March 2, 2019 • 27 mins
We're revisiting a 2015 episode about Katie Sandwina, who wowed crowds from an early age, first as a wrestling act and then exclusively as professional strongwoman. During a time when women's suffrage was a hot button issue, she cultivated an image of a perfectly feminine powerhouse.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week on the show, we talked
about General Toma Alexandra Duma, who rose to the top
ranks of the military during the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars. And one of the things that came up
in the episode was how he liked to do strong
band style stunts, and that kept reminding me of our
previous episode on Katie Sandwina from back in January, and
(00:24):
Sandwena was a strong woman. I love her and I
think she's incredibly amazing. She also was an activist for
women's rights, and we're going to share her story again today,
so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
(00:48):
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
and it's We're in a new year, which means a
lot of people are making New Year's resolutions about how
much I loved them before uh, and it got me
thinking about topics that might center around that, and a
lot of people at this time of year like to
(01:10):
kind of focus on maybe hitting the gym a little
bit more. This is why when I've been in the
regular gym going habit. I always basically take January to
do other things. Yeah, it tends to be the big rush.
Like people that are regular gym goers will find like
this is the influx when they can't get a machine
or can't get you know, time in the spot they
(01:31):
want in the gym before everybody gets tired and wears out.
But it got me thinking about fitness and whether or
not we could find a good fitness related podcast. And
at first I wanted to talk about sort of the
advent of the health club and the gym in America,
which goes back much farther than you may suspect. But
that's not actually we're going to talk about today because
while I was researching that, I then stumbled upon something
(01:54):
else that got me really really excited, and that is
Katie Sandwina, who was a strong woman with sort of
just a wonderful, fascinating story uh that made me laugh
and also be amazed and say wow a lot and
also send me lots of I M s as you do.
(02:14):
I was. I just every time I unturned a new
piece of information about her, I was like, oh, we'll go, Tracy,
guess what else? And then and then like I turned
into a child. So it seemed like I was on
the right track in terms of exciting topics, at least
for me. So today we're going to talk about Katie
Sandwina and her sort of really remarkable life but also
just her remarkable nous as a human, not just because
(02:38):
she was so strong, but because she was just a
kind of a She has a fascinating story. Sandwina was
born Katherine Brumbach in Vienna, Austria, in four Her Bavarian parents,
who were Philippe and Joanna Brumbach, were both circus performers,
and they wowed crowds with feats of strength. Philipp was
a mountain of a man, standing reported six ft six
(03:01):
inches tall and weighing two d sixty pounds. Joanna was
a strong woman and she was about six ft tall,
and the couple had either fourteen, fifteen or sixteen children together,
depending on which source you read. I saw kind of
not almost equal smattering across all of those numbers, but
in any event, we're talking about a really sizeable family. Catherine,
(03:24):
who went by Katie, was the second oldest, and while
she and three of her sisters, Barbara, Marie, and Eugenia
all performed with their parents in their strong person act.
It wasn't very long before Katie really stood out as exceptional.
Even as young as two years old, she was able
to hold a handstand really easily, like they would do
a trick where she would hold a handstand on her
(03:45):
father's hands as part of the show. Uh. And so
she began gymnastics training pretty quickly to develop her natural
proclivity in that direction, And she also started appearing on
stage pretty regularly with mom and dad. And we're talking
again a two year old. In her teen years, Katie
was already almost six feet tall and was quite lean
(04:06):
in a hundred and eighties seven pounds, and she worked
really diligently to develop this natural strength that she seemed
to have. As her might grew, so did her looks.
She was considered to be really a beauty, and so
her father developed a whole circus act around her. Yeah,
and it's maybe not the act you would expect at
(04:28):
the various circuses where the family performed throughout Europe. Uh.
Philippe at the end of them, showing off all of
their feats of strength, would offer one hundred German marks
cash to any man or woman who could best Katie
in a wrestling match, and the prospect of wrestling with
an attractive young woman, Uh no doubt had serious appeal
for the gentleman who stepped up to try. They did
(04:49):
very well with this this act. H and Katie took
on many, many challengers and she never lost a single fight.
But there was a sort of fun and surprising outcome
from this act. Eventually, this act ended up adding to
the Brumbach family. There was a young nineteen year old
man named Max Hayman, and he was an acrobat. He
(05:12):
took the challenge to wrestle Katie and he stepped into
the ring with her, was promptly knocked out, and then
she carded him out of the ring up. She was
at that point sixteen years old, and in a terribly
charming twist to the story, the strong woman and her
vanquished challenger, Hayman fell in love. They were married two
(05:32):
years later and Max officially became part of the act.
And again, he was also an acrobat, so he when
they were with the circus, he wasn't just being uh
with Katie's act. He was also doing things like, you know,
standing on horses as they ran around and other acrobatic things,
and their match seems to have been really quite happy.
They stayed together for the rest of Katie's life. In
(05:54):
some interviews given later on in his life, Max tells
the story as though he fell madly in love with
her that very day and then ran away with her
to get married, much to the chagrin of Katie's father,
but that does not add up given the census records.
The Census reports that Max indicated that Katie and he
(06:14):
had been married um when she was nineteen and he
was twenty ones. That was a couple of years after
this whole thing happened. Yeah, that lines up with most
of the histories about Katie. There are only these few
sort of interviews with Max later in life that it
seems like he may be played up the sort of
um whirlwind nature of their of their marriage. That it's
(06:37):
very cute because he'll talk about how all he remembers
is stepping in the ring, seeing the blue sky when
he fell down, and then coming to as Katie carried
him away, which sort of a cute, fun start to
a romance. I don't recommend knocking someone out as a
way to win their heart, but it's sure to work
in this case. Uh. And in nineteen o nine, Katie
(06:58):
and her act made their way to the United States.
