Careers of Danger and Daring

I

IN WHICH WE MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF "STEEPLE BOB"

DURING the summer months of 1900 – what blazing hot months, to be sure! – people on lower Broadway were constantly coming upon other people with chins in the air, staring up and exclaiming: "Dear me, isn't it wonderful!" or "There's that fellow again; I'm sure he'll break his neck!" Then they would pass on and give place to other wonderers.

The occasion of this general surprise and apprehension was a tall man dressed entirely in white, who appeared day after day swinging on a little seat far up the side of this or that church steeple, or right at the top, hugging the gold cross or weather-vane, or, higher still, working his way, with a queer, kicking, hitching movement, up various hundred-foot flagpoles that rise from the heaven-challenging office buildings down near Wall Street. At these perilous altitudes he would hang for hours, shifting his ropes occasionally, raising his swing or lowering it, but not doing anything that his sidewalk audience could see very well or clearly understand. Yet thousands watched him with fascination, and a kodak army descended upon neighboring housetops, and newspapers followed the movements of "Steeple Bob" in thrilling chronicle.

That is what he was called in large black letters at the head of columns – "Steeple Bob"; but I came to know him at his modest quarters on Lexington Avenue, where he was plain Mr. Merrill, a serious-mannered and an unpretentious young man, very fond of his wife and his dog, very fond of spending evenings over books of adventure, and quite indifferent to his day-time notoriety. I call him a young man, yet in years of service, not in age, he is the oldest steeple-climber in the business, ever since his teacher, "Steeple Charlie," fell from his swing some years ago in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and died the steeple-climber's death.

I often saw books of the sea on Merrill's table, and accounts of whaling voyages; and he told me, one evening (while through an open door came the snores of his weary partner), about his own adventurous boyhood, with three years' cruising in Uncle Sam's navy on the school-ships Minnesota and Yantic (he shipped at the age of twelve) and two years at whale-fishing in the North Sea. Quite ideal training, this, for a steeple-climber; he learned to handle ropes and make them fast so they would stay fast; he learned to climb and keep his head at the top of a swaying masthead; he learned to bear exposure as lads must who are washed on deck every morning with a hose, and stand for inspection, winter and summer, bare to the waist. And he gained strength of arm and back swinging at the oar while whale-lines strained on the sunk harpoon; and patience in long stern-chases; and nerve when some stricken monster lashed the waters in agony and the boat danced on a reddened sea.

Merrill laughed about the climb up old Trinity's spire, the first climb when he carried up the hauling-rope and worked his way clear to the cross, with nothing to help him but the hands and feet he was born with, and did it coolly, while men on the street below turned away sickened with fear for him.

"I'm telling you the truth," said Steeple Bob, "when I say it was an easy climb; any fairly active man could do it if he'd forget the height. I'm not talking about all steeples – some are hard and dangerous; but the one on Trinity, in spite of its three hundred-odd feet, has knobs of stone for ornament all the way up (they call them corbels), and all you have to do is to step from one to another."

"How much of a step?"

"Oh, when I stood on one the next one came to my breast, and then I could just touch the one above that."

He called this easy climbing!

"The only ticklish bit was just at the top, where two great stones, weighing about a ton apiece, swell out like an apple on a stick, and I had to crawl around and over that apple, which was four feet or so across. If it hadn't been for grooves and scrollwork in the stone I couldn't have done it, and even as it was I had two or three minutes of hard wriggling after I kicked off with my feet and began pulling myself up."

"You mean you hung by your hands from this big ball of stone?"

"I hung mostly by my fingers; the scrolls weren't deep enough for my hands to go in."

"And you drew yourself slowly up and around and over that ball?"

"Certainly; that was the only way."

"And it was at the very top?"

"Yes, just under the cross. It wasn't much, though; you could do it yourself."

I really think Merrill believed this. He honestly saw no particular danger in that climb, nor could I discover that he ever saw any particular danger in anything he had done. He always made the point that if he had really thought the thing dangerous he wouldn't have done it. And I conclude from this that being a steeple-climber depends quite as much upon how a man thinks as upon what he can do.

