Sonora Webster Carver

Atlantic City performer Sonora Carver was the most famous horse diver of her time, and probably ever. It was an entertainment that was incredibly dangerous, particularly for the riders. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So, while
researching some other episode recently, and I don't even remember
which one, there are several that could have landed me here,

(00:23):
I came across just a casual mention of Sonora Webster
Carver and I looked into her briefly, and then I
had to resist jumping to work on her story at
the time because I was already so far along in
the other topic that I would have really made my
life miserable to change over that late in the game.
But I was enthralled by her story and a little

(00:44):
bit trepidacious because it does involve animal trick acts that
look very, very dangerous. It is, uh, the story is
mostly heartbreak free in that regard. There's there's one thing
we'll mention at the end. Um. It was, however, incredibly dangerous,
but it was primarily for the riders. Uh. And what
we're talking about today is horse diving, which includes horses

(01:07):
diving off of platforms. Again, it looks terrifying. We'll talk
about that relationship with the animals and and their training
and whatnot. And we're going to talk about not just
horse diving, but probably the most famous horse diver of
her time, certainly possibly all time, and that is Sonara
Webster Carver. But to talk about her, we actually first
have to talk briefly about Doc Carver to begin with,

(01:30):
to set the groundwork, um, because he invented this entertainment.
Uh and Doc carver story is a roller coaster. He
if you've done any reading about like wild West shows,
you've heard of him. His life was filled with a
lot of adventure and a lot of wild tales, some
of which are probably tall but he genuinely did some
very very uh, surprising and perhaps bananas things. But we're

(01:55):
going to give a very brief version of his life here.
William Frank Carver was born in eighteen fifty one in Winslow, Illinois,
and his childhood is pretty undocumented. The stories that he
told about it really contradicted each other. Even biographies differ
on what year he was born. They differ pretty wildly
because Doc would sometimes claim to have been born not

(02:17):
in eighteen fifty one, but in eighteen forty. Yeah, there
are various reasons for that probably gave him some credibility
early on in his life, and he just ran with it.
And then later on their discussions of people saying, wow,
you look amazing for your age, and he was like, thanks,
but he was eleven years younger than he was claiming
to be. But the important part is that as an adult, Carver,

(02:40):
who got the nickname Doc because he was trained as
a dentist, became a skilled sharpshooter, and he toured the
world in sharp shooting exhibitions and competitions, and he made
a pretty decent living doing it. He also had a
Wild West show with Buffalo Bill Cody for a time
before the two men had a falling out That is
a whole story in and of itself. Uh. Obsequent touring

(03:00):
shows that Carver mounted on his own without Buffalo Bill
were successful, but they ultimately fell apart for a couple
of reasons. One was economic depression, which meant that people
couldn't buy tickets, and also because it was discovered that
Carver had actually been using kidnapped Native Americans in his act,
and some of them he had just abandoned overseas. But

(03:22):
so many layers, of so many layers he wrote a
play titled The Scout, which also toured after this shooting
act ended, but once it wound down, he launched a
new entertainment project, and that was using horses and water
as spectacle dot. Carver claimed the idea for horse diving
had come to him in eight one when he was

(03:44):
crossing a bridge over the Platte River on horseback and
the bridge collapsed. As he and his horse fell into
the river and survived, it occurred to him that he
could turn that ability into a show. Although he did
not make it into one for another thirteen years. Doc
did include sort of a minimized stage version of his

(04:04):
fall from that bridge in his performances of The Scout,
But when it came to the larger scale dive show, Doc,
who at that point was getting older and was heavier
than would have been healthy for the horses to carry,
was not one of the stunt riders. He focused instead
on training the horses, and one of the skills that
he really developed was getting a sense of which horses

(04:25):
were game for this job, and according to him, even
enjoyed it. He claimed that when he was doing the
short stage drops in The Scout, which drops a horse
into a small body of water. It was just a
couple of feet, but most of the horses could only
be used once because even though that was a very
short drop and it was handled, according to him, very safely,

(04:46):
they were usually too frightened by the experience to do
it again. But then he did discover one that not
only seemed fine with it, but would literally walk back
around and reset himself, ready to do that trick again
without any urging, which gave him a sense some horses
actually seemed to enjoy it. Whether or not that's the case,
we don't know. The first of Doc Carver's diving shows

(05:07):
was held in Kansas City, Missouri. That was in the
summer of eight and it was an immediate hit. He
started touring and he had the same success everywhere he went.
People just flocked to the novelty of seeing horses dive
into the water. So now we're going to get to
Sonora Webster, who was born in Waycross, Georgia on February
two four. Her family was working class, and we honestly

