Sad Stunt

San Francisco's evening newspapers had gone to press one afternoon last week when, about 3:25 p. m., a truck rolled quietly along as though to cross the long new bridge over the bay to Oakland. Far at sea, a couple of steamers plumed on the horizon. Far below, toys on the hammered-silver water of the bay, a couple of launches circled aimlessly.

In the truck a tense-faced man of 30 pulled a football helmet on his head, strapped it firmly under his chin. Unbuttoning his topcoat he fingered a steel-ribbed corset beneath his bathing suit, adjusted the pads on his shoulders, chest and knees. "Here's the place," said the driver, stopping the truck close to the guardrail on the span about two thirds the distance to Yerba Buena Island. "We're three minutes late." In an auto on the ramp over their heads, a cameraman for the San Francisco Examiner (morning Hearst-paper) was checking his shutter adjustment, squinting at the cloud-scudded sky, gazing with concern at the second launch below the bridge. The man in the helmet stood on the running board, slipped out of his topcoat, stepped quickly over the guard rail, facing inward at the bridge. He glanced upward to the cameraman above him, then down to the water 185 feet below. He choked his breath halfway in his throat and, in the instant, jumped backwards into space.

Below in the two launches, cameras clicked. For seconds all was well. Then the people in the launches gasped as the plummeting body, having touched fingers and toes in a back jackknife, was seen to straighten and then veer, swing crazily in the air-pressure and smash, spread-legged, into the water on shoulders and back. "He's dead!" someone shrieked.

A lifeguard on the prow of the nearer launch dove as the body appeared, floating head down in the water like a rug over a clothesline. Rescued and aboard the launch the dare-devil diver regained consciousness, complained of chills. Then he discovered that his back was broken, his body paralyzed from the waist down. With him in the boat were his wife, his mother, the lifeguard, and reporters and photographers from the San Francisco Examiner. There was no doctor. Bad enough--but then the launch's engine refused to start.

The other launch belonged to the Examiner's, morning rival, the San Francisco Chronicle. There had been a tipoff. The Chronicle's men had their own pictures, and their launch engine was running smoothly. While the Examiner's, men fumbled with their dead engine and crippled diver, the Chronicle launch, unaware of the situation, sped ashore and delivered its plates to waiting messengers. Then it returned to tow in the disabled Examiner launch. It was an hour between the diver's smash and medical attention for him at a hospital. There, for hours, the shocked mother and the wife (three months with child) faced the alternative of their man's death from a severed spinal cord and ruptured spine, or his recovery with life-long paralysis. Scooped, the Examiner's editors could only groan as the first editions of the Chronicle screamed the ill-fated stunt through San Francisco with a five-column front-page picture.

The San Francisco Examiner's officials, shrinking from the public reaction against a good stunt gone sour, denied any actual prepayment to the diver, disavowed sponsorship of his plunge. Other newspapermen sympathized, because they knew who it was that had jumped, and why. He was Ray Wood, a professional diver from high bridges who had plunged safely from the 110-ft. Merchant's Bridge in St. Louis, twice from Steve Brodie's 165-ft. Brooklyn Bridge,* once from a 170-ft. Aurora Bridge over Lake Union at Seattle. Going off the 185-ft. San Francisco-Oakland Bridge was Wood's 185th high bridge dive. Had it been successful he hoped for a permit to dive (for a fee) from the new 220-ft. Golden Gate Bridge whence nine men fell to their deaths last month (TIME, March 1).

*Steve Brodie, 23, Bowery newsboy, bootblack and publicity glutton, claimed to have jumped from Brooklyn Bridge July 23, 1886. Evidence persists, however, that a dummy was dropped from the bridge, while Brodie hid on a pier below, and dived in as the dummy struck. His story at the time was believed. A brewery financed a saloon for him. He made stage appearances, flourished for years, died of tuberculosis in 1901 in San Antonio.

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