The Flying Wallendas is a circus act and group of daredevil stunt performers who perform highwire acts without a safety net. They were first known as The Great Wallendas, but the current name was coined by the press in the 1940s and has stayed since. History Karl Wallenda was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1905 to an old circus family, and began performing at the age of six. While still in his teens he answered an ad for a "hand balancer with courage." His employer, Louis Weitzman, taught him the trade. In 1922, Karl put together his own act with his brother Herman, Joseph Geiger, and a teenage girl, Helen Kreis, who eventually became his wife. The act toured Europe for several years, and when John Ringling saw them perform in Cuba, he quickly hired them to perform at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. In 1928, they debuted at Madison Square Garden. The act performed without a net (it had been lost in transit) and the crowd gave them a standing ovation. In 1944, while the Wallendas were performing in Hartford, Connecticut, a circus fire broke out, killing over 168 people. None of the Wallendas were hurt. In the following years, Karl developed some of their most impressive acts, such as the seven-person chair pyramid. They continued performing those acts until January 30, 1962, when, while performing at the Shrine Circus at Detroit's State Fair Coliseum, the front man on the wire, Dieter Schepp, faltered, and the pyramid collapsed. Three men fell to the ground, killing Richard Faughnan, Wallenda's son-in-law; and nephew Dieter Schepp. Karl injured his pelvis, and his adopted son, Mario, was paralyzed from the waist down. Dieter's sister, Jana Schepp, let go of the wire to fall into the quickly-raised safety net, but bounced off and suffered a head injury. Other tragedies include when Wallenda's sister-in-law, Yetta, fell to her death in 1963, and his son-in-law, Richard ("Chico") Guzman, was killed in 1972 after touching a live electric wire while holding part of the metal rigging. Nonetheless, Karl decided to go on. He repeated the pyramid act in 1963 and 1977. Karl continued performing with a smaller group, and doing solo acts. Karl crossed the Tallulah Gorge in Georgia on a high wire on July 18, 1970. On March 22, 1978, during a promotional walk in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Karl fell from the