She was performing with Max and one to two other
gentlemen as the Sandwina's Uh. They actually took this name
on It wasn't the name they originally came over with
because on a visit to New York, she issued a
challenge at the end of her act to anyone that
wanted to try to lift more weight than she could.
(07:21):
She had one taker from the crowd, and it was
a doozy Eugen sand Out. And sand Out was a
Prussian born bodybuilder. He'd always already become very famous as
the sort of the embodiment of the perfect male physique.
He made a career of appearing on stage wearing nothing
more than a fig leaf or other very scant clothing
(07:41):
and gladiator sandals to show off his extremely powerful muscles.
Yeah these are they're hilarious to me. Pictures out there
of him standing in his fig leaf like flexing so
you could see every you know, part of his body.
But so, he was widely believed to be the strongest
and on earth. And so when he emerged from the
(08:02):
crowd to take this challenge, Katie was a little concerned
that she had made a woeful misstep. Uh you know,
remember this is a girl that never lost a fight,
so the thought that she might be facing like defeat
in front of a crowd was probably very terrifying. But
she did not back down and the weightlifting challenge began.
So the way this worked was that Katie would lift
(08:24):
up a weight and then the challenger standout would have
to lift up the same weight, and this went on
for a while with an ever increasing weight load. Finally,
Katie lifted three hundred pounds up over her head. And
Katie had put the weight down and Sandow took the
three pounds up, he could only lift it to chest level.
(08:45):
So the challenge was over and Katie had officially beaten
the most famous strong man in the world at a
weightlifting competition. And so before we jump into how they
become the Sandwinas and what happens next, we're going to
take a quick word from a sponsor. So back to uh,
(09:12):
Katie Sandwina. It was after this challenge with Sandow that
Katie started appearing under the name Sandwena. So what we
do know about the name is that it is intentionally
a female derivative of Sandow. And what we do not
know and has always been a little nebulous in the record,
is whether this was meant to be a respectful nod
to the famous bodybuilder or an insult after she beat him.
(09:35):
After this challenge, the other big change to Katie's life
besides her stage name, was the nature of her act.
She was no longer a wrestling challenger. She became exclusively
a strong woman act. Yeah. Once this, I mean this
made big news, like the fact that a woman had
beaten this huge male bodybuilder in public in New York.
It pretty much rippled out through newspapers pretty quickly. And
(09:58):
so at that point she was us a strong woman.
They didn't feel like they needed to bother with wrestling anymore.
And among the feats that she would demonstrate during the
course of a show, we have a nice list here
that Tracy and I will share with you. So one
of the things she would do was juggling thirty pound
cannon balls, lifting her husband Max, who weighed a hundred
and sixty five pounds over her head with one hand.
(10:22):
This one blew my mind. She would lift up horses.
I don't even know how you begin to lift a
horse because it's a live thing that might wiggle. In
addition to being extremely heavy at an unwieldy size and shape,
she would hold fourteen people at a time on a
carousel supported by her chest and shoulders. This one is
also wild to me. She would lift a halfton cannon
(10:43):
on her back around her chest. There's actually a picture
that I found online of her with this cannon, again
a full cannon. We're not hearing about cannon balls the
apparatus to shoot them, and it's balanced on her chest
by what would be the exit end of the cannon
with the wheels in the air, and she's just sort
of stay mean, they're holding it. So that's again half
(11:04):
a ton, So we're talking about a thousand pounds or
four and fifties three kilos that she's just balancing on
her chest. There's the strong act classic of bending iron bars.
She would also break iron chains like she would just
snap them as part of the act, and she would
(11:24):
lie on a bed of nails while audience members were
brought forward to hit an anvil perched a top of
her chest with sledgehammers. Now as I was starting to
read this, I was like, come on, bed of nails.
I know people who do this. They do not do
this with an anvil on their chest. They may be
at the most have a cinder block. Yeah, she was
(11:45):
pretty astonishing. I mean, she just did amazing things. And
it's funny because you'll read some accounts where there was
one piece that I read where they were talking about
how she lifts and what was allegedly called the German method.
I don't I have no knowledge of whether or not
this is a valid nomenclature for it, where she when
(12:07):
she would lift particularly heavyweights, she would kind of be
rolling them up over her belly and chests to get
them up, rather than like a clean and jerk. If
I'm getting this correct, I'm still standing here going yes,
but three hundred pounds. I don't care how she got
it in the air. I'm sure if you are a
weightlifting expert, you will know that that is clearly a
(12:29):
layman's take on things. But I'm still pretty amazed that
she was just hucking this kind of weight around as
part of an act that she was doing over and over.
