Pole Position

Sometimes the most curious thing you can find is high above you. Here are two figures we can all look up to.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Cities often seen cramped and crowded, don't they People work
and live in skyscrapers that soar over streets clogged with
taxis and pedestrians. After all, in a city you can't
build out, you build up. When you think of narrow
alleyways and densely packed streets, we often think of places
like New York City and Chicago. But one location that
isn't often talked about lies roughly four thousand miles away

(01:00):
the ocean, and that place is Paris, France, and back
in nineteen nineteen, one man did the impossible. He landed
a plane in the middle of the city of Lights.
His name was Jules Vdrine born in France in eighteen
eighty one. Vadrine was a hoodlum who spent much of
his youth getting in fights on the streets of Paris.
But despite his heart in nature, he also grew up

(01:21):
to become a skilled mechanic. Vadrine eventually found his way
to London when he was twenty nine to work under
actor and aviator Robert Lorraine. After six months, the former
street urchin earned his own pilot's license and started making
a name for himself all over Paris. He won or
placed in a number of air races, which eventually helped
him launch a political career as a Socialist candidate in

(01:43):
local elections. Although he was in adept pilots with numerous
trophies on his wall, he had less luck in politics,
but that didn't stop him from trying. He even used
his skills as a pilot to drop propaganda over the
Chamber of Deputies in Paris in eighteen twelve, the year
that he ran. These skills carried him through World War One,

(02:03):
where he ran secret service missions delivering troops over enemy
lines or getting them out of harm's way. Thedrine had
gone from fighting in the streets of Paris to saving
the lives of his comrades and arms. Quite the journey
for a young man, but the achievement for which he
is best known was yet to come. Before the war
had started, a contest had been announced, with the grand

(02:24):
prize of twenty five thousand francs to be given to
the pilot who could land his plane on the roof
of Paris's Galery Lafayette department store. To do so was
quite dangerous, after all, the rooftop rows only thirty meters
above the Paris streets, with no room for a runway.
Even the police had to step in. They saw how
risky it was and issued in order forbidding anyone to

(02:46):
try it. But Jules Vdrine wasn't exactly someone to listen
to authority. He knew he could do it. After all,
he'd been a World War One hero, clocking in over
one thousand hours running airborne reconnaissance missions for the French Army.
Landing a place lane on the roof of a department
store would be a piece of cake. So on January
nineteenth of nineteen nineteen, Vdrine hopped into the cockpit of

(03:08):
his Quadron G point three, a single engine French plane.
This would have been the same plane that he'd flown
during the war. Very little about the event is known today,
save for a few photographs that remain. But what is
clear is that Vadrine successfully landed his plane on the
roof of the Gallery Lafayette, and in order to make
sure that he didn't overshoot the landing, he had a

(03:28):
team of men waiting to catch the Quadron by its
wings as it touched down, and his wild plan worked.
Although he won the twenty five thousand francs, six francs
were deducted for landing in a restricted area of the
roof and for any damage caused by the stunt. He
and the plane also suffered injuries as a result. But
he done it. Jules Vdrine had become the first person

(03:51):
to land an airplane on top of a building. His
victory was short lived, though, a few months later, while
piloting a Quadron C twenty three to Rome, his engine
failed and the aviator died trying to land his aircraft. Today,
all that remains of the event is an engraved stone
plaque on the roof of the Gallery Lafayette, burying the
face of Jules Vadrine and a description of what happened

(04:12):
that day. And as someone who has struggled to find
parking spots while going shopping myself, you have to admire
how Vdrine found such a curious solution. Alvin loved getting high,

(04:38):
but not in the way you might think. He was
born Alouisious Anthony Kelly in Hell's Kitchen, New York, on
May eleventh of eighteen ninety three. He didn't know his parents.
His mother died during childbirth and his father passed away
before he was born. He was adopted by a family friend,
but it was clear from a young age that Kelly
had his eyes on a life outside of Hell's Kitchen.

(05:00):
When he was thirteen years old, Alvin ran away from
home and signed up for work on a cargo ship.
As he grew older, he took on a number of
professions including steel worker, high diver, chimney and roof repairman, boxer,
and as a stunt pilot for movies. And it was
his work on films that helps him make a name
for himself outside of his old neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen.

