FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. Carla Wallenda, a member of the “Flying Wallendas” wire industry and the last surviving child of the founder of the famous group, has died at the age of 85.
Her son, Rick Wallenda, said on social media that she died of natural causes on Saturday in Sarasota, Florida. She was the daughter of Karl Wallenda, who founded the group in Germany before moving to the United States in 1928 with great praise. She was the aunt of the aviator Nik Wallenda.
Carla Wallenda was born on February 13, 1936 and appeared in a news story in 1939 when she learned how to walk the wire while her father and mother, Mati, watched it. But she said her first time on the wire was much earlier.
“They actually carried me over the wire when I was 6 weeks old,” she told a Sarasota TV station in 2017. “My father rode the bicycle and my mother sat on his shoulders and held me and introduced me to the public.”
She traveled the country in her younger years while her father’s group performed in the Ringling Bros. circus. She had a brother, Mario, and a sister, Jenny – all performed.
According to her biography on the family’s website, she started appearing in the family show in 1947, but at first not on the high thread. In 1951, her father told her that she could join the high-wire act if she could do a headstand on top of the family’s seven-person pyramid. She was able to perform at the high wire later that year.
Carla Wallenda left the family business in 1961 to form her own group. The following season, two of the Wallendas were killed in an accident while carrying out the pyramid. Her brother is paralyzed.
Wallenda rejoined the family troupe in 1965, replacing an aunt who had died by a solo act.
Her husband, Richard Guzman, died in 1972 when he fell 60 feet during a performance in West Virginia. Her father died in 1978 and fell while running a wire across a street in Puerto Rico.
Yet she will not refrain from acting.
“Accidents can happen anywhere,” she told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2014. ‘I have to make a living and that’s the only way I know or want to. I did waitressing and hated every minute of it. should I go do a job I hate? ‘
She works through her 70s, including in a Miley Cyrus music video. She finally retired in 2017 at the age of 81 after appearing on a TV specialist by Steve Harvey and doing a headstand above an 80-foot swing pole.
“When I’m out there, all my pain and everything goes away, and I’m in a world of my own,” she said in a 2017 TV interview.
She is survived by her son, two daughters, Rietta Wallenda Jordan and Valerie Wallenda, and 16 grandchildren. A second son, Mario, died in 1993.