It wasn't like a one time shot. She toured the
United States first on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, and while
on tour in the early nineteen hundreds, she and Max
had a baby. They had a son, Theodore Roosevelt Martin
(12:50):
Beck Sandwina, and through her whole pregnancy she continued to
do her stage appearances with all of her usual tricks
and feats of strength. The night before he was born,
she did not one, but two shows. Yeah, I could
never find any good uh info on you know in
the what were You Thinking? Arena? Like that seems like
(13:12):
an awful lot to be doing to your body, particularly
using your core at a time when you were carrying
a little person. And I know, exercising throughout pregnancy is
considered healthy as long as you're not kind of going
harder than you were before you got pregnant. But having
people hit you with sledgehammers on a bed of nails
seems unwise when you're carrying a child. But what do
I know? Uh? Katie, for her part, really seemed to
(13:35):
take motherhood and stride though. The press nicknamed Theodore super Baby,
as he was not surprisingly a large child. Even though
his father was not a particularly large man, you know,
he still came from Katie's stock, and so by the
age of two, he reportedly weighed fifty pounds, and for comparison,
in case you are not a parent, the modern CDC
(13:55):
charts put the average weight of a two year old
boy at twenty eight pounds, so he was almost twice
normal expected modern size anyway, so we can conclude pretty
logically that this had a lot to do with his
mother's genetics. But it really prompted reporters to start asking
Sandwina for feeding and care tips for healthy babies, like
(14:17):
you two could raise a colossus. I don't know how
on earth that would happen. And while Teddy was still young,
Katie and Max headed to Europe to tour, and they
did not always take Teddy on tour with them. Sometimes
he was at boarding school, but in any case, it
was not long before John Ringling spotted Katie's act and
signed the husband and wife for the Barnamin Bailey Circus.
(14:40):
And at this point Ringling and his brothers had just
bought the circus for a reported four and ten thousand dollars,
and again this is in like nineteen ten money, so
it's quite a significant investment, and so they wanted to
fill their roster with interesting and star acts. So in
nineteen eleven they headed back to the States, but Katie
was not, as it turned out, a featured performer for
(15:01):
the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Instead, her act, which was
the San Duenas, was one of four strength based attractions
that ran simultaneously. Yeah Wrangling had envisioned this scenario with
all four of these strength acts sort of vying for
the audience's attention is like one huge spectacle. But of
course Katie drew all eyes. She drew reporters as well
(15:25):
as audiences. So the circus launched this plan to really
play up her role, and they arranged a press conference
to feature their new star and kind of announce her
as like the new um, you know, spotlight performer of
Barnamin Bailey's And so her act was also renamed so
they no longer went by the Sanduenas. The name was
actually updated to Katie Sanduina and Troope. This was the
(15:48):
first of many press conferences that Sanduina would give while
she was with the circus, and it became the norm
for the press to really want to see her anywhere
that the circus toured. Doctors would show ups away and
measure her publicly the press would report on her figure
and marvel at her sixteen into calf muscles, and Katie
(16:12):
did not seem to mind doing this at all. For
her part, she actually accentuated her size by wearing boots
with heels and some height enhancing up dudes like. She
would pile her hair on top of her head to
further accentuate her stature and especially in contrast to her
five ft six husband. And then to conclude these press appearances,
(16:32):
she would lift Max into the air, and then she
would follow that by lifting both Max and their son
Teddy with one arm. There's actually a rather charming photo
of the family in this arrangement floating around online. For
Katie's in this beautiful dress and she's just got her
husband in her arm, and her husband is holding the child,
who's not an infinite at that time. He's, you know,
more of like a young child. It's kind of wonderfully wacky. So,
(16:56):
in addition to showing off Katie's size and her straight
these press conferences also really accentuated her femininity. Press members
wrote at great length of her tightness beauty. The promotion
push on the part of the circus worked really hard
to balance her charm and good looks with her strength
in the public eye to create this irresistible act that
(17:17):
was sure to dry in spectators. Even reporters who doubted
the strength claims that Barnum and Bailey made, Uh, they
were quick to acknowledge Katie's appeal and magnetism. It seemed
like she was as likable as she was strong. And
what's really fascinating is that she's never described as being
masculine during the press junket, despite being bigger and stronger
(17:38):
than many men of the era, or I would say
many men today. Descriptions of her always call her a
venus and a commanding beauty, and according to one female
reporter quote, she was an unconsciously perfect illustration of her
text that beauty is strength, strength beauty. Yeah. I really
was expecting, as I was doing research on this, to
(18:00):
find some weird thing about, you know, how manly she was,
but none of them seemed to. There's some that kind
of suggests, like, you know, men might be in trouble
if you know, if women are like this, then if
this is how we're going, we're gonna lose some power.
And uh, that's actually pretty Germaine to what we're going
(18:23):
to talk about next, which is that while Katie really
easily handled this role of basically being also a pr
act for Barnamin Bailey Circus, she also served to some
degree as a mouthpiece for women's suffrage because she was
in the public eye, she was very likable, she was
considered attractive, and she was a wife and mother. She
was admired by many. It was like people could both
(18:44):
admire her beauty, women could identify with her because she
fulfilled roles that they were living, even though she was
also living this life of a circus performer. But because
she was also part of a marriage where she was
seen as at least physically dominant over her husband, she
was also this mob all of liberation, and starting in
nineteen twelve, she actually served as vice president of the
(19:04):
circus's women's suffrage group, has earned her the nickname Sandwin
know the Suffragette in some news stories. And then before
we get to sort of how her um life shifts
at this point, we are going to have another word
from a sponsor, if that's cool with Tracy. Okay, so um.
(19:31):
At this point, you know, Katie has really achieved some
level of fame and she and Max have been touring
the world, and at one point while they're touring Europe
in eighteen they actually had their second son, Alfred, and
Alfred's birth took place during some of the unrest of
the Hungarian Revolution, which we talked about a little bit
in our Bella Legoti episode, and the story goes Although
(19:53):
there's no substantiation I could find on this, but I
did see it reported similarly in several places that Katie
actually had to crawl under like a barbed wire fence
to get to a hospital when she went into labor,
and she ended up actually giving birth on the floor
of the hospital because it was completely overcrowded and there
was nowhere for her to go. They couldn't admit her.