"A funny thing happened!" he added. "After I got over this hard place, I slid into a V-shaped space between the bulging stone and the steeple-shaft, and I lay there on my back for a minute or so, resting. But when I started to raise myself I found my weight had worked me down in the crotch and jammed me fast, and it was quite a bit of time before I could get free."

"How much time? A minute?"

"Yes, five minutes; and it seemed a good deal longer."

Five minutes struggling in a sort of stone trap, stretched out helpless at the very top of a steeple where one false move would mean destruction – that is what Merrill spoke of as a funny thing! Thanks, I thought, I will take my fun some other way, and lower down.

"You would be surprised," he went on, "to feel the movement of a steeple. It trembles all the time, and answers every jar on the street below. I guess old Trinity's steeple sways eighteen inches every time an elevated train passes. And St. Paul's is even worse. Why, she rocks like a beautifully balanced cradle; it would make some people seasick. Perhaps you don't know it, but the better a steeple is built the more she sways. You want to look out for the ones that stand rigid; there's something wrong with them – most likely they're out of plumb."

"Isn't there danger," I asked, "that a steeple may get swaying too much, say in a gale, and go clear over?"

"Gale or not," said Merrill, "a well-made steeple must rock in the wind, the same as a tree rocks. That is the way it takes the storm, by yielding to it. If it didn't yield it would probably break. Why, the great shaft of the Washington Monument sways four or five feet when the wind blows hard."

Then he explained that modern steeples are built with a steel backbone (if I may so call it) running down from the top for many feet inside the stonework. At Trinity, for instance, this backbone (known as a dowel) is four inches thick and forty-five feet long, a great steel mast stretching down through the cross, down inside the heavy stones and ornaments, and ending in massive beams and braces where the steeple's greater width gives full security.

"What sort of work did you do on these steeples?" I asked.

"All kinds; stone-mason's work, painter's work, blacksmith's work, carpenter's work – why, a good steeple-climber has to know something about 'most every trade. It's painting flagpoles, and scraping off shale from a steeple's sides, and repairing loose stones and ornaments, and putting up lightning-rods, and gilding crosses, and cleaning smoke-stacks so high that it makes you dizzy to look up, let alone looking down, and a dozen other things. Sometimes we have to take a whole steeple down, beginning at the top, stone by stone – unless it's a wooden steeple, and then we burn her down five or six feet at a time, with creosote painted around where you want the fire to stop; the creosote puts it out. Once I blew off the whole top of a steeple with dynamite; and, by the way, I'll tell you about that some time."

Conversing with a steeple-climber (when he feels like telling things) is like breathing oxygen; you find it over-stimulating. In ten minutes' matter-of-fact talking he opens so many vistas of thrilling interest that you stand before them bewildered. He starts to answer one question, and you burn to interrupt him with ten others, each of which will lead you hopelessly away from the remaining nine.

"Did you ever have any experiences with lightning?" I asked Merrill, one day.

"Oh, a few," he said. "A thunderbolt struck the Trinity steeple the very day we finished our work. We had just taken down our tackle and staging after gilding the cross when – by the way, they say there's a hundred dollars in gold under that cross."

"Really?" I exclaimed. "How did it get there?"

"Somebody ordered it put there when the steeple was built. People often do queer things like that. I painted a flagpole on a barn up in Massachusetts where there was four hundred dollars in gold hidden under the weather-vane. Everybody knew it was there, because the farmer who put it there told everybody, and my partner was crazy to saw off the end of that pole some night and fool 'em, but of course I wouldn't have it."

Here was I quite off my thunderbolt trail, and although curious about that farmer, I came back to it resolutely.

"Well," resumed Merrill, "this lightning stroke came down the new rod all right until it reached the bell-deck, and there it circled round and round the steeple four or five times, wrapping my assistant in bluish-white flame. Then it took a long jump straight down Wall Street, smashed a flagpole to slivers, and vanished. Say, there are things about lightning I've never heard explained. I know of a steeple-climber, for instance, who was killed by lightning – it must have been lightning, although no one saw it strike. There were two of them working on a scaffolding when a thunder-storm came up, and this man's partner started for the ground, as climbers with any sense always do. But this fellow was lazy or out of sorts or something, and said he wouldn't go down, he'd stay on the steeple until the storm was over. And he did stay there, without getting any harm, so far as anybody on the ground could see, except a wetting. Just the same, when his partner went up again, he found him stretched out on the scaffolding, dead."

