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When the Doctors Call You by Your
"He had a hankering to play around with aeroplanes and used to ask me questions about them," said Brown, who was himself an aviator during the war. "The advice I gave him was to stay out of them and he'd stay healthy."
In telling me of Gene Perkins' last stunt, Brown brought out clearly that greatest of all dangers to the stunt man — the other fellow. You've probably heard a hundred people say about automobile driving, "I don't worry about myself. It's what the other fellow is going to do that bothers me."
TN a stunt man's office hours, that danger is magr:fied a -^-thousand fold, because a couple of feet one way or th other may mean life or death. For instance, take the rather common stunt of jumping from the top of one moving automobile to another. Properly timed, it's as easy as picking pansies. But let one of the drivers get a bit excited and the boy making the jump is apt to find himself looking a balloon tire in the face.
A perfect illustration of this is a stunt pulled at Fort Lee Ferry by Leo Noomis, whose specialty is wrecking autos.
Leo was to drive a car through a "breakaway" gate (one built to be crashed into and so made that it would break in the right spots when hit) just as the ferry was pulling away from the slip. With infinite pains, they figured that if the boat got just one car length away from the apron by the time Leo hit the edge of it, the calculated speed of the automobile would carry
A stunt man in "Rookies" transferred from an aeroplane to a balloon. He climbed down the ropes into the basket and finished off with a parachute jump to the ground
"Can you make it, Perk?" Brown asked. "I want you to jump in here," indicating a spot some forty feet from the edge of the falls, "and go as near to the edge as you think safe."
"Just a minute and I'll tell you," said Perk.
He broke the branch off a tree and threw it into the water at the spot the jump was to be made. His eyes narrowed as he watched it intently.
"Sure, I can do it," he said. "When I get here," he pointed to a spot only two feet from the brink, "throw me a rope and try not to miss me. That water looks cold. "
According to Brown he did the thing with the perfection of a machine.
"I'll never forget the first time Perk ever worked for me," Brown went on. "When I saw him I thought he was the coolest looking person I'd ever seen. His self-control was astounding. His eyes were like ice, yet they were always smiling.
"I wanted him to jump out of a fourth story window. It was a night shot. We stalled around most of the afternoon waiting for it to get dark enough to shoot and about dusk I decided we could do it. I went looking for Perk and found him shooting craps with some of the boys. 'All ready, Perk?' I said. He looked at his watch. 'Excuse me a minute while I telephone,' he said. I heard him behind me talking over the phone to his wife. 'I'm sorry, honey,' he said, 'I'm going to be a little late for supper. I got to jump out of a fourth story window and then I'll be right along home.' "
Yet Perkins was killed doing something Clarence Brown begged him not to do, warned him against.
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Above: Ralph Forbes about to be crowned with a
Yucca chair. Below: Harry Carey plays a human
torch. Both in "The Trail of '98"
.