So Alfred was kind of born in not ideal circumstances,
(20:16):
but seemed to turn out just fine. And just like
with Theodore, she was performing right up until she gave birth.
Katie continued to draw crowds as a strong woman into
the late nineteen forties, and at this point she was
in her sixties. But there were some bumpy times towards
the end of her career as a strong woman. Yeah,
having nothing really to do with her during the nineteen thirties.
(20:38):
In the early nineteen forties, the Ringling brothers and their
various business ventures were really struggling. You know. The Great
Depression impacted the circus just like everyone else, and many
performers lost their jobs. For a brief period during the depression,
the Works Progress Administration Circus, which is the only state
run circus the United States has ever had, was organized
(20:58):
by the federal government. This gave circus performers the opportunity
to stay afloat and to keep entertaining, and Katie and
Max worked with the w p A Circus after leaving
Barnum and Bailey and UH as sort of a fascinating
financial side note related to the circus. As Ringlings, Barnam
and Bailey Circus was getting back on its feet in
(21:20):
the forties, UH and Katie and Max were still working
with them. A fire actually destroyed the main tent during
the show. I don't think Katie and Max were at
this particular event. This horrible fire killed a hundred and
sixty eight people and it injured hundreds of others, and
as the financial mess of it was being sorted out,
the resulting ruling of the courts was that the circus
(21:41):
had to continue operation in order to bring in enough
money to settle the resulting lawsuits and operation losses, and
this actually became the first Chapter eleven bankruptcy case, which
is just sort of a fascinating historical side note. It
also wasn't long after this that Katie Sandwina and her
husband wound up leaving the circus for good. Yeah, we
don't know how much, you know, sort of the fiscal
(22:03):
problems or the financial problems of the circus actually incited
them to leave, or if it was just feeling like
time to settle down and stop touring constantly. But in
the late nineteen forties, Sandwina finally made her last stage
of appearance and she retired from her job as a
strong woman at the age of sixty four. And she
was still doing those same crazy tricks that she had
been doing since she was like a teenager in a
(22:24):
twenty year old and a pregnant lady Like she just was,
I am perpetually sort of agog at her amazing physical
prowess and her strength and her just ability to do
these things again into her sixties. And at that point
she and her husband Max opened a restaurant in Queens,
New York, and while she wasn't appearing with the circus,
(22:45):
she would occasionally kind of pull out the old tricks
and entertain patrons by lifting Max into the air. She's
also said to invent steel bars and broken horseshoes to
entertain the diners and and people that came in to
have a drink. There. There's actually a picture in one
of the the articles that I looked at, and it's
actually kind of a reprint of an older article from
(23:05):
the forties, from the very late forties when they were
first starting out in the the bar and grill business.
That's kind of uh couched within a bigger, more modern
article about her, and there's a picture of her again,
a retired woman in her sixties, doing the bed of
Nail's trick with the sledgehammers in the bar to entertain people.
(23:25):
So she really never gave up performing even though she
wasn't on stage anymore. That first year of running a
bar and grill wasn't really easy for the pair, which
is not surprising it's hard to start a restaurant, but
they eventually got a regular clientele and settled into the business.
One of Katie's jobs would be that she would deal
with the patrons who had too much to drink, and
(23:47):
according to an interview that the two of them gave
in late nine seven, usually the inebriated man would later
return apologetically and beg her pardon after sobering up. Yeah,
she uh, and again I love it because she still
was considered sort of girly in many ways. Her daughter
in law that was married to Alfred said that she
(24:09):
always had her nails painted and she was really one
of the most feminine women she had ever known. But unfortunately,
just four years after she retired from performing and really
as their bar and grill was getting really really stable
and good, Katie actually died of cancer on January twenty
one of ninety two. Katie and Max's sons each followed
into the family business in their own ways. Their first son, Theodore,
(24:31):
became a heavyweight boxer under the name Ted San Sandwina,
and there's a brief video of his mom giving him
boxing lessons in the twenties on YouTube. After his brief
boxing career, he worked in the bar with Katie and Max,
and Alfred, for his part, went on to become a
fairly successful actor as Alfred Sandor. While his career struggled
(24:53):
in the US initially, he eventually became known in Australia
for a long running gig on the soap opera The
Young Doctors, and he also appeared on the cult drama
series Dark Shadow. So if any of our listeners ever
watched that, he was on one episode, but just kind
of a noteworthy spot for him. Uh yeah, Oh, I'm
I'm so delighted by her story. What a fun, wacky lady.
