Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly Rode Flagpole to Fame
Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly Rode Flagpole to Fame
By Brian D’Ambrosio
Fads, by nature, are short-lived and exhausted quickly. Now and again they fully enmesh the nation in some incredible, though usually innocuous, temporary craze. Looking back, a lot of them leave us shaking our heads.
Perhaps one of the most wackiest of them all – flagpole sitting – returns us to the year 1924 and the life of Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, perhaps “the greatest flagpole sitter of them all,” as he was frequently billed. Yes, Shipwreck Kelly parked himself atop flagpoles for a living – nothing more – but he popularized something in a decade that did not lack for zany attention-grabbers in the first place. Indeed, Kelly was a superstar, once earning as much as $500 a day by sitting on precarious perches and he toured dozens of cities and stirred the imaginations of enthusiasts throughout the country.
Deciphering the Life, Legend of “Shipwreck”
It wasn’t always simple to tell how it all began because “Shipwreck” hardly ever told the same story two times. What is true is that Kelly was born Aloysius Anthony Kelly on May 11, 1893, in Hell’s Kitchen, an infamous tenement district of New York City. His father died before he was born and his mother died at his birth. He was adopted by a family friend and, according to Kelly, “ran away to sea,” changing his name to “Alvin” when he was only seven. There are stories of him shimmying up the sides of buildings as a defiant teenager, but they might be apocryphal. He later related stories of him performing duties as a seaman, a structural steel worker, a high diver, and even a pilot who performed aerial stunts.
The “Shipwreck” nickname traces back to a time when he boxed and called himself “Sailor Kelly.” Apparently, his five-foot-seven-inch frame was on the canvas so much of the time that the fans took to shouting, “The sailor’s been shipwrecked again.”
Origins of a Wacky Career
The most plausible story about the origins of his strange career began in Hollywood in January, 1924. Kelly, then 31, found work performing a risky feat as a steeplejack in a stunt role for a motion picture. Someone on the set asked him whether he thought he could last 10 hours on a flagpole. Kelly answered yes. Soon, he found himself on a mast outside of a Los Angeles theater as an advertising shill for the film then on display. He stayed up for 13 hours and 13 minutes, pocketing a side bet with the theater owner, and then slid down to ringing cheers from “a medium-sized multitude,” he later said.
That set him on the road to fame, and he began to bill himself as “The Luckiest Fool Alive” and benefit from the employ of the name Shipwreck. In 1927 Shipwreck sat on a pole atop St. Francis Hotel for 312 hours, earning about $600. In 1928, his fees mounted to $100 a day, and he topped all his own records in the notable year of 1929 by putting in a total of 145 days on one precarious perch or another and netted approximately $29,000.
Ticket fees, endorsements (including cigarettes, cigars, car dealers, and newspapers), written materials, and personal appearances – Shipwreck was earning good money coming in from all directions. He not only was collecting amply from the hotel and cutting in on the receipts from the rooftop admission charge but had a coffee sponsor as well, while his manager was peddling a pamphlet describing the earlier feats in somewhat extravagant terms.
One of Shipwreck’s most spectacular feats, in December 1928, kept him on a flagpole atop the Paramount Hotel in New York for 13 days, 13 hours, and 13 minutes in zero cold, snow, sleet and freezing rain. Some grand feat, although news accounts related, “he was bitter when he came down.” Apparently, only 13 copies of his pamphlet had been sold in all that time.
“Flagpole-sitting ain’t what it used to be,” he lamented.
But there were other perks, too, In Dallas he married an elevator operator to whom he was introduced when she was boosted up to the top of a pole to shake hands with him. They had one son Alvin Jr., who, it was told, clambered up backyard poles with his father.
Shipwreck was a daredevil but he was clearly no dummy: there were safeguards atop the flagpoles. When he stood on the six-to eight-inch deck that served as his platform, he had stirrups attached to the pole so that he wouldn’t plunge to the ground if he fell asleep and lost his balance.
Parked on the his backside, he used a cushioned eight-inch seat fashioned from a Ford brakedrum, either locking his thumbs into special holes or keeping his little fingers between his teeth so that he would instantly react if he dozed and started to quiver.
