Free entertainment draws crowds and the Orange Retail Merchants Association knew it. In 1935, the group brought famous wire walker Bunny Dryden to downtown.
He performed on a wire strung across Fifth Street between the First National Bank Building and Abe’s at the corner of Front Street. The show during the Great Depression was a hit. People remembered it years later.
Dryden, who was from Texas, had previously made headlines across the country with his feats. Phillipe Petit in 1974 made an unauthorized walk across a wire between New York City’s Twin Towers. Dryden made news forty decades earlier with an unauthorized walk at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
News reports say he used the fair’s “Sky Ride” cables to walk and do tricks 660 feet above the city. He was arrested when he got back on the ground.
The Orange Retail Business Association’s promotional information said Dryden on July 1, 1931, became the first man to sucessfully walk a wire over Niagara Falls.
The Leader on February 20, 1935, read “If you want a thrill” come to downtown and see “the ace wire walker” do stunts over “the Orange business section.” His tricks would include carrying someone on his back across the wire and balancing on a chair.
The story said Dryden was young when he began walking the rod lines at the Burkeburnett oil fields. One day he walked a oil well pipe rod to cross a swollen creek and was the only student to reach the school. His teacher knew John Ringling of the Ringling Brothers Circus and contacted him. Dryden joined the circus at the age of 16. He later set out as a solo attraction.
Newspaper archives report the 26-year-old Dryden was 6-foot-1 and weighed 185 pounds. The Leader’s publicity said he attributed his secret for “nerves and grace” to never drinking whiskey or smoking.
The wires in Orange, low and high, were strung between the two-story buildings of the First National Bank and Abe’s, a menswear store owned by Abe Sokolski. Show times on Saturday February 22 were at 10 a.m., 2 p.m., 5:30 p.m., and 8:15 p.m.
Dryden challenged Mayor W.L. Blanchard to ride on his shoulders across the wire. He had carried the mayor of another Texas town. Unfortunately, the Leader did not print a story after the event, so no record is left on whether mayor took the challenge.
Dryden continued to travel with his act across the country in big cities like Los Angeles and smaller ones like Orange, which had a population of about 7,900 at the time.
He offered to walk across the expanse at the Boulder Dam (latee Hoover Dam) in July 1935. But organizers thought the stunt was not appropriate for the dedication ceremony.
Fate caught up with Dryden. He fell at the Washington State Fair at Puyallup in September 1937. The publication Variety later reported he fell 45 feet. One of his tricks was pretending to fall and then catching himself with one hand. But on that day, the glove he was wearing didn’t catch and he slipped to the ground.
He died a week later at a Puyallup hospital. Variety said the fair paid out his contract which included his act with his wife, then his hospital bills and funeral expenses. The contract also paid the fare for his widow to accompany his body back to Texas.
Volney Lafayette ‘Bunny’ Dryden was buried in McAllen. He was 26 when he died, but he saw the country, including Orange.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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