"Frightened to death?" I suggested.

Merrill shook his head. "No, they said it was lightning; but it's queer how lightning could kill a man without being seen, isn't it?"

Then Merrill gave an experience of his own with a thunderbolt. It was during this same busy summer of 1900, while he and his partner were scraping the great steel smoke-stack that rises from ground to roof along one side of the American Tract Society Building, that towering structure which looks down with contempt, no doubt, upon ordinary church steeples.

"We were in our saddles," Merrill explained, "swung down about two thirds of the smoke-stack's length, when some black clouds warned us of danger, and we hauled ourselves up to the roof. My partner, Walter Tyghe, got off his saddle and stood there where my wife was waiting (she often goes to climbing-jobs with me – she's less anxious when she can watch me); but I thought the storm was passing over, and kept on scraping, sort of half resting on the cornice, half on my saddle. Suddenly a bolt shot down from a little pink cloud just overhead, and splintered a big flagpole I had just put halyards on, and then jumped past us all so close that it knocked Walter over, and made me sick and giddy so that I fell back limp on my saddle-board, and swung there helpless until my wife pulled the trip-rope that opens the lock-block and drew me in from the edge. That's not the first time she's been on deck at the right minute. Once she came up a steeple to tell me something, and found the hauling-line smoldering from my helper's cigarette. If that line had burned through it would have dropped me to the ground from the steeple-top, saddle, lock-block, and all. The man with the cigarette was so scared he quit smoking for good and all."

Here, in reply to my question, Merrill explained the working of a lock-block, which is simply a pulley that allows a rope to pass through it, but will not let it go back. With this block the steeple-climber can be hauled up easily, but cannot fall, even if the man hauling should let go the rope. When it is necessary to descend, a pull on the trip-rope releases a safety-catch and the saddle goes down.

"Do steeple-climbers always work in pairs?" I asked him.

"Usually. It would be hard for one man to do a steeple alone. There are lots of places where you must have some one to fasten a rope or hold the end of a plank or pass you something. Besides, it wouldn't be good for a man's mind to be spending days and days upon steeples all alone. It's bad enough with a partner to talk to. That makes me think of poor old Dan O'Brien. If I hadn't been up with him one day – " Merrill checked himself and changed the subject.

"I'll give you a case where a man alone could never have done the thing, I don't care how clever a steeple-climber he might be. It was on St. Paul's, New York, after we had finished the job and taken everything down. Then somebody noticed that the weather-vane on top of the ball wasn't turning properly. I knew in a minute what the matter was; it was easy enough to fix it, but the thing was to reach the weather-vane. I don't mean that the climb up the steeple was anything; we had done that before; but if I tried to climb around that big ball again (it was the same sort of a wriggling business as that over the bulging stones at Trinity) I would be sure to scrape off a lot of the fine gilding we had just put on. And yet I couldn't get at the weather-vane without getting over the ball. I studied quite a while on this little problem, and solved it with my partner's help. We both climbed the steeple as far as the ball; we went up the lightning-rod; then we roped ourselves on the steeple-shaft by life-lines, and then my partner, that was Joe Lawlor, stood on my shoulders and did the job. You see it was easy enough that way."

"Easy enough!" Think of it! Two men clinging to the point of a steeple. One of them braces himself with the toes of his rubber shoes in crannies of the stone, and the other, balancing on his shoulders like a circus performer, does a piece of work, no matter what, with a reeling abyss all around (what is looking over a precipice compared to this?), and all the time the spire swaying back and forth like a forest tree. And then you hear that, instead of getting a large sum for such an achievement, these men, taking it through the year, get scarcely more than ordinary workmen's wages.

