Word: baling
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...Gyro-Wheel," and that is probably as good a name as any for the contraption. Two or three times a day at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, where the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus has settled in for its spring visit, a British-born performer named Elvin Bale approaches the device, unlimbers its 40-ft. arms and sets both himself and the great wheel into motion. Thus begins what Ringling Impresario Irvin Feld says is "one of the most fantastic thrill acts the show has ever...
...once, circus hyperbole comes close to fact. At one end of the Gyro-Wheel's arms is a heavy counterweight; at the other is a circular wire-mesh cage 8 ft. in diameter. Bale and his wife Jeanette give the cage a mighty push. As it begins to turn, Bale hops inside, then makes like a hamster in an exercise wheel. As the cage rises, he runs up the inside to help maintain speed. When it reaches the top, Bale backpedals frantically to slow the whooshing descent, reversing again at the bottom to propel himself around the loop once...
...good. Cardiac-arrest time-the moment when some kids in the audience begin to chant "Fall! Fall! Fall!"-comes when Bale climbs outside the cage and does the whole heart-stopping routine standing on top, with nothing between him and a nasty tumble but an exquisite sense of balance. As the cage dives earthward from the peak of its arc some 45 ft. in the air, he is in danger of being tossed by centrifugal force into the cheap seats. Bale often loses balance on the downswing and has to hang on for dear life...
...Bale's Gyro-Wheel act is not his only scary turn. At another point in the show, he dives headfirst off a swinging trapeze bar and then catches himself, at the last moment, by his heels. That stunt gives even Bale bad dreams. "The heel is the last point of your body," he says. "You can't catch yourself if you fall. Sometimes I wake up at night dreaming I have just missed the bar." On these occasions, adds Jeanette, "he almost knocks me out of bed, grabbing at things...
...spring, the number of deaths grew so great that the bureaucrats had to admit their existence and ask for international aid. At first the drought seemed confined to eastern Ethiopia. But a new government survey uncovered big pockets of famine to the south and southeast of the capital. In Bale province alone an estimated 27,000 cattle, 25,000 sheep and goats and 500 camels have died. This study only hints at the true extent of Ethiopia's problems. Remarked an Ethiopian relief worker: "The farther east you go, the worse it gets." Ethiopian deaths are estimated...