Warm milk, a loose wire, and two martinis: 50 years ago, Karl Wallenda walked a tightrope across the Vet

The first ball of the Phillies’ 1972 home opener was supposed to be delivered by Kiteman, whose objective was to soar off an upper-deck ramp above center field at Veterans Stadium and land at home plate. But Kiteman — a water skier from Florida who replaced two other Kitemen who bailed on the Phillies — instead slipped off the ramp, performed a nosedive into the seats, and somehow escaped with minor injuries.

So perhaps it was no longer a good idea, the Phillies thought, to have a circus performer walk later that summer on a tightrope 140 feet above the field. Karl Wallenda, a 67-year-old German-born daredevil, planned to walk 640 feet from foul pole to foul pole without a harness or safety net.

Ruly Carpenter, the team’s owner, figured the Phils were lucky to avoid a tragedy at the home opener with Kiteman. It was time to cancel Wallenda, who signed a contract two months earlier for $3,000. Bill Giles, the team’s vice president, called Wallenda’s agent to see if there was a cancellation clause in the contract. No luck. The show went on.

And that’s how Wallenda, who died six years later performing a similar high-wire stunt in Puerto Rico, found himself 50 years ago drinking a warm glass of milk in the Vet’s first-aid station before taking a nap during the first game of a doubleheader against Montreal on Aug. 13, 1972.

The Phillies woke Wallenda in the seventh inning and walked him to 65,000-seat stadium’s roof in South Philly. It was show time.

The Phillies ended the 1970s as one of baseball’s premier teams, but they started the decade at the bottom. They finished in last place for three straight seasons after the Vet opened in 1971, averaging just 66 wins per year and struggling to draw fans to their new stadium. The Phils averaged 16,584 fans per game in 1972.

“In the early ‘70s, we didn’t win a lot of games,” said Larry Bowa, who slapped the first hit at the Vet. “So we had to get people in there. It was like a circus.”

There was Kiteman, Cannon Man, Benny the Human Bomb, and a first pitch dropped from a helicopter. But nothing was as risky as the Great Wallenda.

“I always wanted to make people happy, so anything I could think of I would try,” Giles said.

Bill Hall wrote a letter to Giles before the ‘72 season suggesting the Phillies hold a “Circus Night” promotion after reading about a similar stunt by the Atlanta Braves. Giles and Frank Sullivan, the team’s promotion director, invited him to a meeting at the Vet to hear what Hall — who formed his own entertainment company after graduating from Temple — had in mind.

Hall, who is now 89 and lives in Glenside, fell in love with the circus after attending his first show at 11th Street and Erie Avenue when he was just 11 months old. His parents took him back every year and that’s how he ended up as a 4-year-old with an elephant’s trunk wrapped around his waist while he was feeding her peanuts. Hall, who went to Germantown High, was hooked. His business — Bill Hall Entertainment and Events — booked shows on every continent except Antarctica.

“We do family entertainment,” Hall said. “I deal with an unusual variety of attractions such as aerial thrill acts, wild animal acts, small animal acts. My client list includes circus fairs, expositions, ice shows. Family entertainment. I don’t deal with singers, dancers, strippers, any of that nonsense.”

Hall took a look at the Vet that day and realized that any circus performer would be dwarfed by the size of the stadium. Instead of something inside, Hall thought he needed something to go above it. He needed Wallenda.

“A year or two before, he walked a high wire over the Tallulah Gorge in Georgia, so I said, ‘I bet he would consider doing this,’” Hall said. “When I got home, I called my business partner Joe Bauer and asked if Wallenda would do something like this. He said, ‘Karl is crazy. He’ll do anything.’”

The event was billed as Wallenda’s “SkyWalk,” but inside the Vet’s home clubhouse it was simply “Win Day” as Steve Carlton, acquired before the season from St. Louis, was pitching the first game of the doubleheader.

“When he walked in, he said, ‘Today is Win Day’ from the very first time I saw him,” Bowa said. “What he did that year was incredible. We were a young team just learning our way and we weren’t very good hitters at that time. But we knew mentally, if we got one or two runs for him, we had a chance to win.

“He would emphasize it when he came in. He could care less about what happened yesterday or what would happen tomorrow. He was that focused. He wasn’t arrogant, just very confident.”

Giles said it was a bit of bad luck that Carlton pitched on the same day as Wallenda’s stunt as Lefty’s starts that summer were the rare times when the game sold itself. Carlton went 27-10 that season, making him responsible for nearly half of the team’s 59 wins. He led the National League with a 1.97 ERA, won his first of four Cy Young Awards, and compiled one of the greatest seasons ever by a pitcher.

“When Lefty came in, you left him alone,” Bowa said. “Now, if you wanted to talk to him the day before, talk to him after, he was good. But you respected that it was game day. ‘Win Day.’ That’s all he would say.”

Carlton allowed just one run on three hits against the Expos while pitching one of his major-league-best 30 complete games. The Phillies, who averaged the NL’s second-fewest runs per game that season, scored just two runs. But that was plenty. Carlton breezed through the Expos and the game lasted just 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Hopefully Wallenda wasn’t hoping to score a long nap. It was show time.

There were 38 people — 19 on each end — holding the wire to make it taut, but that was not enough to steady it as Wallenda took his first steps. Two weeks earlier, his son-in-law Richard “Chico” Guzman had died after he fell 50 feet before a performance in West Virginia. Guzman’s wife, Carla, started screaming for her father to back out. The Vet didn’t seem safe.

“I was sold on the idea and wasn’t at all fearful,” Giles said. “Until we got the wire up there and it was swaying a little bit. I said, ‘Oh, [bleep].’ I got really nervous.”

Wallenda told The Inquirer he had a bad feeling and thought about quitting but kept going. He walked about 35 feet and sat down, motioning for the 38 people to pull tighter.

“When he sat down on the wire, I started thinking, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen now?’ You never sit down on a wire,” Hall said. “I started to pray to God to get us through this, but then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, God didn’t tell us to come up here.’”

The rope was taut and Wallenda continued his walk before stopping again above second base. This time it was to perform a headstand as simply walking a high wire above a stadium was not daring enough. It took Wallenda 17 minutes to complete the walk. The Phillies brought him off the roof, ushered him into the press box, and toasted him with the two martinis — “Very strong, very dry,” Wallenda said — he requested before he started his trek.

“A party ensued, if you know what I’m saying,” Hall said.

Wallenda said afterward that it was the “toughest walk I ever made” and the “loosest rope I ever walked on,” but the tragedy the Phillies feared had been avoided. (He performed the same stunt at the Vet four years later.) The only thing left to do was detach the 1,000-pound wire that hung over the ballpark. Hall’s crew waited until the fans had left as the wire would snap across the Vet once they removed it from one end of the roof.

Just before they were ready to yank it off, Hall heard someone climbing up the ladder. It was Wallenda, who left the party in the press box and wandered onto the roof. He said he wanted to make sure the tightrope came down correctly, giving Hall a sense of dread that a Kiteman-like disaster was looming.

“All I could see was a headline: ‘Daredevil crosses Vet, falls to death in tipsy stupor,’ which would have ruined the whole thing,” Hall said. “But we got him downstairs and finally the whole thing was done and delivered.”