II

HOW THEY BLEW OFF THE TOP OF A STEEPLE WITH DYNAMITE

KNOWN over all Connecticut was the Congregational Church in Hartford, that stood for years on Pearl Street, and was famous alike for the burning words spoken beneath its roof, and the tall, straight spire that reached above it; two hundred and thirty-eight feet measured the drop from cross to pavement. But churches pass like other things, and near the century-end came the decision by landowners and lease interpreters that this graceful length of brownstone and the pile beneath it must move off the premises, which meant, of course, that the steeple must come down, the time appointed for this demolition being August, 1899.

Now, the taking down of a steeple two hundred and thirty-eight feet high, that rises on a closely built city street, is not so simple a proceeding as might at first appear. If you suggest pulling the steeple over, all the neighbors cry out. They wish to know where it is going to strike. Are you sure it won't smash down on their housetops? Can you make a steeple fall this way or that way, as woodmen make trees fall? How do you know you can? Besides, how are you going to hitch fast the rope that will pull it over? And who will climb with such a rope to the steeple-top? It must be said that there is usually some young man at hand, some dare-devil character of the vicinity, who is ready to try the thing and is positive he can succeed at it. But, luckily, he seldom gets a chance to try.

"It's queer," said Merrill, telling me the story, "how people ever built a steeple like this one without a window in it, or an air-passage, or anything for ventilation. Between the bell-deck and the cross there wasn't a single opening from the inside out, so I had to break my way through up near the top. What a place for a man to work, squeezed in the point of a stifling funnel, with no swing for his hammer, and no air to breathe, and the scorch of an August sun! After fifteen minutes of it, my wrists and temples would be pounding so I'd have to come down and rest.

"Of course the purpose of this hole that I knocked through the steeple-top was to make fast ropes and pulleys, so my partner and I could hoist ourselves along the outside, and not have to climb up the inside cross-beams, which, I can tell you, is a lively bit of athletics. Well, we got our ropes fixed all right, about twenty-five feet below the top, and the 'bosun's saddle' swung below for us to travel up and down in, and then we made fast another set of ropes and pulleys about fifteen feet higher up; this was for hoisting timber and stuff that we needed."

"How did you get up that fifteen feet?" I inquired.

"Worked up on the stirrups – that is, two nooses around the steeple, each ending in a loop, one for the right foot, one for the left. You stand in the right stirrup and work the left loop up, then you stand in the left stirrup and work the right loop up. Sometimes in hard places you have to throw your nooses around the shaft as a cowboy casts a rope. Come down some day and watch us work; you'll see the whole thing."

To this invitation I gave glad acceptance; I certainly wished to see this stirrup-climbing process.

"The next thing," continued Merrill, "was to make another hole in the steeple through a keystone a little below our first hole. In this hole we set a block of Norway pine resting on an iron jack. The block was about a foot square and twenty-two inches high, a big tough piece, you see, and by screwing up the jack we could make that part as solid as the keystone was. We made this hole on the east side of the steeple, which was the side we wanted her to fall on, the only side she could fall on without injuring something; and we had it figured out so close that we dug a trench on that side straight out from the steeple's base, ten feet wide and four feet deep, and told people we intended to have the whole top of that steeple, say a length of thirty-five feet and a weight of thirty-five tons, come off at one time and land right square in that trench and nowhere else. That's what we intended to do.

"Now began the hoisting of materials; first a lot of half-inch wire cable, enough for four turns around the steeple, then eight sixteen-foot timbers, two inches thick and a foot wide, then a lot of maple wedges. We bandaged the steeple with the cable and drew it tight with tackle. Then we lowered the timbers lengthwise inside the cable, which we could do because the steeple was an octagon with ornamented corners, and these left spaces where the wire rope was stretched around. Then we wedged fast the eight timbers so that they formed a sixteen-foot half-collar on the west side of the steeple just opposite our hole where the jack was. In other words, we had the steeple shored in so that when we let her go no loose stones could fall on the west side; everything must fall to the east.

