100 years ago in Spokane: The city’s own trapeze artist-turned-police officer opened up about his past with the carnival

Spokane motorcycle policeman Bill Hudson had an interesting career – to say the least – before he joined the force.

Hudson was a “carnival balloonist and parachute jumper.”

He thrilled crowds at fairs by attaching a trapeze to a balloon, which carried him upward. When the balloon was spent, he would detach himself, open the parachute and perform tricks on the trapeze on the way down.

“An old time balloonist (Balloon Red) taught me the game and went up with me on my first trip,” Hudson said. “I’ll never forget the sensation when we dropped away from the balloon in the parachute. I’d always imagined it must be an awful jerk when the parachute opened up. There’s nothing like that at all. Although you fall sheer from 50 to 200 feet before the parachute opens, you would hardly know when it opened if it wasn’t for the loud clap the cloth makes when she spread. … I thought, ‘We’re goners, sure, the parachute has torn to smithereens.’ I was astounded and somewhat relieved to find it was still intact. Instead of falling swiftly to our doom, we were floating gently earthward.”

He endured a few scrapes, literally. Once, the parachute dragged him along the ground in North Dakota and he ended up tangled in barbed wire and tumbleweed. Another time, his arm cramped up and he had to let go of the trapeze high above a shallow lake. Rescuers had to dig him out of the mud. He broke an arm and leg.

That put the “final kibosh” on his parachuting career.

On this day

(From Associated Press)

1933: Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.