Twelve Days

Should a man throw into the air a tennis ball, catch it as it falls, he would perform no great feat, arouse no great attention. But should he make, consecutively, 100,000 throws, 100,000 catches, he would become a famed person whom vaudeville patrons would lay down dimes, quarters, halves to see. For any action, no matter how trivial or inane, becomes a heroic achievement, if it is persisted in long enough to constitute some sort of record.

Thus, for example, one Alvin ("Shipwreck") Kelly expects soon to collect $1,000 per week in vaudeville. No singer, no dancer, no card-trickster, no chatterer, no club-swinger is Mr. Kelly. He is a sitter. Last week he came down from a seat fastened to the top of the flagpole on the roof of the St. Francis Hotel, Newark, N. J. There he had perched continuously for twelve days and twelve hours (TIME, June 20).

During this period the hotel roof was peopled with wide-eyed, neck-cramped gazers at 25c per head. Others, equally curious but less solvent, jammed streets, stopped traffic, broke down fences, trampled lawns. Concessionaires opened hotdog, coffee, soft drink and peanut dispensaries.

One Lee Rapport, Polish, 22, of New York City, challenged Mr. Kelly to a polar marathon, claimed that Mr. Kelly's pretentions to the squatting championship were fraudulent in the extreme, inasmuch as he (Mr. Rapport) had once sat on a Parisian flagpole for 21 days. One Hugo Bihler, just-arrived German immigrant, who speaks no English, also challenged for the Sitting Sweepstakes, as did an unidentified Bostonian. Cried Mr. Kelly, belligerently, "Let those guys pick their poles and sit!" But none sat.

Eventually, stiff, sore, weak from twelve days' abstaining from solid food, Mr. Kelly came down. First he kissed his 19-year-old bride of six months, who had kept watch on the hotel roof, and hoisted up supplies on a pulley system. Then he prepared to exercise the cramped fingers of his right hand in the pleasant task of signing the vaudeville contract promised as the fruit of his labors.