Niagara: A History of the Falls (50 page)

Roger asked permission to steer the boat as they passed under the bridge; he could see in the distance a pillar of mist rising from the water. The boy had no idea that this marked the crest of Niagara Falls. Indeed, he had no idea that the river down which they were travelling had anything to do with the Falls. For a child of seven, recently arrived, the great cataract had no meaning. To him, Niagara Falls was a city; the Niagara was just another river.

On the American side he could see a small island, no more than a shoal, covered with roosting birds. Suddenly the noise of the motor changed to a high-pitched squeal. The propeller shaft had struck the shoal, the shear pin was gone, and they had no power.

Honeycutt hauled the engine out of the water and called to Deanne to put on the only other life jacket in the boat. Then, seizing the oars, he began to pull furiously for the American shore.

“What’s the matter?” Deanne asked fearfully. Honeycutt didn’t answer. A moment later the craft was in the rapids on the Canadian side. Goat Island was flashing past. The children began to panic. “We’re going to die!” cried Roger. “I don’t want to go swimming.”

“Don’t be scared,” said Honeycutt. “I’ll hold you.”

The boat struck a mammoth wave and righted itself. It struck a second wave, and all three passengers were hurled into the water. Deanne tried vainly to cling to the overturned boat. Honeycutt did his best to hold on to Roger, but the raging water tore them apart.

The boy was terrified. The whole world seemed to have exploded around him. The force of the water threw him against the rocks that protruded from the channel, bruising him badly. Then his terror shifted to anger. He could see people running frantically up and down the Goat Island shoreline and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t come out and pull him from the water.

But the anger quickly vanished, and young Roger Woodward found himself at peace. He knew now that he was going to die. His life actually passed before him, all seven years of it. He wondered what his parents would do with his pet dog Fritz, named for his idol, Fritz Von Erich, a local wrestler who lived a few doors from the Woodwards’ trailer. He wondered what they would do with his toys and other possessions. How sorry they will be when they learn I’m dead, he thought, for he now gave up all hope of surviving. A moment later, still wearing his life jacket, he was hurled over the Horseshoe Falls.

Meanwhile, Deanne had lost her grip on the overturned boat. Although she was a weak swimmer, she struck out alone for Goat Island.

John R. Hayes, a black bus driver from New Jersey who moonlighted as an auxiliary policeman, was standing near the tip of Terrapin Point with his wife and some others when he saw two black objects bobbing in the white water above the Falls. “It’s only pieces of wood,” one of his companions said.

“Like hell, they’re wood,” cried Hayes. A moment later, to his horror, he saw the overturned boat swept over the Falls, followed by two human beings.

A shout went up: “There’s a girl in the water. Someone help. For God’s sake, someone help!”

Hayes, who had been trained to save lives, spotted Deanne in her red life jacket about to be swept over the brink a few feet from the Goat Island shore. He dropped the camera he was carrying and made a dash for the ledge, climbing over the aluminum guard rail and teetering on the eighteen-inch lip of the bank, a few feet above the water. “Somebody help me! Help my brother!” Deanne was calling.

Hooking one leg over the railing and arching his body as far as he could, Hayes called to the girl to kick her legs. “Kick harder!” he shouted. Deanne was about to give up, but the sound of his voice compelled her to fight. “Swim for your life, girl,” called Hayes. “Don’t stop.” As Hayes reached for her, she just managed to seize his thumb and two fingers. That was her only lifeline. At this point she was no more than fifteen feet from the brink of the cataract.

The force of the water was so strong Hayes could not haul Deanne to safety. He called for help, but the people in the crowd, watching from behind the rail and stunned by the spectacle, seemed incapable of action.

A short distance away, a Pennsylvania sheet-metal worker saw his predicament and moved instinctively. John Quatrocchi, a veteran of five European campaigns in the Second World War, also had a camera in his hand and his five-year-old son in his arms. He handed the boy to his wife, dropped the camera, and raced for the railing, bumping his head as he tried to squeeze underneath. He stood back, leaped over the barrier, and clinging to the bank by the toes of his shoes, helped Hayes haul the girl to safety.

“My brother! What’s happened to my brother?” she cried.

“Pray for him,” Quatrocchi told her. With tears streaming from her eyes, Deanne dropped to her knees and prayed.