(05:31):
don't know a whole lot more about it than that.
Um I managed to locate some records on a genealogy
site that indicated that her parents were Ula Marion Webster
Senior and Lila Gertrude are net Webster. But keep in
mind those sites are crowdsource, so that's not what we
would consider necessarily like a um uh, definite source he

(05:51):
would use. Again, there's next to nothing of them. But
we're gonna talk a little bit more about her family
and just a bit from an early age. Nora loved horses.
When she was five, she tried to trade her newborn
brother for a carriage horse named Sam that she had
fallen in love with. This is where I fall in
love with Sonora, because when I was about that age,

(06:13):
I tried to sell my little brother at a yard sale,
just because I thought money would be better than a brother.
I guess I don't know. I was five, She's Weelon
and Delon. Sam's owner had made the offer of a
trade in jest, and Sonora had actually gotten her baby
brother out of his crib to take him to the
neighbor for the trade. When her parents caught her at

(06:35):
what she was doing, she described her let down at
this deal falling apart as quote literally bursting with grief.
I was not bursting with grief. My mother was just
like you know you cannot sell your brother at the
yard sale. You were kicking the dirt, but not probably
crying in your room. Fortunately, living in Waycross gave her
ample opportunities for time with horses, even without any nefarious

(06:59):
trades of siblings and evolved Livestock was often held at
the railroad yards in way Cross as a stopping point,
and she would visit every morning on her way to
school just for a glimpse of the horses. Often she
got to school late as a result of this and
did not seem to care. She flunked first grade because
of it. That sort of set a tone for her education.

(07:19):
By the time she was in high school, she was
routinely cutting classes to ride horses. She didn't finish school,
not because of the horses, but because her mother had
to leave way Cross to take care of her own
ailing father, and that meant that Sonora had to look
after her younger siblings. She wasn't doing very well in
school anyway. Her grades were okay, but she was having

(07:39):
other issues. She had been rejected by a boy that
she had really fallen for, and she was super embarrassed
about the whole thing and heartbroken, and the combination of
those factors just made her very, very willing to drop
out under the guise of responsibility to her siblings. Still,
she did say later in life that she regretted not
finishing school. Information Sonora's early life is pretty sparse, and

(08:03):
Holly even found a source that indicated that she was
an orphan. That's not the case, though it is clear
where the idea might have come from. She doesn't talk
about her father at all in her autobiography, and her
mother is never mentioned by her given name. She's just
called mother. She also fleetingly references quote conflicts in my

(08:24):
parents marriage once in her autobiography when she's talking about
her own views on marriage. But that's really it. As
we'll see in Just a Moment, she found an alternate
father figure in her late teens who seems to have
been a lot more important to her. Yeah, she had
some issues with her mom. Uh, we can talk more
about some of those in her behind the scenes. But

(08:46):
soon after Sonora left school, the family moved to Savannah.
This was kind of on a whim of her mother's
when she saw listing for a home that sounded charming,
and off they went. There is no mention again of
her father and it seems that her mother at this
point was raising the kids entirely on her own. This
was one of a series of spontaneous moves that the

(09:07):
family had over the years. Sonora, whose siblings were at
this point all school age, was desperate to strike out
on her own, largely because she was tired of her
mother's desires determining her fate. It was actually Sonora's mother
that found the route to freedom for her daughter in right,
So anytime you see any sort of abbreviated story of

(09:29):
Sonora's life, it is often told that she saw the
following listing in the Savannah paper and immediately went to
see dot Carver and that ad read wanted attractive young
woman who can swim and dive, likes horses, desires to
travel see Dr W F. Carver Savannah Hotel. She did
see that ad, but it was her mother who had

(09:52):
brought it to her attention, and according to Sonora's autobiography,
she did not immediately jump at the idea. Her response
to her mother suggesting that she would be perfect for
this horse diving job was quote me, dive on a horse, mother,
You've lost your mind. She insisted that she did not
want to meet Carver or any of the people in
his company. I love I love her mother. You've lost

(10:17):
your minds. Her mother's ongoing pestering, though, led Sonora to
the Savannah Hotel one Wednesday evening, and she did meet
with Dr Carver, his son Alan, his daughter Lorena, and
a stunt woman named Vivian who was working with the
family at the time. Sonora thought Dr Carver, who was
eighty four at this point, was quote the most distinguished

(10:37):
man I had ever met. But even then, when Carver
offered her a job on the spot, Sonora didn't take it.
She turned him down. She explained the whole visit had
just been to appease her mother and that she didn't
see a life for herself as part of a traveling
horse act. But instead of abandoning the thought entirely, Sonora
Webster whipped to the fair and watched that diving horse act,