(05:20):
In January of nineteen twenty four, a local movie theater
hired Kelly for a publicity stunt to help sell tickets
for an upcoming picture. His job climbed to the top
of a tall pole and sit on it. It was
apparently something that he'd been good at since he was
a boy. Kelly had climbed to the top of a
pole when he was only seven years old, at least

(05:40):
according to one witness. Then when he was nine, he
climbed up the side of a building all by himself.
But in the winter of nineteen twenty four, he sat
on top of a pole for over thirteen hours, all
to spread word about a new movie being released. Except
it wasn't the movie that he wound up advertising. It
was Alvin Kelly himself. He started traveling all over the

(06:01):
country just sitting on poles for money and attention, and
the people loved him for it. Local businesses sponsored him
and even hired him to advertise for them. He gained
fans who would wait for him to climb down from
his perch so that they would meet him afterward. But
spending hours on top of a flagpole could be taxing
for the average stuntman. So how did Kelly pull it off? Well,

(06:23):
For one, he didn't eat much. He subsisted mainly on
coffee and broth, which he had delivered to him using
a bucket hooked to a rope and pulley. He also
taught himself to nap. Sitting up, he would stick his
thumbs into holes at the top of the pole, and
when his sleeping body would list in one direction, the
pain in his hands would snap him awake. Of course,
staying up there for tens of hours meant that all

(06:44):
those liquids had to go somewhere, and it wasn't like
he had a porta potty on a pole next to him. Allegedly,
Kelly had rigged up a tube system that ran the
length of the pole to a container on the ground
with which he would relieve himself into. This was better
than an alternative solution that would have required spectators to
carry umbrellas with them, and when he wasn't evacuating his bladder,

(07:05):
Kelly could be seen shaving or reading the newspaper as
though he were simply going about his normal day and
not sitting one hundred feet in the air on a
narrow metal pole. Kelly quickly outdid his record of thirteen
hours and thirteen minutes. In nineteen twenty seven, he sat
on a pole for one hundred and forty seven hours
in the middle of February in Kansas City, Missouri. Having

(07:26):
spent my youth in the Midwest, I can only imagine
how horrible that was. He battled wind and rain and cold,
only to go even longer in Atlantic City in nineteen
thirty On that occasion, he sat on top of a
pole for nearly twelve hundred hours, that's forty nine days.
He never let the weather or discomfort sway him, either
whether it was ten degrees out or blistering hot. He

(07:48):
would give the people what they wanted, and apparently what
they wanted to see was a man sitting on a pole. Sadly,
his days of flagpole sitting came to an end in
nineteen thirty five, at least profession. He was one day
into an attempt to break his Atlantic City record when
the police forced him to get down. After that moment,
he went in got a regular job to make ends meet.

(08:11):
A New York Dunkin Donuts hired him in nineteen thirty
nine to do headstands on the fifty fourth floor of
the Channon Building in Manhattan for National Donut Week. He
performed while eating donuts and drinking coffee upside down, but
soon after the Sea called him back for duty. He
served during World War II as a merchant marine before
returning to his old life without a penny to his name.

(08:33):
He tried flagpole sitting again in nineteen fifty two, but
a stunt in Orange, Texas proved to be too much
for him. He was sixty five feet in the air
when he suffered a series of heart attacks. They did
not kill him, though, but they did force him to
retire from flagpole sitting forever. Kelly went back to Hell's
Kitchen to live out the rest of his days, and
I do mean days. While walking down the street in

(08:54):
his old neighborhood. Soon after his return, he collapsed on
the sidewalk and died. He had no more and no
family to claim him from the morgue. He was eventually
laid to rest at Long Island National Cemetery Alvin Shipwreck.
Kelly accomplished a lot during his relatively short life. He
may not have been blind or been given superpowers in
a freak accident, but he'll always be remembered as the

(09:16):
original Daredevil of Hell's Kitchen. I hope you've enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me,
Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make

(09:40):
another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show and you can learn all
about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious.