“Pure serendipity. When I was ten, a Wild West show passed through town—The Great Carver Wild West Show. It was run by ‘Doc’ Carver, a former buffalo hunter and sharpshooter. Six foot four, two hundred pounds, flaming red hair—my sister-in-law Sonora said he was like a giant redwood, nothing could knock him down. He was called Doc ’cause he’d studied to be a dentist in California, before he thought better of it.”
“Irving Rosenthal at Palisades used to be a dentist, too.”
“Something about the profession just sends men into the outdoor amusement business, I guess,” Ella mused. “Anyway, when he saw what a good climber and jumper I was, he asked my mother if he could adopt me, and train me for a diving act he was planning. She said sure.”
“She did?” Toni said in amazement.
“Of course she did. She was struggling to raise eleven kids on her own, and here was somebody offering to give one of them a better life than she ever could. And I was rarin’ to go and be a diver, just like you. So she signed some papers making Doc Carver my guardian.
“He taught me to swim, dive, and ride horses. That was the act he’d come up with—diving horses. You’d ride the horse up a long ramp to the top of a forty-foot tower, then dive headfirst together into a tank of water.”
Toni was amazed—her father hadn’t just made that up to scare her!
“Doc had another daughter named Lorena, and the two of us rode five different horses—Lightning and King Klatowah were my favorites—all over the world. We even made a tour of China. But eventually I knew I wanted to go out on my own as a swan diver,” Ella said, “and I made good at it.”
Nursing her cup of coffee, she added, “Doc was wonderful to me, but I had one thing against him. When Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel in 1926, I knew I could do it faster than her. He wouldn’t let me.”
“My friend Bunty helped train Amelia Gade Corson, the second woman to swim the Channel.”
“There you go. That could’ve been me. I may give it a try yet.” She looked impatient. “You about finished? We should get back on the road.”
They pulled into Savannah a little after sundown and slept the night in Ella’s comfortable house trailer with its two-bunk bedroom and kitchenette with a small gas range, on which Ella cooked breakfast the next morning before they began the “grunt work”—and Toni found herself doing a lot of grunting—of unloading Ella’s equipment from the truck. The water tank, twelve feet in diameter, came out first in eight pieces, and Ella put it together with the skill of a trained mechanic. The ninety-foot ladder followed, in nine ten-foot sections, each with its own platform. Toni marveled as she watched Ella wield a ten-pound sledgehammer to pound axle stakes into the hot asphalt pavement; Toni was young and strong but for every stake she drove into the ground, Ella managed to do two.
The stakes secured guy wires from the ground to the ladder sections; once the wires were tied off to the first ten-foot section, Ella climbed up and used a pulley called a gin pole to raise the next section of ladder, attach it, then tie off four more guy wires until that section was secure. Toni did most of the toting and Ella most of the rigging, but Ella had Toni tie off a few wires herself so she knew how to do it—and Toni watched Ella’s every move, sensing that at some point she could be called upon to do any or all of this.
By Friday morning tank and tower were ready, standing nine feet apart. Toni gazed up at the small diving platform jutting out a few rungs down from the top; from down here it looked as substantial as a postage stamp. But Ella, wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit for her practice dive, was hardly cowed, though she did take a precaution that puzzled Toni: she tore off a piece of duct tape. “What’s that for?” Toni asked.
“Honey,” Ella explained, “I take about three and a half feet of water when I hit—pressure’s equal to five hundred pounds per square inch. Once I reach the top, I tape my mouth and nose shut to withstand the shock.”
She began climbing up the ladder. When she reached the top she taped her mouth and nose. On that tiny platform, she looked about as big as a bird perched on the topmost branch of a bare, wintry, ninety-foot tree.
The little bird inched forward to the edge of the platform, pausing only a moment before she dove into space.