(25:18):
I like the beats of strength that sounded possible. I know,
they just they blow my mind. And it's one of
those things, like I said, they're reporters that were even like,
I don't know that Barnama Bailey are being entirely accurate
with their claims, but gosh, I really like this woman,
Like I want to go see her show. But even
like if if those sort of wild claims were overblown
(25:44):
in most cases, if you have them, they would still
be really mind boggling feats of strength. But there are
pictures of her lifting multiple people at a time, and
they're like I said, I saw a photograph of her
with the cannon balanced on her chest, and so there
is photographic evidence of some of these things and in
some cases you could say, oh, that's a prop and
it was probably lighter, but they were not proper people
(26:04):
that were walking across the piece of board that were
that was balanced on her chest. Like, Yeah, the cannon
is the one thing that makes me go, I wonder
if something was going on with that cannon. Yeah, I
don't know. But again, you see her with like, you know,
four and five people climbing on her shoulders. It's pretty
also a lot of that's a lot of human Yeah,
(26:31):
thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
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be out of date now, you can email us at
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(26:53):
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Happy Saturday, everybody. This week on the show, we talked
about General Toma Alexandra Duma, who rose to the top
ranks of the military during the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars. And one of the things that came up
in the episode was how he liked to do strong
band style stunts, and that kept reminding me of our
previous episode on Katie Sandwina from back in January, and
(00:24):
Sandwena was a strong woman. I love her and I
think she's incredibly amazing. She also was an activist for
women's rights, and we're going to share her story again today,
so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
(00:48):
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
and it's We're in a new year, which means a
lot of people are making New Year's resolutions about how
much I loved them before uh, and it got me
thinking about topics that might center around that, and a
lot of people at this time of year like to
(01:10):
kind of focus on maybe hitting the gym a little
bit more. This is why when I've been in the
regular gym going habit. I always basically take January to
do other things. Yeah, it tends to be the big rush.
Like people that are regular gym goers will find like
this is the influx when they can't get a machine
or can't get you know, time in the spot they
(01:31):
want in the gym before everybody gets tired and wears out.
But it got me thinking about fitness and whether or
not we could find a good fitness related podcast. And
at first I wanted to talk about sort of the
advent of the health club and the gym in America,
which goes back much farther than you may suspect. But
that's not actually we're going to talk about today because
while I was researching that, I then stumbled upon something
(01:54):
else that got me really really excited, and that is
Katie Sandwina, who was a strong woman with sort of
just a wonderful, fascinating story uh that made me laugh
and also be amazed and say wow a lot and
also send me lots of I M s as you do.
(02:14):
I was. I just every time I unturned a new
piece of information about her, I was like, oh, we'll go, Tracy,
guess what else? And then and then like I turned
into a child. So it seemed like I was on
the right track in terms of exciting topics, at least
for me. So today we're going to talk about Katie
Sandwina and her sort of really remarkable life but also
just her remarkable nous as a human, not just because
(02:38):
she was so strong, but because she was just a
kind of a She has a fascinating story. Sandwina was
born Katherine Brumbach in Vienna, Austria, in four Her Bavarian parents,
who were Philippe and Joanna Brumbach, were both circus performers,
and they wowed crowds with feats of strength. Philipp was
a mountain of a man, standing reported six ft six
(03:01):
inches tall and weighing two d sixty pounds. Joanna was
a strong woman and she was about six ft tall,
and the couple had either fourteen, fifteen or sixteen children together,
depending on which source you read. I saw kind of
not almost equal smattering across all of those numbers, but
in any event, we're talking about a really sizeable family. Catherine,
(03:24):
who went by Katie, was the second oldest, and while
she and three of her sisters, Barbara, Marie, and Eugenia
all performed with their parents in their strong person act.
It wasn't very long before Katie really stood out as exceptional.
Even as young as two years old, she was able
to hold a handstand really easily, like they would do
a trick where she would hold a handstand on her
(03:45):
father's hands as part of the show. Uh. And so
she began gymnastics training pretty quickly to develop her natural
proclivity in that direction, And she also started appearing on
stage pretty regularly with mom and dad. And we're talking
again a two year old. In her teen years, Katie
was already almost six feet tall and was quite lean
(04:06):
in a hundred and eighties seven pounds, and she worked
really diligently to develop this natural strength that she seemed
to have. As her might grew, so did her looks.
She was considered to be really a beauty, and so
her father developed a whole circus act around her. Yeah,
and it's maybe not the act you would expect at
(04:28):
the various circuses where the family performed throughout Europe. Uh.
Philippe at the end of them, showing off all of
their feats of strength, would offer one hundred German marks
cash to any man or woman who could best Katie
in a wrestling match, and the prospect of wrestling with
an attractive young woman, Uh no doubt had serious appeal
for the gentleman who stepped up to try. They did
(04:49):
very well with this this act. H and Katie took
on many, many challengers and she never lost a single fight.
But there was a sort of fun and surprising outcome
from this act. Eventually, this act ended up adding to
the Brumbach family. There was a young nineteen year old
man named Max Hayman, and he was an acrobat. He
(05:12):
took the challenge to wrestle Katie and he stepped into
the ring with her, was promptly knocked out, and then
she carded him out of the ring up. She was
at that point sixteen years old, and in a terribly
charming twist to the story, the strong woman and her
vanquished challenger, Hayman fell in love. They were married two
(05:32):
years later and Max officially became part of the act.
And again, he was also an acrobat, so he when
they were with the circus, he wasn't just being uh
with Katie's act. He was also doing things like, you know,
standing on horses as they ran around and other acrobatic things,
and their match seems to have been really quite happy.
They stayed together for the rest of Katie's life. In
(05:54):
some interviews given later on in his life, Max tells
the story as though he fell madly in love with
her that very day and then ran away with her
to get married, much to the chagrin of Katie's father,
but that does not add up given the census records.
The Census reports that Max indicated that Katie and he
(06:14):
had been married um when she was nineteen and he
was twenty ones. That was a couple of years after
this whole thing happened. Yeah, that lines up with most
of the histories about Katie. There are only these few
sort of interviews with Max later in life that it
seems like he may be played up the sort of
um whirlwind nature of their of their marriage. That it's
(06:37):
very cute because he'll talk about how all he remembers
is stepping in the ring, seeing the blue sky when
he fell down, and then coming to as Katie carried
him away, which sort of a cute, fun start to
a romance. I don't recommend knocking someone out as a
way to win their heart, but it's sure to work
in this case. Uh. And in nineteen o nine, Katie
(06:58):
and her act made their way to the United States.
