Sparked by a publicity stunt performed by Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly, flagpole sitting was a popular test of endurance in the United States during the 1920s, before falling out of fashion during the Great Depression.
Library of CongressFourteen-year-old William Ruppert climbed an 18-foot flagpole in 1929, where he sat for 23 days.
Fads sweep the country every decade. In the 1890s, spectators gathered to watch staged train wrecks. In the 1950s, the phone-booth-stuffing craze saw contestants try to squish as many people as possible into a single phone booth. And in the 2010s, planking swept the globe. But one of the strangest trends emerged in the 1920s: flagpole sitting.
The Roaring Twenties had many fads, including flappers and dance marathons. But flagpole sitting was one of the more bizarre. During the peak of this trend, Americans would climb on top of a pole and stay for hours — or even days or weeks.
But while flagpole sitting could be lucrative for some, the trend died out by the end of the 1920s. When the Great Depression began, most Americans lost their appetite for watching pole sitters.
How Flagpole Sitting Started With A Stuntman
The flagpole sitting craze started with one man: Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly. A stuntman and World War I veteran, Kelly reportedly earned his nickname after surviving a number of shipwrecks. He even claimed to have survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic, though there’s no evidence for this.
In 1924, Kelly was hired to sit on a flagpole as a local publicity stunt for a movie. For more than 13 hours, he perched high upon a pole, astounding those who passed by.
Everett Collection HistoricalAlvin “Shipwreck” Kelly was the face of flagpole sitting in the 1920s.
The stunt was so popular that Kelly repeated it elsewhere. Kelly sat on a pole for 80 hours in New Orleans, 146 hours in Kansas City, 312 hours in Newark, 22 days in Madison Square Garden (during a dance marathon), 23 days in Baltimore, and — his personal record — 49 days in Atlantic City.
Kelly also pushed the trend to new heights — literally. In 1927, he even sat on a flagpole attached to the top of an airplane. When asked if he was aiming to set a record, Kelly breezily told The New York Times that he “just went up for a breath of fresh air.”
National Gallery of ArtShipwreck Kelly started the flagpole sitting craze and then repeatedly broke his own record.
Indeed, flagpole sitting became a lucrative pastime for Kelly, who could make hundreds of dollars a day by sitting on poles. But the trend also spread far beyond him.
Other Flagpole Sitters In The 1920s
Another famous flagpole sitter in the 1920s was Betty Fox. “Pretty Betty Fox,” as the newspapers called her, set records of her own. And she also marketed herself as a flagpole dancer.
Atop a towering flagpole, Betty Fox and her dance partner, Benny (who was falsely marketed as her brother) would dance for hours as spectators paid to watch the pair balance on a two-foot wide platform.
Western Americana Collection of Princeton UniversityBenny and Betty Fox dance on a flagpole in Dallas, c. 1935.
Other prominent flagpole sitters included Bobbie Mack, who sat on a pole for three weeks, Bill Penfield, who sat on a pole for 51 days — and would have sat longer, if not for a storm — and 15-year-old Avon Foreman, who set a juvenile record by flagpole sitting for 10 days.
Some flagpole sitters sat upon a platform or a box to protect them from the weather. They sometimes rigged canvas to the pole to create tents, and used buckets hauled up and down by rope to transport food, water, and items like cigarettes and newspapers. The height of the poles varied widely, with some as short at 10 feet, and others towering nearly 200 feet in the air.
For his part, Kelly sometimes read newspaper stories about himself from the top of a flagpole in 1927. During one appearance, Kelly even requested a telephone atop the pole. When asked what he did to pass the time, Kelly quipped, “Drank coffee and smoked cigarettes mostly.”
Public DomainAvon Foreman set a juvenile record for flagpole sitting after he perched on a pole for 10 days.
But flagpole sitting was ultimately a trend of the 1920s, and no further. When the Great Depression began in 1929, Americans more or less lost their appetite for flagpole sitting.
How Pole Sitting Has Endured
When flagpole sitting ended, so did Kelly’s career. He continued to pole sit, but he was also forced to take on riskier — and more gimmicky — jobs, including balancing upside down on New York City’s Chanin Building and eating donuts for National Donut Dunking Week in 1939.
He died of a heart attack in 1952, and was found with a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of his most triumphant exploits under his arm, according to reporting from The New York Times.
But flagpole sitting didn’t entirely die with him.
In 1946, a couple climbed a 176-foot pole to get married. They even sold tickets to 1,700 viewers and invited LIFE magazine to photograph their wedding.
Columbus Metropolitan LibraryA 1946 wedding on a flagpole attracted hundreds of paying spectators.
A Phoenix car dealership also partnered with a country radio station to market their businesses with a flagpole sitter in 1958. John Roller sat in a Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner atop a 40-foot pole, vowing to break the world record in order to walk away with a free car.
During his turn as a flagpole sitter, Roller even wrote a song called “Flagpole Rock,” and he ultimately stayed in the sky for nearly 212 days — winning the car.
“I feel just like a man who’s been through a war,” Roller told The Arizona Republic. “It’s over, and I don’t especially want to go through it again. I never worked so hard in my whole life as while I was up there.”
The next year, however a 17-year-old named Mauri Rose Kirby climbed a flagpole outside an Indianapolis drive-in theater and broke Roller’s record by 13 hours. (Her daughter, Mellissa Sanders, would spend more than 500 days in a small cubicle atop a pole between 1987 and 1988.) Another flagpole sitter, 17-year-old Peggy Townsend, spent 217 days on a pole, and a man named Kenneth Gidge sat on a pole for 248 days in 1971.
Nationaal ArchiefA pole sitter in the Netherlands, with a sign that reads RECORD POLE SITTING 120 HOURS (old record). 1979.
As such, flagpole sitting hasn’t entirely disappeared since the Great Depression. But the trend has never returned to the same soaring heights that it once achieved in the 1920s. Then, Americans everywhere were seemingly intrigued by the challenge of climbing a pole — and staying there for as long as possible.
Flagpole sitting wasn’t the only strange trend of the past. Next, check out vintage health and beauty trends. Then, experience the Roaring Twenties with colorized 1920s photos.