It was a perfect swan dive, Ella’s body arcing out and down as if sliding down a rainbow. Her head was nestled between her outstretched arms, to cushion the impact. When she hit the water, her body was rigid and she created a geyser that erupted over Toni as she stood on the catwalk surrounding the tank. Through the spray she was able to see that as soon as Ella entered the water, her rigid body went supple, curving like a smile, turning the steep dive into a shallow one; had she not, Toni knew, she would have slammed headfirst into the bottom of the five-foot tank. Instead her arched body sank only three or four feet, easily skirting the bottom, before surfacing on the other side of the tank.
“That was magnif!” Toni told Ella as she climbed up the side ladder.
Ella stripped off the tape covering her nose and mouth, smiled, and said, “Ah, that’s nothing. Wait’ll you see me do it when I’m on fire.”
* * *
Toni had assumed that Ella would perform in the kind of heavily padded outfit that Bee Kyle had worn when she was doing the same act. So she was shocked when Ella, just before showtime, suited up in nothing more than some woolen tights and a shirt, under a canvas jacket.
“Are those made of asbestos?” Toni asked hopefully.
“Asbestos is for sissies,” Ella said with a grin.
“But don’t you get burned?”
“Sometimes. The trick is, the motion of my body as I fall pushes the flames away from me, and the splash when I enter the water extinguishes the fire in the tank—most of it, anyway.”
Over the canvas jacket she now strapped on a pair of gasoline packs.
“You look like Rocketman,” Toni said in awe, “from the serials.”
“Ha! I’d like to see Rocketman try this,” Ella said, picking up a can of gasoline. She began pouring it into the water, along the rim of the tank.
Ella handed Toni a box of matches and said, “Go ahead, light it.”
Ever since ’44, Toni was terrified of fire, but she wasn’t about to show it as she took a match, struck it against the side of the box, then tossed it into the tank. Immediately the gas ignited, five-foot flames shooting up like lava out of a caldera, causing the audience to gasp and Toni to wince; in seconds the fire sped all along the rim of the tank, creating a flaming hoop of fire with barely five feet of open water in the middle.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” an announcer boomed from the loudspeakers, “the amazing Ella Carver will climb to the top of this ninety-foot ladder, set herself ablaze, and dive into the inferno you see before you!”
The air pungent with the smell of burning gasoline, Ella said, “That’s my cue,” and began climbing the tower. Now from the loudspeakers came a piece of music familiar to many circus-goers: Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” punctuating Ella’s ascent with its pulsing rhythms and dramatic percussion. It took a few minutes to climb ninety feet, and with every rung the tension increased. When Ella finally reached the top, Toni couldn’t see her actually striking the match to the gas packs—but she saw the fireball that flared on Ella’s back as her jacket burst into flame, and shared the crowd’s collective gasp when she hurled herself off the platform and into the air.
Trailing flame like a falling star, she plummeted as the fire seemed to consume more and more of her pathetically inadequate clothing, before plunging into the middle of the tank, threading the eye of the flaming needle. As she predicted, the huge waterspout extinguished most of the flames—and within seconds Ella broke surface, climbed up the side ladder, and stood, uninjured, on the catwalk, as the crowd cheered.
Toni looked at her and thought, How on God’s green earth can I ever live up to that?
* * *
Ella said she was usually paid fifty dollars per dive, one dive n
ightly, or three hundred dollars a week: good money even by the standards of the booming postwar economy. “The real challenge in this business can be in getting paid,” she told Toni on the drive home. “Couple years ago I had to sue some fly-by-night operator to get the four hundred and twenty-five bucks he owed me. I’ve gotten burned plenty—and not from fire diving!”
Taking that as her cue, Toni presented Ella with the first of her monthly training fees of two hundred dollars.
Back in St. Petersburg, Ella entered a trailer park on Fourth Street between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Avenues. Young palm trees did their best to shade the clusters of low-roofed trailer homes. Ella pulled into one of three adjacent lots she owned, unhitched the trailer from the truck, and reconnected the gas, sewer, power, and water lines. On the other two lots bloomed a patchwork of flower and vegetable gardens that Ella had begun when she first bought the lots, which often went untended while she was on the road.
