Harold Lloyd’s 1924 film “Safety Last” is known as the film where he climbs the side of a building, narrowly escaping death. Much of this was achieved with special effects, but the footage of the actual climb was real. It was all thanks to a chance encounter between Lloyd and professional building climber Bill Strother.
On September 17th, 1922, Strother was hired to climb the Brockman Building in downtown Los Angeles. In the crowd that fateful day, was Lloyd.
In an interview for a talk show in 1962, Lloyd related the incident:
“Now, I was walking up 7th Street… where the. Brockman building is.
And there was a tremendous crowd… maybe two or 300 people or more. And I inquired all I was going on.
They said, “a man’s going to scale this building.”
And I said, “Really?”
So I stood around, and they introduced him, and he started climbing, and he got about three floors, and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I knew it, and just knew he was going to be killed.
So I walked on up the street, and I didn’t want to leave.
I anything happened, I was going to be there to see what it was all about.
And so I went around the corner where I couldn’t see him, and lots of people were up there too, and I said, “Where is he now?”
“About the fifth floor.”
“Really?”
And then I’d peek around… he’s climbing from window to window.
And so I peeked around and waited until he finally got to the top.
Then he got a bicycle, rode it on the edge of the building, finished that, (there was a) flagpole right on the edge around the corner, and he crawled up the flagpole. It was a short one. Stood on top of his head, and, of course, the crowd were absolutely thrilled, and it had such a reaction on this group of people and on myself that I said,
‘well, now, if it can have that and you do it properly on the screen, it should have the same results.’
So I went back, went up there, on the roof, met the young man, and had him come out to the studio and see Hal Roach and myself, and so we hired him.
Storyteller and Promoter
Bill Strother started out as a 19-year-old promotions man for a real estate auction house in North Carolina.
Buildering, or free-climbing buildings had become a popular stunt, with human flies and human spiders popping up in the news for scaling tall buildings without any safety nets or tethers.
Strother was an athletic guy with a lot of energy, ambition, the impetuousness of youth. What better way to get some publicity than a crazy stunt?
In an article for the Saturday Evening Post from 1951, he related this version of his origin story:
In 1915, the fliers for his upcoming auction were on a train that was running late. Strother sat at the local lunch counter that day, wondering what he was going to do. He turned to the man sitting next to him and mused that he might have to climb the county courthouse to get some attention. That man happened to be the editor of the local newspaper.
The next day, he opened the paper to discover an announcement: “Bill Strother Will Climb the County Couthouse Today At 2 PM”.
In front of a crowd of five thousand, he safely climbed the side of the building in his regular street clothes, using only his bare hands. The stunt paid off… the next day he netted $35,000 at the auction, the equivalent of over 800 thousand dollars today.
Researching this article, I could not find any evidence of this climb in the local paper that year, but I did find many articles thereafter, such as this one below.
From Human Spider to Santa Claus
From then on, Strother became a professional Human Spider. He climbed more buildings throughout the south, slowly moving his way West across the country. Sometimes the climbs were promotions for businesses, and other times for charities like the Red Cross.
After signing on with Hal Roach and Harold Lloyd, Strother became performed in a handful of films, and later started an act with his dog, who was featured in “The Gold Rush” with Charlie Chaplin. They would also perform in Santa Claus shows for department stores.
After too many stunts and too many injuries, Strother returned to the South to retire and run “The Strother House” hotel with his wife. Retirement did not suit, him, and before long, he was entering the third chapter of his career.
He had an idea for a Christmas-themed show about the spirit giving, and to decided to pitch it to the local department store, Miller and Rhodes, in 1942. They turned down his concept, but liked his message and enthusiasm, and offered him the job of Santa. Strother had no desire to play Santa Claus, so, as the legend goes, he asked for an extraordinary amount of money, thinking they would turn him down flat. Instead, they agreed to $1000 a week, and Bill Strother became the highest-paid Santa Claus in the world.
As with his buildering career, Strother gave 100% to this new role. He traveled back to California and had Hollywood makeup artist Max Factor create a realistic look for him, which took 2 hours to prepare each day. He would emerge from a chimney each day for the children and, thanks to a helper with a concealed microphone, could call each of them by name. When not at the store, Strother’s Santa would visit sick children at home, hospitals, and appear in parades. Though he never had children of his own, he was able to touch the lives and bring magic to thousands across the country each year.
He again moved to California, but still managed an annual trip to Virgina to play Santa each Christmas up until his untimely death in 1957 in a car accident. He was inducted into the to the Santa Claus Hall of Fame in 2010.
Talking Silents 