"Last of all, we widened our hole on the east side, stripping away stones until that whole side lay open in a half-circular mouth about four feet high. And in this mouth were two teeth, one might say, that held the stone jaws apart, the iron jack biting into the block of Norway pine. On those two now came the steeple's weight, or, anyhow, one half of it. To knock out one of these teeth would be to leave the east side of the steeple unsupported, with the result that it must topple over in that direction and fall to the ground. Anyway, that was our reasoning, and it seemed sound enough; the only question was how we were going to knock out that block of Norway pine.

"Well the day of the test came, and I guess five thousand people were there to see what would happen. Everybody was discussing it, and farmers had driven in for miles just as they do for a hanging. You understand I was under the orders of the contractor, and he had his own plan about getting the block out. He proposed to hitch a rope to it, drop this rope to a donkey-engine in the yard, and set the engine winding up the rope. He said the block would have to come out then and the steeple fall. I agreed that the block might come out, but was afraid it would tip up through the strain coming at an angle, and throw the steeple over to the west, just the way we didn't want it to go. And if that steeple ever fell to the west, there was no telling how many people it would kill in the crowd, without counting damage to houses.

"However, the contractor was boss, and he stuck to it his way was right, so we hitched the engine to the block and set her going. She puffed and tugged a little, and then snapped the rope. We got another rope, and she broke that too. Then we got a stronger rope, and the engine just kicked herself around the yard and had lots of fun, but the block never budged. All that morning we tried one scheme after another to make that engine pull the block out, but we might as well have hitched a rope to the church; the steeple's weight was too much for us. And all the time the crowd was getting bigger and bigger, until the police could hardly manage it.

"Finally the contractor, being very mad and quite anxious, said he'd be hanged if he could get the block out, and for me to try my scheme, and do it quick, for some men were going about saying the thing was dangerous and ought to be stopped. He didn't have to speak twice before I was on my way up that steeple carrying an inch auger, a fifty-foot fuse, and a stick of dynamite – I'd had them ready for hours. It's queer how people get wind of a thing; the crowd seemed to know in a minute that I was going to use dynamite, and before I was twenty feet up the ladder a police officer was after me, ordering me down. I went right ahead, pretending not to hear, and when I got to the bell-deck he was puffing along ten yards below me. I swung into my 'bosun's saddle' and began pulling myself up outside the steeple, and I guess the whole five thousand people around the church bent back their heads to watch me.

"As soon as I began to rise in the saddle I knew I was all right, for I coiled up the hauling-line on my arm so the officer couldn't follow me. All he could do was stand on the bell-deck and gape after me like the rest and growl.

"When I reached the block I bored a six-inch hole into her at a downward slant, and in this I put some crumbs of dynamite, – not much, only about half a teaspoonful, – and then I stuck in the fuse and tamped her solid with sand. Then I lit the other end, dropped it down inside the steeple, and slid down the rope as fast as I could, yelling to the officer that I'd touched her off. You ought to have seen him get out of that steeple! He never waited to arrest me or anything; he had pressing business on the ground!

"By the time I got down you could see a little trail of bluish smoke drifting away from the hole, and there was a hush over the crowd, except for the police trying to make them stand back behind the ropes. I don't know as I ever saw a bigger crowd; the street was jammed for blocks either way. Well, sir, that was a queer acting fuse. It smoked and smoked for about ten minutes, and then the smoke stopped. The people began to laugh – they said it had gone out; and the contractor was nearly crazy: he was sure I had made another failure. I didn't know what to think; I just waited. We waited ten minutes, twelve minutes; it seemed like an hour, but nobody dared go up to see what the matter was. Then suddenly the explosion came – no louder than a pistol-crack, for dynamite isn't noisy, but it stirred me more than a cannon.

"'Start your engine!' I shouted, and the little dummy had just time to wind up half a turn of the hitch-line when the old steeple-top swayed and broke clean in two, right where the block was, and the whole upper length fell like one piece, fell to the east just as we had planned it, and landed in the trench, every stone of it; there wasn't a piece as big as your fingernail, sir, outside that trench. And while she was falling I don't know how many kodaks were snapped in the hope of getting a picture; men and women with cameras had been waiting for hours on the roofs of high buildings, and two or three of them actually caught a picture of the steeple-top as it hung in the air for a fraction of a second at right angles to the base."