always like to see attractive young ladies doing unexpected things—like jumping off a forty-foot tower into five feet of water. I used to trade on the same lack of convention, but now that the last blush of spring has left my cheeks I’ll soon be the sweet little old grandma who sets herself on fire and dives into a flaming tank. That’s what makes for a good act, the tension between what the performer appears to be and what she does. The greater the tension, the more audiences love it—as long as you deliver.”
Thus there were signs all around the city of Largo advertising Ella as THE FLAMING VENUS or THE INTERNATIONAL THRILL GIRL, though she was well past what anyone might reasonably call girlhood.
Toni peeked around the curvature of the tank and saw an audience of perhaps one hundred crowding the bleachers: people munching on popcorn or hot dogs, women holding babies in their laps, older children gazing up in wonder at the diving tower even as Toni had done at their age, at Palisades Park. That wasn’t the only thing that reminded her of Palisades—the smell of cotton candy wafted in from a nearby concession, as did the stutter of pellet guns at a shooting gallery and the sound of people laughing on the Tilt-a-Whirl as gravity whipped them crazily around in circles.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” boomed an announcer’s voice, “shortly, from this ninety-foot tower, Ella Carver, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of two grown children, will dive headfirst into a tank filled with only five feet of water!”
Through this, Ella came up behind Toni, put a maternal hand on her shoulder, and whispered, “Break a leg, hon—just don’t take that literally.”
“But before she does, her lovely assistant, a young lady not yet out of her teens, will thrill you with her astounding midair gymnastics! Pinellas County Fair presents that sensational duo, Ella Carver and Toni Stopka!”
Hearing her name announced for the first time in these electric tones galvanized Toni, as did the round of applause that welcomed her entrance. She raced out from behind the tank, made a small bow to the audience, then ran to the tower and began climbing—practically propelled up the ladder by the driving, pulsing rhythms of Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.” She reached her goal quickly—she would not be diving from the ninety-foot platform this afternoon, but from the forty-foot platform. She was, after all, only the warm-up act—she had to give Ella something to “top.”
She stood on the platform, looking down at the tank. Everything seemed so different from the practice dive she’d taken that morning—the presence of the crowd changed everything, the sound, the motion, even the temperature of the air. Ella had warned her to be observant of anything unusual before she jumped—all it took was some idiot to trip over a guy wire, jostling the platform, to turn a routine dive into a fatal plunge. She scanned the crowd for possible hazards, gauged her distances, then—as “Sabre Dance” faded out over the loudspeakers, leaving a dramatic silence—she turned around on the platform, standing with her back to the audience.
Below her she heard gasps from the crowd, which made her smile.
She pushed herself off the platform backward, as she had watched Bee Kyle do years ago, and at the pinnacle of her jump she pulled her knees up to her chin, clasped her thighs tightly with her hands, threw her head back, and somersaulted as she fell—catching glimpses of the sky, the tank, the crowd below, pinwheeling like the shards of color in a kaleidoscope. Then she straightened her body and did a full gainer, feet-first, into the tank.
She flutter-kicked to the surface, climbed up the side ladder, and a wave of applause washed over her, as warm as the waters of Tampa Bay.
She took her bows, instantly addicted to the sound.
Then, just as quickly, it was her job to step back out of the limelight, jumping off the catwalk as the announcer introduced the top half of the bill: “Now, the International Thrill Girl herself—Ella Carver!”
Ella passed Toni briefly on her way to the tower, gave her a smile and wink of approval, then began climbing the ladder all the way to the top.
Ella performed her flawless swan dive from ninety feet up, which brought an even bigger round of applause and cheerin
g from the crowd.
That evening, Toni performed a backward somersault from ninety feet, took her applause, then began sprinkling gasoline on the water in preparation for Ella’s fire dive. She lit the gas with a torch, hoping no one would notice the way she kept her arm rigid and the flame as far away from her as possible. A ring of flames erupted like a lit fuse around the tank, eliciting gasps from the audience, as Ella ascended the tower and, at the top, ignited the gasoline packs on her back. She burst into flame, leaped into the air, plummeting down into the middle of the flaming tank. The waterspout from Ella’s entry doused the flames—and the crowd went wild, cheering, hooting, applauding, as the lithe diver climbed up the ladder and onto the catwalk around the tank.