(11:00):
and she was, in her own word, spell bound. She
described the scene quote, A girl in a red bathing suit,
brown football helmet, and white sneaker sat on a railing
at the top of the tower, looking intently down a
steep ramp. In a moment, she gave a signal with
her hand, and instantly there came the sound of a
horse's hoofs hitting the runway, and as she galloped past,

(11:22):
the girl on the railing jumped on. They drew up
together at the head of the platform, where there was
a drop off, and the horse stood for a moment
like a beautiful statue. She hung for a moment at
an almost perpendicular angle, and then pushed away from the
boards and lunged outward into space. For a split second,
her form was imprinted on the night sky like a silhouette.

(11:44):
Then her beautiful body arched gracefully over and down and
plunged into the tank. We'll talk about how witnessing horse
diving changed Sonora's mind and her life after we take
a quick sponsor break. So, after watching horse diving for herself,

(12:07):
Sonora decided that she did in fact want to take
Carver up on his offer. But by the time she
came to this decision, the Carver Show was getting ready
to leave Savannah the following morning. She dressed as quickly
as she could, she skipped breakfast, and she rushed to
the hotel in the hopes of intercepting Dot Carver and
his company before they left town. And in her autobiography

(12:28):
she mentioned she could never recall their exact conversation, but
she knew she did not make clear to them that
she wanted to join their show, and they kind of
had some sort of talk, and then they left without her.
Three months later, though, dot Carver wrote her a letter
restating his offer, quote, if you still want to learn
to ride the diving horses, reply at this address. So

(12:48):
she did, and then she waited and waited and waited,
and after several weeks he appeared in person in Savannah
and asked how soon Sonora could leave. She was given
us salary of fifty dollars a week, and that was
more than triple what she had been earning as a
department store bookkeeper in Savannah. Yes, she had kind of
been making a life for her own. She had moved

(13:10):
out of the family house and into a boarding house.
But this suddenly seemed like riches and they get to
ride horses. Um. So she soon found herself alongside the
rest of Carver's crew in Jacksonville, Florida. That's where they
were spending the winter months prepping for the next season,
and she saw how they cared for the horses. Doc's son,
Alan was in charge of their day to day care

(13:31):
and managing the groomers that they hired. Duc's daughter, Lorena,
was a trick rider, but she had injured a muscle
in her leg and she was not ready to perform
again yet. Sonora had to learn how to ride bareback,
which was entirely new to her and very challenging. That
left her bruised all over her legs, and when she
got smacked by a horse moving its head and got

(13:52):
a bloody nose, Dot Carver made it clear that she
was the one at fault. She really bristled at that,
but she took the lesson to always be full, so
she continued to exercise the horses and practice riding and
develop her relationships with the animals. It was a while, though,
before she got to the diving part. When they finally
started touring, they would have to set up their entire

(14:13):
diving platform and pool system in each location, so they
would dig out tanks from the ground that were forty
five ft long, twenty five ft wide, and eleven feet deep.
Doc Carver and his son had experimented to find that
right depth. It sounds so shallow to me, but uh
their experiments when they had tried deeper pools, led to

(14:34):
them discovering that the horses couldn't really get to touch
bottom on those. They were a little too buoyant, and
they did better if they could get into the water,
kind of hit the bottom with their hoofs, and then
push off to come up out of the water head first.
Otherwise they might roll in the water and get disoriented.
So their standard tank size, which they had developed, was
lined with canvas, and it held an estimated thirty five

(14:57):
thousand gallons of water par some of the um. The
humans also would just swim in it for exercise. They
also included an incline on one end, so once the
horses got out of the water or righted themselves in
the water, they could essentially walk right up that ramp
and out of the pool when they were done with
the stunt. Above the tank was a tower which reached

(15:19):
forty feet in height. It had a long ramp at
the back for the horses to make their ascent and
a ladder for the divers. The divers didn't mount the
horses until they were right on top of the tower
before the dive. The tower also had to be lit,
since they gave shows day and night, but they also
had to position that lighting really carefully to prevent reflections

(15:39):
on the water which would scare the horses. All of
this digging and construction and lighting was overseen by Doc
and Alan, but it was always at the expense of
the fair or event that had booked the show. Doc
made sure that that was always in the contract. It
does sound like quite a lot of work and money.
It does. There where some of the discussions she talks