In the vortex below, Clifford Keech, a quiet, pipe-smoking veteran of twenty-three years as captain of the
Maid of the Mist
, had manoeuvred his vessel to within two hundred feet of the Horseshoe, as far as he ever dared go. He was just about to turn it away when he heard a member of a tour group on board cry out, “Man overboard!”

Keech spotted Roger Woodward in his red life jacket about fifty feet away. A crew member threw out a life ring; it fell short. Another followed; it fell short, too. Keech turned the
Maid
in a large circle so that the rope could swing around the boy’s body. Roger flung himself across the life ring in a belly flop. “My sister!” he called. “Where’s my sister?” On the observation point above, John Quatrocchi saw the rescue and told Deanne that her prayers had been answered.

Roger Woodward, bruised but game, was hauled aboard in his shorts and running shoes. To everyone’s astonishment, he asked for a glass of water. The Niagara River, he said, had tasted funny. He was taken to a hospital, where he made a quick recovery, as did his sister in an American hospital. Honeycutt’s body was found four days later.

For the next twenty years Roger Woodward kept asking himself why he and his sister had been spared from almost certain death. “You know,” people would say to him, “somebody must be watching out over you; somebody has something special planned for you.”

The family moved to Florida. Roger studied music and education at the University of Mississippi, spent four years in the navy, became sales manager for a business-machine firm in Orlando, married, and made two trips back to the Falls to show his children where he had almost died.

During all those intervening years, Roger Woodward continued to question his existence. Where had he come from? Why was he here? Where was he going? He had even gone to see the navy chaplain while in the service to ask those questions. The answers, he thought, were unsatisfactory. It was only later that he understood the effect of the plunge on his subconscious – a traumatic experience, whose psychological impact was so powerful that it left an impression on him for life. It wasn’t just him, he theorized; anybody who had survived a miraculous brush with death must question the reason for his continued existence. His sister’s response was quite different; to this day, Deanne, a mother with two children, doesn’t care to talk about her ordeal.

In 1980 a close friend, Ron Cobb, invited Roger to attend a service at an evangelical church. Years before Roger had taken an interest in evangelism through his friendship with Ross Finch, a member of Billy Graham’s Youth for Christ Movement. But it wasn’t until he knelt to pray with Ron Cobb and heard the pastor tell his flock, “There is someone here that is lost today,” that Roger Woodward felt his questions would finally be answered. Seated in his pew, he “prayed a simple prayer that simply acknowledged Christ as my Saviour.”

In 1990, the thirtieth anniversary of his miraculous escape, he returned again to Niagara Falls, Ontario, to preach in the Glendale Alliance Church. “For the first time in my life I knew what God’s purpose was in saving me thirty years ago,” he said. “Something happened thirty years ago that was very, very special. I lived. Why? So that I could live again … so that others would come to the saving knowledge of Christ and have the gift of eternal life.”

“I did not conquer the Falls,” Roger Woodward declared, “and I don’t ever want to be portrayed as someone who tried to do that.” Nonetheless, his experience was unique. No human being had ever, before or since, plunged over the brink protected by nothing more than a life jacket and lived. And it is doubtful that anyone else ever will.

But even as Roger was recovering from his ordeal in that summer of 1960, a New York maintenance worker was making plans to repeat Jean Lussier’s feat and hurtle over the Horseshoe in a rubber ball of his own invention.

To this day, nobody really knows what possessed William Fitzgerald to invest his life savings in a “Plunge-O-Sphere” so that he could conquer the Falls. He wasn’t interested in profit. He shunned publicity. He gave a false name – Nathan Boya – and a false occupation to the press. When reporters sought to find out more about his background, he did his best to cover his tracks. He was only the sixth human being to make the plunge and live to tell the tale. But Fitzgerald wasn’t telling. He gave no reasons for his decision, and when others who had talked to him advanced theories, he vigorously denied them.