After a quick lunch, Ella and Toni began unloading the diving equipment from the truck and reassembling it again, this time on one of Ella’s adjacent lots. “I don’t have anything booked for the next few months,” she explained, “so I can start whipping you into shape before the next round of fairs and festivals starts up in February.”
By the next day the tank was set up and filled with water, and the first section of ladder was erected nine feet away and secured to the ground with guy wires. But that was as high as it would rise for the moment: “You say you’re used to diving from a height of ten feet, so that’s where we’ll start.”
Toni was thrilled to begin training and even the short climb up to the ten-foot summit of the ladder seemed exciting. She stepped onto the small platform, which was much shorter than the diving boards she was used to at the Y, and called down to Ella, standing on the narrow walkway surrounding the tank: “So what should I try first? A tuck-and-roll somersault?”
“Hold your horses,” Ella told her. “For now I just want you to look down. Even from only ten feet up, diving into a tank twelve feet in diameter is a different kettle of fish from diving into an Olympic-size swimming pool. For one thing, you’re not standing on a board hanging out over the pool but aiming for the middle of a tank of water nine feet away. Go on, take a good long look and gauge the distance you’ve got to cover.”
Toni went to the edge of the platform and looked down.
“And you’re not standing on a springboard,” Ella added, “but a little wooden pedestal. So the spring you’ll need to cover those nine feet—”
“Has to come from my legs, not the board,” Toni said with a nod.
“Exactly. Now, you want to make your entry into the tank at a ninety-degree angle, precisely. From ten feet it doesn’t matter much, but when you’re dropping from ninety feet up and traveling about fifty miles an hour, even an entry just ten degrees off the beam can break a rib, or worse. The minute you enter the water, relax your body, extend your legs like you’re sitting down, and throw back your head and arms—to cushion your impact, slow your descent, and stop you from hitting bottom with all that velocity.”
“Okay,” Toni said, a bit chagrined to learn how easy it was for things to go terribly wrong. She gazed soberly down at the tank, silently judging the amount of spring she would need to bridge the gap, plus another three feet to land in the center of the tank.
“Take your time, if you need to.”
“I’m ready.” Toni gripped the edge of the platform with her toes, bent her legs—and jumped.
She sprang up, putting as much oomph into the jump as she could to cover the nine feet of ground. It was an exhilarating leap, but scary too, at least until she had cleared the side of the tank and was plummeting safely down toward the water. She kept her body straight, perpendicular to the water, and as soon as she entered it she extended her legs and threw back her head and arms, as Ella had said. Her curved body only lightly brushed the bottom of the tank and she floated to the surface, feeling triumphant.
As she climbed up the side ladder, Ella stood on the catwalk and said, “Well, you missed hitting the ground, which is always a good thing, but I saw your rear end kiss the bottom of the tank. If you’d done that from ninety feet up your tailbone would be halfway up your rectum by now.”
Toni’s triumph was quickly punctured, though Ella’s colorful description made it quite clear that worse things could be punctured.
Once Toni was sufficiently practiced in takeoff and landing, Ella judged her ready to move on to a simple forward somersault. At the pinnacle of her jump she would start a tuck-and-roll, coming out of it perpendicular to the water.
“You’ve got to gauge two things now, distance and time,” Ella said, “and whether you’ve got enough time to do the somersault while still landing in the water at the right angle.”
“I got it.” Toni had done this a hundred times before. Confidently, she gauged her time and distance, then jumped. At the pinnacle of her jump she started to tuck her body, the world spinning around her—
But she was used to her pinnacle being higher off the springboard, and just as she was starting to untuck herself, she hit the water on her back—the impact knocking the breath out of her lungs and sending a huge waterspout splashing over the sides of the tank.
She sank like a stone to the bottom. As she surfaced, her embarrassment was compounded by the sight of Ella standing on the catwalk, dripping wet.
“Well, that’s just fine,” Ella said, shaking off the water, “if you’re of a mind to do a cannonball act in a clown show. And again, from a height of ninety feet, you would now be unconscious, with a broken back.”