She was performing with Max and one to two other
gentlemen as the Sandwina's Uh. They actually took this name
on It wasn't the name they originally came over with
because on a visit to New York, she issued a
challenge at the end of her act to anyone that
wanted to try to lift more weight than she could.
(07:21):
She had one taker from the crowd, and it was
a doozy Eugen sand Out. And sand Out was a
Prussian born bodybuilder. He'd always already become very famous as
the sort of the embodiment of the perfect male physique.
He made a career of appearing on stage wearing nothing
more than a fig leaf or other very scant clothing
(07:41):
and gladiator sandals to show off his extremely powerful muscles.
Yeah these are they're hilarious to me. Pictures out there
of him standing in his fig leaf like flexing so
you could see every you know, part of his body.
But so, he was widely believed to be the strongest
and on earth. And so when he emerged from the
(08:02):
crowd to take this challenge, Katie was a little concerned
that she had made a woeful misstep. Uh you know,
remember this is a girl that never lost a fight,
so the thought that she might be facing like defeat
in front of a crowd was probably very terrifying. But
she did not back down and the weightlifting challenge began.
So the way this worked was that Katie would lift
(08:24):
up a weight and then the challenger standout would have
to lift up the same weight, and this went on
for a while with an ever increasing weight load. Finally,
Katie lifted three hundred pounds up over her head. And
Katie had put the weight down and Sandow took the
three pounds up, he could only lift it to chest level.
(08:45):
So the challenge was over and Katie had officially beaten
the most famous strong man in the world at a
weightlifting competition. And so before we jump into how they
become the Sandwinas and what happens next, we're going to
take a quick word from a sponsor. So back to uh,
(09:12):
Katie Sandwina. It was after this challenge with Sandow that
Katie started appearing under the name Sandwena. So what we
do know about the name is that it is intentionally
a female derivative of Sandow. And what we do not
know and has always been a little nebulous in the record,
is whether this was meant to be a respectful nod
to the famous bodybuilder or an insult after she beat him.
(09:35):
After this challenge, the other big change to Katie's life
besides her stage name, was the nature of her act.
She was no longer a wrestling challenger. She became exclusively
a strong woman act. Yeah. Once this, I mean this
made big news, like the fact that a woman had
beaten this huge male bodybuilder in public in New York.
It pretty much rippled out through newspapers pretty quickly. And
(09:58):
so at that point she was us a strong woman.
They didn't feel like they needed to bother with wrestling anymore.
And among the feats that she would demonstrate during the
course of a show, we have a nice list here
that Tracy and I will share with you. So one
of the things she would do was juggling thirty pound
cannon balls, lifting her husband Max, who weighed a hundred
and sixty five pounds over her head with one hand.
(10:22):
This one blew my mind. She would lift up horses.
I don't even know how you begin to lift a
horse because it's a live thing that might wiggle. In
addition to being extremely heavy at an unwieldy size and shape,
she would hold fourteen people at a time on a
carousel supported by her chest and shoulders. This one is
also wild to me. She would lift a halfton cannon
(10:43):
on her back around her chest. There's actually a picture
that I found online of her with this cannon, again
a full cannon. We're not hearing about cannon balls the
apparatus to shoot them, and it's balanced on her chest
by what would be the exit end of the cannon
with the wheels in the air, and she's just sort
of stay mean, they're holding it. So that's again half
(11:04):
a ton, So we're talking about a thousand pounds or
four and fifties three kilos that she's just balancing on
her chest. There's the strong act classic of bending iron bars.
She would also break iron chains like she would just
snap them as part of the act, and she would
(11:24):
lie on a bed of nails while audience members were
brought forward to hit an anvil perched a top of
her chest with sledgehammers. Now as I was starting to
read this, I was like, come on, bed of nails.
I know people who do this. They do not do
this with an anvil on their chest. They may be
at the most have a cinder block. Yeah, she was
(11:45):
pretty astonishing. I mean, she just did amazing things. And
it's funny because you'll read some accounts where there was
one piece that I read where they were talking about
how she lifts and what was allegedly called the German method.
I don't I have no knowledge of whether or not
this is a valid nomenclature for it, where she when
(12:07):
she would lift particularly heavyweights, she would kind of be
rolling them up over her belly and chests to get
them up, rather than like a clean and jerk. If
I'm getting this correct, I'm still standing here going yes,
but three hundred pounds. I don't care how she got
it in the air. I'm sure if you are a
weightlifting expert, you will know that that is clearly a
(12:29):
layman's take on things. But I'm still pretty amazed that
she was just hucking this kind of weight around as
part of an act that she was doing over and over.