A particular kind, he always kept shaving equipment on hand, and when he found one so daring, a manicurist would be hoisted up to trim and polish his nails. He said he trained himself to “take five-minute catnaps” on the hours to keep his strength. He took nourishment regularly, mostly liquids, usually coffee, hoisted up to him on a rope.
He read a lot of newspapers while on the high throne and once invited a competitor to box with him a couple rounds in the sky. During one stunt scheduled for eight days, he told a reporter that he fasted on coffee for all eight of them “to show that people didn’t need to eat so much.” He stayed on that 54-foot flagpole for 13 days. There was money in the extra time and publicity, he understood.
Spawned Many Imitators, Even Impostors
By the early 1930s, the flagpoles were crawling with imitators, as this New York Tribune article affirms:
“Right into the ‘30s, there was barely a day when one hardy soul or another wasn’t on some high perch striving to wean away a portion of Kelly’s fame – and, of course, his paltry fortune.”
Doing a stint atop the Plaza Hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey, Shipwreck said that he was “shocked” and “embarrassed” to find a lawman stationed below him waiting to serve the papers in a $75 nonpayment suit filed by some press agent; the document really was intended for a flagpole sitter of decidedly lesser renown who also happened to be plugging away under the name of Shipwreck Kelly.
He found the impostor tucked between the sheets in the Plaza Hotel in that very town and swiftly exhibited a copyright filed in Washington giving him sole and exclusive right to the name in the United States and a slew of other countries, including China and Great Britain.
End of Daredevil Fad
In 1930, Shipwreck set a world flagpole sitting record of more than 49 days. But as the Great Depression increased with its power, people were less and less interested spending money to watch eccentrics on poles any more, and from splendor he sank into squalor. In 1934 Shipwreck found work as a dancer at a Broadway hall and during World War II he applied to resume his career as a merchant seaman. Also that year, in need of something to revive the waning interest in his exploits, Shipwreck let it be known that he was prepared to plunge off the George Washington Bridge on “a greased rope.”
The journalists and newsreel cameramen arrived in force – but so did the law. Kelly’s rope happened to be 52 feet short of the 250 needed to deposit him in the Hudson River in one piece, so the authorities canceled that trip.
In 1935, with the purses ever slimmer, Shipwreck took steps to bring a minor league rival into court for advertising himself as the real thing. The culprit proved too elusive to be brought to the judge, and Shipwreck grumbled about his own fate.
“I once had 17 other Shipwreck Kellys arrested,” he said, “but what’s the use? There’s always more.”
Opportunities became seemingly less and less dignified. For example, on October 13, 1939, at age 46, he stood on his head on a plank jutting out from the roof of the 56-story Chanin Building, “the tallest skyscraper in midtown New York,” according to contemporary news accounts, and “ate 13 hand-fed donuts for National Donut Week.”
An ad in a St. Louis newspaper in 1940 promoted an appearance by Kelly on a flagpole atop a new Kroger Super Self-Service Market. During the grand opening Kelly broadcasted over a telephone attached to a loud speaker and his vigil in the sky lasted seventy-two-hours.
By 1942, things were so dire that Shipwreck took on an assignment to paint the flagpole at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey; careless, he fell five feet one day and got hurt. Around that time, one of Kelly’s final interviews appeared in a Missouri newspaper, in which he showed up with a scrapbook “telling of his 13,000 hours standing and sitting on poles” clutched under his arm.
Goodbye to the Great Flagpole Sitter
The conclusion came on a chilly October Saturday night in 1952 when the police found a body between two parked cars on a West Side Manhattan sidewalk. A pocket stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings identified him as Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, whose name had once graced the marquee of Madison Square Garden, just a block away.
The police said he had been “almost penniless” living on relief in the same neighborhood of his birth. In death, he pulled off one final lark. His real age was determined to be 67 – eight years older than the age he had given when he was doing his most popular publicity stunts.
Brian D’Ambrosio’s newest book, "Montana Eccentrics: A Collection of Extraordinary Montanans, Past & Present," was released in September 2023. He is currently at work on a book about New Mexico eccentrics.