(16:02):
about in her book was that they weren't really making
that much money because even though they had made these arrangements,
they spent so much money traveling and getting the horses
and all of this equipment moved around that by the
time they got to their next destination in their next booking,
they were almost out of cash. Sonora also had to
learn to just dive herself, because sometimes they included trick

(16:23):
dives in their shows as well as diving with the horses.
There was a lower platform on the tower that was
twelve feet up instead of going right from that forty
ft uh platform, and that was used for both humans
and horses to learn their diving in practice, and part
of Sonora's training was being taught that she would. Initially,
when she started diving horses, always feel as though the

(16:45):
horse was going to somersault forward as it leaned forward
on its ramp off the diving board, but that it
was not going to and she needed to resist the
urge to react physically to it. Soon she was diving
with the horses with Alan, who she called Al as
her coach. She later wrote, quote, as Al coached me,
the odds between me and the hospital seemed to get smaller.

(17:06):
She kept practicing, and soon she was deemed ready for
a full height jump from the forty ft platform, but
she didn't train at that height. Dot Carver had decided
her first high platform jump would be in front of
an audience. Sonora describes going kind of numb as she
walked to the tower and started climbing for that jump,
which was in front of thousands of spectators in Durham,

(17:29):
North Carolina, but also feeling completely confident and at ease
once she finally got up there. She later wrote of
that first high dive quote, I felt his muscles tense
as his big body sprang out and down, and then
had an entirely new feeling. It was a wild, almost
primitive thrill that comes only with complete freedom of contact

(17:49):
with the earth. Then I saw the water rushing up
at me, and the next moment we were in the tank.
We went in so smoothly that the wetness seemed the
only proof of landing. Also wrote of horses diving in general, quote,
the physical, holy, sensual pleasure that comes with a drop
from the tower down to the tank is a pleasure
totally lacking in psychological or philosophical meaning. It's the sheer

(18:13):
exhilaration of being entirely free of the earth as well
as everything human. To me, no other physical sensation can
be so acute, so deeply intoxicating. Sonora started giving multiple
shows a day as she was the only writer. The
team split up and Al took two of the horses
onto another booking so they could bring in more money.

(18:33):
Dot Carver trained another young woman to send along with
that group while he and Sonora stayed in Durham since
Lorena was still unable to ride. Once Lorena was fully healed,
she literally got back on the horse as the sub
writer was not as good as Al and Doc had hoped.
Yeah the person they had sent along to that other booking,
they determined did not really have the nerve to do

(18:54):
this job long term, so Lorena went to meet up
with her brother. At this point, Sonora was earning a
hundred and twenty five dollars a week during the busy
touring season, and she was often interviewed and photographed by press.
She made sure, she would later say, to not get
a big head about it and to remember that they
were really there for the act and not for her.
Throughout their time working together, it seems that Doc took

(19:17):
on a sort of taskmaster fatherly role in Sonora's life,
and she was really devoted to him. And this was
even something that played out in the press, where Sonora
was billed as Sonora Carver and reporters interviewed her so
called father, Dr Carver dot Carver would spend all kinds
of tales about how nervous he had been to let
his little girl ride, but he couldn't keep her away

(19:38):
from horses. So no doubt this was all intended to
stir up interest around this idea of a worried dad
and his daredevil daughter to sell tickets. Yeah, the first
of these articles I found, I got really excited because
they talked about her father being nervous and I'm like
they found her father, and it was like, oh no,
this was a ruse. As they toured, Doc, who was

(20:03):
in his eighties, needed her more and more just to
handle many of the tasks of everyday life on the road.
He seemed like he just grew really attached to her
and wanted her around to help him with things, and
he always wanted her to travel with him. Throughout nineteen seven,
his health had really declined. They had reluctantly gotten him
to go to the hospital at one point while he

(20:23):
and Sonora were traveling, which he did not like uh
and eventually got out of and made clear he probably
wasn't going to follow doctor's orders. And on August thirty one,
he died after he and Sonora had met up with
Al and Lorena and Sacramento for a booking, and a
lot of his obituaries list Sonora Carver as his daughter.