It wasn't like a one time shot. She toured the
United States first on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, and while
on tour in the early nineteen hundreds, she and Max
had a baby. They had a son, Theodore Roosevelt Martin
(12:50):
Beck Sandwina, and through her whole pregnancy she continued to
do her stage appearances with all of her usual tricks
and feats of strength. The night before he was born,
she did not one, but two shows. Yeah, I could
never find any good uh info on you know in
the what were You Thinking? Arena? Like that seems like
(13:12):
an awful lot to be doing to your body, particularly
using your core at a time when you were carrying
a little person. And I know, exercising throughout pregnancy is
considered healthy as long as you're not kind of going
harder than you were before you got pregnant. But having
people hit you with sledgehammers on a bed of nails
seems unwise when you're carrying a child. But what do
I know? Uh? Katie, for her part, really seemed to
(13:35):
take motherhood and stride though. The press nicknamed Theodore super Baby,
as he was not surprisingly a large child. Even though
his father was not a particularly large man, you know,
he still came from Katie's stock, and so by the
age of two, he reportedly weighed fifty pounds, and for comparison,
in case you are not a parent, the modern CDC
(13:55):
charts put the average weight of a two year old
boy at twenty eight pounds, so he was almost twice
normal expected modern size anyway, so we can conclude pretty
logically that this had a lot to do with his
mother's genetics. But it really prompted reporters to start asking
Sandwina for feeding and care tips for healthy babies, like
(14:17):
you two could raise a colossus. I don't know how
on earth that would happen. And while Teddy was still young,
Katie and Max headed to Europe to tour, and they
did not always take Teddy on tour with them. Sometimes
he was at boarding school, but in any case, it
was not long before John Ringling spotted Katie's act and
signed the husband and wife for the Barnamin Bailey Circus.
(14:40):
And at this point Ringling and his brothers had just
bought the circus for a reported four and ten thousand dollars,
and again this is in like nineteen ten money, so
it's quite a significant investment, and so they wanted to
fill their roster with interesting and star acts. So in
nineteen eleven they headed back to the States, but Katie
was not, as it turned out, a featured performer for
(15:01):
the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Instead, her act, which was
the San Duenas, was one of four strength based attractions
that ran simultaneously. Yeah Wrangling had envisioned this scenario with
all four of these strength acts sort of vying for
the audience's attention is like one huge spectacle. But of
course Katie drew all eyes. She drew reporters as well
(15:25):
as audiences. So the circus launched this plan to really
play up her role, and they arranged a press conference
to feature their new star and kind of announce her
as like the new um, you know, spotlight performer of
Barnamin Bailey's And so her act was also renamed so
they no longer went by the Sanduenas. The name was
actually updated to Katie Sanduina and Troope. This was the
(15:48):
first of many press conferences that Sanduina would give while
she was with the circus, and it became the norm
for the press to really want to see her anywhere
that the circus toured. Doctors would show ups away and
measure her publicly the press would report on her figure
and marvel at her sixteen into calf muscles, and Katie
(16:12):
did not seem to mind doing this at all. For
her part, she actually accentuated her size by wearing boots
with heels and some height enhancing up dudes like. She
would pile her hair on top of her head to
further accentuate her stature and especially in contrast to her
five ft six husband. And then to conclude these press appearances,
(16:32):
she would lift Max into the air, and then she
would follow that by lifting both Max and their son
Teddy with one arm. There's actually a rather charming photo
of the family in this arrangement floating around online. For
Katie's in this beautiful dress and she's just got her
husband in her arm, and her husband is holding the child,
who's not an infinite at that time. He's, you know,
more of like a young child. It's kind of wonderfully wacky. So,
(16:56):
in addition to showing off Katie's size and her straight
these press conferences also really accentuated her femininity. Press members
wrote at great length of her tightness beauty. The promotion
push on the part of the circus worked really hard
to balance her charm and good looks with her strength
in the public eye to create this irresistible act that
(17:17):
was sure to dry in spectators. Even reporters who doubted
the strength claims that Barnum and Bailey made, Uh, they
were quick to acknowledge Katie's appeal and magnetism. It seemed
like she was as likable as she was strong. And
what's really fascinating is that she's never described as being
masculine during the press junket, despite being bigger and stronger
(17:38):
than many men of the era, or I would say
many men today. Descriptions of her always call her a
venus and a commanding beauty, and according to one female
reporter quote, she was an unconsciously perfect illustration of her
text that beauty is strength, strength beauty. Yeah. I really
was expecting, as I was doing research on this, to
(18:00):
find some weird thing about, you know, how manly she was,
but none of them seemed to. There's some that kind
of suggests, like, you know, men might be in trouble
if you know, if women are like this, then if
this is how we're going, we're gonna lose some power.
And uh, that's actually pretty Germaine to what we're going
(18:23):
to talk about next, which is that while Katie really
easily handled this role of basically being also a pr
act for Barnamin Bailey Circus, she also served to some
degree as a mouthpiece for women's suffrage because she was
in the public eye, she was very likable, she was
considered attractive, and she was a wife and mother. She
was admired by many. It was like people could both
(18:44):
admire her beauty, women could identify with her because she
fulfilled roles that they were living, even though she was
also living this life of a circus performer. But because
she was also part of a marriage where she was
seen as at least physically dominant over her husband, she
was also this mob all of liberation, and starting in
nineteen twelve, she actually served as vice president of the
(19:04):
circus's women's suffrage group, has earned her the nickname Sandwin
know the Suffragette in some news stories. And then before
we get to sort of how her um life shifts
at this point, we are going to have another word
from a sponsor, if that's cool with Tracy. Okay, so um.
(19:31):
At this point, you know, Katie has really achieved some
level of fame and she and Max have been touring
the world, and at one point while they're touring Europe
in eighteen they actually had their second son, Alfred, and
Alfred's birth took place during some of the unrest of
the Hungarian Revolution, which we talked about a little bit
in our Bella Legoti episode, and the story goes Although
(19:53):
there's no substantiation I could find on this, but I
did see it reported similarly in several places that Katie
actually had to crawl under like a barbed wire fence
to get to a hospital when she went into labor,
and she ended up actually giving birth on the floor
of the hospital because it was completely overcrowded and there
was nowhere for her to go. They couldn't admit her.