Toni worked the rest of the day on improving her spring off the platform, finally gaining the necessary height to complete a perfect somersault and entry into the water at the proper angle.
And when she did, Ella surprised her by applauding.
“Good work. You’re a fast learner. And watching you has whetted my appetite. Take a shower while I go fix us some supper.”
Ella cooked a delicious dinner of fried chicken, parboiled potatoes, and collard greens in her small but serviceable kitchen.
“I bought this place,” she told Toni, “when I tried retiring from the diving game in ’43. I’d had a bad fall that required some emergency surgery, and my son Lewis, who’s in the Navy, was flown all the way back from hell and gone by the Red Cross to be by my side. He told me, ‘Mom, I don’t worry about the war, but I worry every night when I think of you setting yourself afire and then jumping into space. Promise me you’ll stop it.’
“Well, what else can you do when your son asks you that? And I had a gentleman friend who wanted to settle down with me, too. So I retired, and got married for the second time, to boot. Inside of a year I was itching to get back on the road, diving. My retirement didn’t last any longer than my marriage. I’m happy to see my son and daughter when they visit, but now I know—I wouldn’t be happy settling down anywhere permanently.”
“Did you and your first husband get divorced too?” Toni asked.
Ella’s eyes softened. “No, God love him, I would’ve stayed married to Fred Grabbe forever. But God had other plans for him, I guess.” She smiled tenderly. “I still use his name—I’m Ella Carver-Grabbe on everything except the stage billing. It’s like keeping a little bit of him for myself.”
Moved, Toni didn’t know what to say, and Ella, seeming a bit uncomfortable to have shared this, cleared away the dinner dishes and said, “Well, young lady, you get a good night’s sleep. We’re back at it tomorrow.”
* * *
Toni advanced up the ladder at a rate of ten feet every five days, quickly learning to gauge the increases in height and adjusting her jumps and somersaults accordingly. This was how all high divers learned their trade, with incrementally greater ascents to make them gradually more comfortable with the height. At forty feet, the climb up the ladder began to seem more formidable to Toni. But it was offset by the exhilaration as she leapt into the air and reache
d her pinnacle—a timeless moment in which she seemed to be defying gravity itself—tucked herself into a ball, spun end-over-end, then straightened out, feet flat in order to “punch a hole” in the surface tension of the water big enough to squeeze her body through. Then she curved her body, dissipating her velocity so she wouldn’t strike bottom.
It felt fantastic!
Frustratingly, even as she ascended higher on the ladder, there was one stunt she couldn’t seem to master: a double somersault, like the ones Bee Kyle had done so beautifully. It should have been easy—just a matter of continuing to tuck her body for one more revolution—but at the start of the second spin she would panic, afraid she wouldn’t be able to come out of the tuck at the right angle to enter the water. She made two abortive attempts in which she came out of the second tuck halfway through, turning it into a clumsy one-and-a-half somersault. The third time she hit the water with feet splayed, the impact sending an excruciating jolt through her right ankle. She cried out in pain as she went under, taking in a mouthful of water.
Ella dived in and grabbed her, got her up the ladder and onto the catwalk. “Can you stand?” she asked Toni.
“Sure,” Toni said, letting go of Ella. Her foot buckled under her and Ella grabbed her before she collapsed.
One hospital visit later, it was apparent that Toni had torn a ligament in her ankle. The doctor bandaged it, told her to ice it for twenty-four hours, and keep the foot elevated. “You’ll be fine in three to four weeks,” he assured her, “but no diving. Not even from the side of a pool.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the hospital bill took a twenty-dollar bite out of Toni’s cash reserves.
“Well, there’s no law says you have to do a double somersault,” Ella said philosophically as they drove back to her trailer. “Once that ankle’s healed, we’ll pick up where we left off and stick to single somersaults.”
Toni was angry at herself for botching the stunt, and frustrated at being sidelined for possibly an entire month. Ella tried to relieve the tedium by taking her to Tampa Bay Beach, or across town to a barrier island called Long Key, where they fished, caught dinner, and barbecued it on the beach.
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