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If you think that you’re close to your family, get a load of this family. The Wallendas have been working and performing as a team for over 200 years! In the late 18th century the Wallenda family traveled throughout Europe performing circus acts such as juggling and acrobatics. For over 100 years, each generation of the Wallenda family would learn from their parents and continue the tradition of entertaining and performing.

In the early 20th century, Karl Wallenda was performing at the age of 6. His act was to stack chairs on top of each other and then do a handstand on the top chair. When he was in his teens he landed a job as a wire walker and learned yet another skill. With this skill he began to devise his own act and recruited his brother and a woman who would later become his wife to perform what would later make them famous.

On a wire, they would build a 4-person, 3-level pyramid. The pyramid began with two men on bicycles on the wire. One man was in front of the other on the wire and the men each wore a shoulder harness that draped over their shoulders. The harness supported a pole that was held between them. On this pole, Karl Wallenda would place a chair and balance himself on the chair while his future wife Helen stood on his shoulders. So great was their act that upon seeing it in the early 1920’s, John Ringling of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus offered them a contract. Their first performance was ground breaking for them because the safety net had been misplaced. They did their 4-person pyramid without it and their act became legendary. For decades the Wallenda family headlined the circus as the Flying Wallendas.

In 1947, they enhanced their act by adding 3 more people to the pyramid. The 7-person pyramid delighted and amazed people until 1962 when they stopped doing it due to a fall off the wire. They did this dangerous pyramid two more times during the next 30 years. The first was in 1963 to prove that they could do it again and the second was in 1977 mostly by Karl Wallenda’s grandchildren for the movie The Great Wallendas. In 1998, 21 years after the Wallenda family performed the last 7-person pyramid, they decided to do it once again in the exact place that the family had fallen in 1962.

To a hushed crowd, they built their pyramid and successfully walked the wire to the other end without a net below. With a regained sense of confidence, they now continue to perform the 7-person pyramid to this day and will most likely keep the tradition going for generations to come.