Unlike his predecessor Stathakis, he was perfectly sane. Before he built his sphere, he sought out Jean Lussier, still alive at the age of sixty-seven, and following Lussier’s suggestions carefully, he devised a 1,250-pound capsule with a steel frame built around a six-ply rubber core, covered with a skin of laced steel, and sealed with a spray of rubber and vinyl. Snorkel valves made it possible to draw air into the vessel from outside. An easily opened hatch allowed for a fast exit or escape. Hundreds of ping-pong balls stuffed between the inner and outer chambers, together with a number of inflated cushions, contributed to the vessel’s buoyancy. One hundred and fifty pounds of gunshot in a chamber below the cockpit would serve as ballast.

Fitzgerald knew from earlier tragedies that the real problem would be the possibility of suffocation. What if the Plunge-O-Sphere, as he called it, got trapped behind the falling waters and remained submerged? He had planned to rely on the reserve air stored in six truck-sized inner tubes cushioning the cockpit, but he remained uneasy about their usefulness. Who knew how badly they would be battered in the fall?

Could the air be filtered through the kind of carbon dioxide converter then being installed in rockets? It could, but the cost was prohibitive. The Sphere was already costing him five thousand dollars; he could raise no more. Instead, he bought a fire-fighting mask and thirteen CO
₂
converter canisters. That would extend his air supply to nine hours. He also installed a pair of mouthpieces that would allow him to expel used air from the capsule. He had learned that asphyxiation was caused not so much by the dwindling oxygen supply as by the intake of too much carbon dioxide.

Fitzgerald may have been eccentric, but he was no madman. His plans were rooted in reality, and when he took to the water from a secret site on the American side of the river on July 15, 1961, with only a few to watch him go, he knew exactly what he was doing. The Plunge-O-Sphere shuddered and bumped against the rocks in the channel as Fitzgerald’s body strained against the safety belts. He felt a few moments of raw terror and clawed upward for the grip above him just as the big ball tumbled over the brink and deep into the violence of the basin below.

Fitzgerald described the experience in a few sentences: “Before the Sphere’s five thousand pounds of lift could reverse the dive, savage forces ripped the hatchgrip from my hands. Soon it flapped back from its welded hinge. Driving spray shot into the capsule, threatening a watery grave.” Then, thrust forward by the current, the Sphere burst out of its shroud of vapour and into the brilliant July sunlight. Standing at the rail of the
Maid of the Mist
, Samuel Shifts, a tourist from East Meadow, Long Island, saw it bobbing in the foam and thought it might be a buoy or marker. Suddenly, to his astonishment, a face appeared at the hatch and a hand waved a greeting. The emergency launch,
Little Sister
, knifed out from the shore to drag the Plunge-O-Sphere to safety.

Boya/Fitzgerald did not act like a typical Falls stunter. To all questions and offers, he replied, “Talk to my attorney.” He refused to appear on television, even turning down the Sunday night “Ed Sullivan Show,” required watching in those days.

It was some time before reporters ferreted out who he was and what he did. When they stated that he worked as a maintenance man for International Business Machines in New York, he flatly denied it, claiming he was a free-lance writer. Jean Lussier filled in with the few scraps of information he had gained from his friend. He was writing a novel, Lussier said. Fitzgerald denied it. Lussier said he had fallen in love with a girl in France ten years before, that they had planned a honeymoon at the Falls, she had jilted him, and “Boya” had made the trip over the cataract to prove his love. Fitzgerald denied that, too. “I did it for my own satisfaction,” was all he would say. “Today, in our overcomplicated life, it’s hard for anyone to do something for himself.”

Yet there are some clues. His words when he was taken from his odd craft in July 1961 give some hint as to his intentions. “I have integrated the Falls,” he said. That was the only reference to his colour, but “integration” was very much a buzz-word at the time. The first lunch counter sit-ins, in Greensboro, North Carolina, had taken place the year before, when Fitzgerald was planning his adventure. In May, two months before his plunge, the “freedom riders” began their demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.

Equally significant was the alias he had chosen. He had taken the name Boya to commemorate the role of Tom Mboya, leader of the independence movement in Kenya and founder, in 1960, of the Kenya African National Union Party.

Was Boya/Fitzgerald’s plunge, then, a matter of racial pride – an attempt to demonstrate that a black daredevil could compete on an equal level with white daredevils? If so, he made no further attempt to exploit the idea. A later remark, after climbing out of the sphere, was more laconic. “I always wanted to make the trip and now I have,” he said, rather like a tourist returning from having “done” Florence.