Selects: Flagpole Sitting: A Real Fad

In January 1924, a man named Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly climbed to the top of a flagpole in Hollywood, California, as a promotion for a movie premiere, and sat there for 13 hours and 13 minutes. That single, bizarre stunt kicked off one of the stranger fads in American history: flagpole sitting. Within a few years, people were spending weeks at a time perched on poles, driven by a potent mix of boredom, a hunger for celebrity, and the sheer human impulse to see how long the body could endure.

The Man Who Started It All

Aloysius "Shipwreck" Kelly was born in 1893 in a Hell's Kitchen tenement, orphaned at birth, and shuttled between relatives and orphanages. From a young age, he was drawn to heights—climbing flagpoles by age seven, scaling building facades as a teenager, and later working as a steeplejack, stunt pilot, and boxer. The nickname "Shipwreck" likely came not from surviving 32 shipwrecks (as he sometimes claimed) but from sportswriters who said he was "often adrift and ready to sink" in the ring.