In a lovely gesture, she took Toni’s hand and held it aloft with hers, sharing the audience’s approbation with her assistant.
Even more touching was at the end of their five-day engagement, when Ella, behind the wheel of the truck, said, “Oh, by the by,” reached into her pocket, and handed Toni a thick wad of cash. “Here’s your share of the take. Ten dives at twenty-five dollars a pop.”
Toni stared at the money—mostly twenty-dollar bills—and had no trouble believing there was two hundred and fifty dollars in her hand.
“I can’t take this,” she objected. “I’m supposed to be paying you.”
“You’ve graduated, honey, you’re a working part of the act. The fair wasn’t paying for one diver but for two, and I made sure they paid for two. You’re a professional now, and professionals get paid. If they’re lucky.”
Toni sat there, stunned, looking at more money than she had ever earned at one time before, and managed a soft, “Thank you.”
Ella tossed her a smile. “Not a bad racket, is it?”
Toni grinned and said, “Strictly delish.”
* * *
There were a lot of winter fairs in Florida alone, and after Largo, they went straight to the Florida State Fair in Tampa, followed by the Florida Citrus Exhibition in Winter Haven, the Indian River Orange Jubilee in Cocoa Beach, and the Lake County Fair and Sportsmen’s Exposition in Eustis. It was at the state fair that Ella introduced Toni to the concept of press notices, in this case a small review from the Tampa Tribune mainly praising Ella but also mentioning “her assistant, teenage Toni Stopka, and her aerial gymnastics.” Toni immediately bought her own copy of the paper.
The diving was not nearly as tiring as the driving and the assembling, disassembling, and reassembling of equipment. After a long day of driving and rigging, Ella often had more energy left over than Toni, who would wolf down dinner and crawl into bed like a whipped dog. So Toni was surprised by Ella’s announcement that next month, when they started touring with a carnival, Ella would be hiring a professional rigger: “I wanted you to get your hands dirty, like every diver’s got to do sometimes. But with all the jumps a carnival makes, we’re hiring a rigger—even I can only take so much of this.”
She ran an ad in The Billboard and wound up hiring a former sideshow strongman, a forty-two-year-old Norwegian gone slightly to seed … though his still-staggering biceps could pound in axle stakes with three quick hammer blows. His name was Arlan and he seemed content just to still be working in the outdoor amusement business. He took over the driving, called Ella “ma’am” and Toni “missy,” and was happy to sleep in a corner of the truck, which Ella had comfortably outfitted with a mattress, sheets, pillow, and a small battery-powered light.
After a few days’ rest in St. Petersburg, they hit the road again. For the past few years Ella had been performing, at least part of the time, with the Central States Shows, a medium-size (fourteen rides, ten shows, forty concessions) truck carnival whose crowded schedule began in Kansas in April, ran through the Midwest in summer, then in September headed “south to the cotton”—Texas and beyond.
Ella met up with the carnival in mid-April in Wellington, Kansas, a small town surrounded by acres of golden wheat as bright and beautiful as the Florida sun. Arlan proved himself a good, fast rigger, freeing Ella and Toni to focus on their performances. Central States Shows was managed by W. W. “Scobey” Moser, who back in ’42 had patriotically enlisted in the Army and put his carnival in cold storage for the duration. The midways were anchored by familiar rides like the Ferris wheel, the Spitfire, and a roller coaster, and populated by grind men hawking familiar concessions—Penny Arcade, String Game, Fish Pond, Hoop-la, Guess Your Weight, Cat Rack—and grab stands offering corn dogs, hamburgers, and Coca-Cola.
Ella’s and Toni’s first performance drew praise not only from the audience but from a fellow performer as well. After the evening show, as Ella was in the truck stripping off her slightly singed woolen tights, a young man wearing a red, white, and blue jumpsuit came up to Toni as she finished helping Arlan throw a tarp over the tank. “Great show,” he told her.
“Thanks.” He seemed a few years shy of thirty, dark-haired, with the lean frame and chiseled good looks of a Frank Sinatra. He spoke with a Midwestern twang, the o in show being a dead giveaway.
He extended a hand. “Cliff Bowles. I do a human cannonball act at the other end of the midway.”
“Toni Stopka. Nice to meet you.”