So Alfred was kind of born in not ideal circumstances,
(20:16):
but seemed to turn out just fine. And just like
with Theodore, she was performing right up until she gave birth.
Katie continued to draw crowds as a strong woman into
the late nineteen forties, and at this point she was
in her sixties. But there were some bumpy times towards
the end of her career as a strong woman. Yeah,
having nothing really to do with her during the nineteen thirties.
(20:38):
In the early nineteen forties, the Ringling brothers and their
various business ventures were really struggling. You know. The Great
Depression impacted the circus just like everyone else, and many
performers lost their jobs. For a brief period during the depression,
the Works Progress Administration Circus, which is the only state
run circus the United States has ever had, was organized
(20:58):
by the federal government. This gave circus performers the opportunity
to stay afloat and to keep entertaining, and Katie and
Max worked with the w p A Circus after leaving
Barnum and Bailey and UH as sort of a fascinating
financial side note related to the circus. As Ringlings, Barnam
and Bailey Circus was getting back on its feet in
(21:20):
the forties, UH and Katie and Max were still working
with them. A fire actually destroyed the main tent during
the show. I don't think Katie and Max were at
this particular event. This horrible fire killed a hundred and
sixty eight people and it injured hundreds of others, and
as the financial mess of it was being sorted out,
the resulting ruling of the courts was that the circus
(21:41):
had to continue operation in order to bring in enough
money to settle the resulting lawsuits and operation losses, and
this actually became the first Chapter eleven bankruptcy case, which
is just sort of a fascinating historical side note. It
also wasn't long after this that Katie Sandwina and her
husband wound up leaving the circus for good. Yeah, we
don't know how much, you know, sort of the fiscal
(22:03):
problems or the financial problems of the circus actually incited
them to leave, or if it was just feeling like
time to settle down and stop touring constantly. But in
the late nineteen forties, Sandwina finally made her last stage
of appearance and she retired from her job as a
strong woman at the age of sixty four. And she
was still doing those same crazy tricks that she had
been doing since she was like a teenager in a
(22:24):
twenty year old and a pregnant lady Like she just was,
I am perpetually sort of agog at her amazing physical
prowess and her strength and her just ability to do
these things again into her sixties. And at that point
she and her husband Max opened a restaurant in Queens,
New York, and while she wasn't appearing with the circus,
(22:45):
she would occasionally kind of pull out the old tricks
and entertain patrons by lifting Max into the air. She's
also said to invent steel bars and broken horseshoes to
entertain the diners and and people that came in to
have a drink. There. There's actually a picture in one
of the the articles that I looked at, and it's
actually kind of a reprint of an older article from
(23:05):
the forties, from the very late forties when they were
first starting out in the the bar and grill business.
That's kind of uh couched within a bigger, more modern
article about her, and there's a picture of her again,
a retired woman in her sixties, doing the bed of
Nail's trick with the sledgehammers in the bar to entertain people.
(23:25):
So she really never gave up performing even though she
wasn't on stage anymore. That first year of running a
bar and grill wasn't really easy for the pair, which
is not surprising it's hard to start a restaurant, but
they eventually got a regular clientele and settled into the business.
One of Katie's jobs would be that she would deal
with the patrons who had too much to drink, and
(23:47):
according to an interview that the two of them gave
in late nine seven, usually the inebriated man would later
return apologetically and beg her pardon after sobering up. Yeah,
she uh, and again I love it because she still
was considered sort of girly in many ways. Her daughter
in law that was married to Alfred said that she
(24:09):
always had her nails painted and she was really one
of the most feminine women she had ever known. But unfortunately,
just four years after she retired from performing and really
as their bar and grill was getting really really stable
and good, Katie actually died of cancer on January twenty
one of ninety two. Katie and Max's sons each followed
into the family business in their own ways. Their first son, Theodore,
(24:31):
became a heavyweight boxer under the name Ted San Sandwina,
and there's a brief video of his mom giving him
boxing lessons in the twenties on YouTube. After his brief
boxing career, he worked in the bar with Katie and Max,
and Alfred, for his part, went on to become a
fairly successful actor as Alfred Sandor. While his career struggled
(24:53):
in the US initially, he eventually became known in Australia
for a long running gig on the soap opera The
Young Doctors, and he also appeared on the cult drama
series Dark Shadow. So if any of our listeners ever
watched that, he was on one episode, but just kind
of a noteworthy spot for him. Uh yeah, Oh, I'm
I'm so delighted by her story. What a fun, wacky lady.
(25:18):
I like the beats of strength that sounded possible. I know,
they just they blow my mind. And it's one of
those things, like I said, they're reporters that were even like,
I don't know that Barnama Bailey are being entirely accurate
with their claims, but gosh, I really like this woman,
Like I want to go see her show. But even
like if if those sort of wild claims were overblown
(25:44):
in most cases, if you have them, they would still
be really mind boggling feats of strength. But there are
pictures of her lifting multiple people at a time, and
they're like I said, I saw a photograph of her
with the cannon balanced on her chest, and so there
is photographic evidence of some of these things and in
some cases you could say, oh, that's a prop and
it was probably lighter, but they were not proper people
(26:04):
that were walking across the piece of board that were
that was balanced on her chest. Like, Yeah, the cannon
is the one thing that makes me go, I wonder
if something was going on with that cannon. Yeah, I
don't know. But again, you see her with like, you know,
four and five people climbing on her shoulders. It's pretty
also a lot of that's a lot of human Yeah,
(26:31):
thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
be out of date now, you can email us at
history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
(26:53):
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