The Perilous Descent of Professor Parker
A daredevil aeronaut nearly meets his end in a tangle of city wires and building cornices during a botched parachute stunt over downtown Seattle.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A man styling himself Professor Parker, who evidently values notoriety more than he does his life, made a balloon ascension yesterday afternoon about 3 o'clock. He started from near the corner of Main and South Second streets and went up about 500 or 600 feet. It looked at first as though he were going to drop into the bay, but as he came closer to the ground it was evident that he would land on Railroad Avenue, very close to the Seattle Hotel, and everyone expected to see him get hurt, for it looked quite certain that he could not get down without his parachute catching on the edge of the building or the telegraph and electric light wires. But he was more fortunate than the spectators anticipated, for though the parachute did catch on the edge of the building, he held fast to it until drawn in through a side door upstairs, the only injury he received being a slight cut on the nose from coming in contact with a wire. He promises the public a repetition of the crazy performance.
“A man styling himself Professor Parker, who evidently values notoriety more than he does his life.”
Early Seattle was a hub for itinerant showmen and 'aeronauts' performing death-defying stunts that frequently blurred the line between entertainment and public nuisance. Today’s skyscraper-laden downtown bears little resemblance to the landscape of telegraph wires and low-rise hotels where Professor Parker dangled, yet the city’s enduring fascination with spectacular, if reckless, public performance remains unchanged.
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