“You’ve got great control over your body. I say that as not a masher but as someone who also flies through the air and has to make a soft landing—in my case, in a net—a hundred feet away.”
She laughed. “I’d like to see that.”
“I’m on in fifteen minutes. Come on over if you get a chance.”
He threw her a lopsided smile as he walked away, and she knew there was absolutely no way she would not go to that show tonight.
She walked down the midway to where posters announced, and just in case you couldn’t read, an outside talker repeated:
JETMAN, THE HUMAN MISSILE!
SHOT FROM A CANNON AT 60 MILES PER HOUR
OVER NOT ONE BUT FOUR CARS TO A NET 100 FEET AWAY!
WILL TODAY BE THE DAY HE DOESN’T MAKE IT?
Toni took a seat in the stands with the crowd, taking in the huge flag-painted cannon tilted at a forty-five-degree angle into the sky, a ladder propped up against the muzzle. A few yards down, four Chevy sedans were lined up end to end, at least sixty feet of automotive metal; and about five yards beyond that a large horizontal net was stretched out, secured to the ground in all four corners by thirty-five-foot guy wires.
“Ladies and gentlemen, here he is—Jetman, the Human Missile!”
Cliff made his entrance in his red, white, and blue jumpsuit, matching crash helmet, and a pair of aviator goggles that made him look like a cross between a jet pilot and a Fourth of July parade marshal. The crowd cheered as he gave them a wave before climbing up a short ladder and into the two-foot-wide mouth of the cannon. His head disappeared below the rim of the barrel, a drum roll played over the loudspeakers, and Cliff’s “trigger puller,” Phil, a young man about Toni’s age, made a great show of lighting the fuse.
“Five—four—three—two—one—FIRE!”
BOOM! With a thunderous crack and a cloud of smoke, the cannon fired, propelling the red, white, and blue figure of “Jetman” out at tremendous speed—head up, arms at his side. He flew in a parabolic arc above the first car … the second … the third … the fourth … and at the last minute, as he reached the net, Toni saw him do a half-somersault, turning his body over in time so that he landed safely on his back.
Toni had seen Victoria Zacchini of the Zacchini cannonball troupe perform at Palisades during the war, so she knew it wasn’t a real cannon and that Cliff was ejected by a blast of compressed air, with some gunpowder ignited for smoke and sound effects—but it was still an impressive feat.
The crowd, unaware of how the act worked, cheered as Cliff got out of the net and waved triumphantly.
Afterward, Toni lingered and approached him. “You’ve got a pretty slick act yourself,” she said. “That was a nice half-somersault into the net.”
“Aw, that’s the only part that
takes any real skill,” Cliff said. “For the first part of it you’re literally unconscious.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. That compressed air carries so much kick you’re zooming out of there at seven or eight times the force of gravity. It literally pushes the blood from your brain down to your feet with such force that you black out for a few seconds. Hey, can I buy you a beer?”
He asked her with the same casual tone as when he spoke of blacking out in the middle of his act. This guy was a cool customer. “I’m nineteen, I’m not sure I’m old enough to drink in this state,” she said.
“I’ll buy it for you. This is a carny, no one’s gonna arrest you.”
At a grab stand, Cliff bought them a couple of bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and pretzels with mustard. As they sat munching and drinking at a picnic table, Toni said she found the four-car flyover very impressive.
“Aw, that’s kid’s stuff, really,” Cliff said, washing down a bite of pretzel with a swig of beer. “Ever hear of a cannonballer called the Great Wilno? I was his trigger puller for two years. At the New York World’s Fair he cannonballed over a gigantic Ferris wheel and into his net. The guy he’s got working for him now, Hank DuBois, catapults over two Ferris wheels.”
“Wow!”
“Scobey Moser won’t let me jump over his Ferris wheel—he’s afraid I’ll kill myself and someone on the ride, too—so I go for distance instead. I’ve been in this game for five years, I may not be the best but I was taught by one of the best—Wilno—and someday I will be the best.” He took a swallow of beer. “Ella Carver’s one of the best too, you’ve got a great teacher.”
“I know it.” She finished her pretzel and said, “What got you into it?”
“Wanted to be a trapeze artist. Wanted to fly. First time I saw Wilno, I thought: Man, that’s like flying a V-2 rocket! The speed hooked me, and the challenge of going higher, farther, faster—that’s what keeps me hooked.