Integrating the Falls

Among those who take dares, some men ride sharks; others guzzle a fifth of gin at one sitting. And some take the 162-ft. ride over Niagara Falls. So far as the records show, six men have gone over--in oak casks, steel barrels, truck inner tubes, bathing trunks--and only three survived. Last week, daredevil No. 7 shot the Canadian Horseshoe Falls in a rubber ball and bobbed to the surface grinning broadly, with a few abrasions. Said Nathan Boya, 30, a Negro from The Bronx, N.Y.: "I've always wanted to make this trip."

Boya spent four months building his special plunge-o-sphere, a 1,200-lb. steel framework covered with seven layers of rubber, equipped it with 13 canisters of oxygen in case he was trapped behind the falls' water curtain--a precaution dictated by another fallsman who went over in a steel barrel in 1930, spent 22 hours behind the curtain, suffocated when his air supply ran out. Trucking his sphere to the Niagara River, Boya launched it into the current, climbed aboard and floated off. Niagara Parks Commission Chief Edward Rehfeld, who takes a dim view of such adventures, spotted the contraption two miles above the falls, put in a frantic call for a U.S. Army helicopter (no pilot available), then chased after the ball along the river bank. He could follow only as far as Niagara Control Dam, where he ran out for a better look. "I wanted to see it go over."

Over it went. When Chief Rehfeld arrived at the Maid of the Mist landing, Boya said airily: "Talk to my attorney --I've just integrated the falls." As a matter of fact, there wasn't much anyone could do about it, though Canada may have a case if Boya crossed the international border illegally.

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