(20:44):
There had already been some discussion of Alan taking over
his father's road show, so the transition in that regard
was pretty smooth. In accordance with Doc's wishes, they didn't
pause their performance schedule. They shipped his body to Winslow,
Illinois to be interred. While they went on for the
Sacramento contract. Under Al stewardship, the act changed a little bit.
So whereas Doc had always insisted on fairly conservative, plain

(21:08):
red swimsuits with the most modest cuts available, no adornment,
and plain bathrobes, I'll let the performers choose their own outfits.
So Sonora and Lorena at a different colored suits with
some spangles stitched onto them, and more glamorous robes with
embroidered backs. There's a great description where she talks about
Lorena giving her a robe that she had embroidered with

(21:30):
a peacock on the back and how much she loved
it and it felt like the most glamorous garments she
had ever worn. They also started traveling by car instead
of by train, although initially the horses still needed to
be shipped by train while they sought out the perfect
trailer for them. When Lorena decided to retire from performing
to manage the second touring group, Sonora's sister Arnett joined

(21:51):
as her replacement. And this is something that Sonora really
thought long and hard about. She knew the dangers involved
with this work. They had ever had a horse get injured,
but riders definitely had everything from bloody noses too, fractured
bones and teeth being knocked out, and a stunt man
from the movie industry had begged Dot Carver to let

(22:13):
him try out horse diving and had actually broken his
neck and died on his first dive. But Sonora also
knew that Arnette craved adventure in the same way that
she did. She ultimately decided that at least if Arnette
was with her, she could teach her how to be
as safe as possible and might save her from making
more dangerous choices with her life. Al also acquired a

(22:35):
paint horse named Red Lips during this time that was
known for being incredibly obstinate. This is another great story
in her book about the farmer that owned him, being like,
I'm not selling this horse. He might be satan. He
had apparently tried to sell him and he kept getting
returned uh Sonora, and although both fell in love with
this horse and they learned to negotiate with his temperament.

(22:58):
They even got him a baby as a pet to
make him happy, which seemed to work. And Sonora's devotion
to this particular horse would end up costing her greatly,
which we'll talk about in a bit. Uh He was
a good diver, but he was a little bit dangerous
because he likes to do what they call nose diving,
meaning that he went into the water at an almost
vertical angle straight in, rather than at a slant like

(23:20):
most of the horses. Simultaneously, the relationship shifted between Al
and Sonora. They had worked together for years, but once
they were working alone together, they got closer and closer
over time, and they fell in love. She later wrote
quote Al says he loved me from the beginning and
that he had told himself soon after we met, someday

(23:41):
I'm going to marry her, which is very flattering, but
from my viewpoint, open to argument, she's pretty funny. Uh.
Al did eventually openly profess his love for Sonora, and
that actually made her feel kind of conflicted. She really
liked him too, but she had also seen bad mayor DGEs.
This is the one time she mentions her parents conflicted marriage,

(24:03):
and even in good marriages, it seemed to her like
the love eventually withered, or that having kids created this
constant financial stress of having to provide for them. She
liked being single, and she told Alice much, but Eventually
she did agree to marry him. She was still a
little bit unsure about it even as she said her vows.
But after the quick morning ceremony that they had Al

(24:25):
told her quote, I'll see to it that you're never sorry,
and then they got back to work. They actually had
a show to do that afternoon. A week later, Al
gave Sonora a present that she said many brides would
not have wanted but was quote the perfect one for me,
A contract for a season's engagement at the Atlantic City
Steel Pier. This meant not only more stability and less

(24:49):
constant travel, but also a custom built tank and tower.
The humans also had actual dressing rooms, and the horses
had dedicated stall space. Our Nett's summer of horse diving
had not gone spectacularly well. They had sent her home,
but she begged to come to Atlantic City to see
if there wasn't something else she could do, and Sonora

(25:10):
and Al finally acquiesced to her repeated requests. On this,
Sonora found Our Network as part of a swimming, diving,
and water skiing act that was also contracted to appear
at the pier, and for the next several summers, the
sisters got to work together in Atlantic City, and they
actually saw people that intersect with some of our other shows,
like Johnny weiss Miller and John Philip Sousa as they

(25:31):
came through on bookings as well. In one Sonora was
performing a jump with her horse, Red Lips, when he
went more aggressively vertical than usual. She was afraid that
leaning forward to tuck her head next to his neck,
which they normally did for safety, would cause him to
just roll forward really dangerously, so she held her weight

(25:52):
back to keep their balance, and as she later wrote, quote,
I was successful, but that position caused me to strike
the water flat on my face instead of diving in
at the top of my head, and the excitement of
the moment, I had failed to close my eyes quickly enough,
and as we hit I felt a dull, stinging sensation.
She stayed on the horse's back and wrote him out
of the water, and although it had been rough, she

(26:13):
thought she was okay. But back in her dressing room
she told Al quote, I feel as if I were
trying to peer through fog. Al wanted her to go
to a doctor, but instead she went back out for
the second show and two shows the next day. Things
seemed to be getting better, and she wasn't in any pain,
so she thought she was fine. But as those foggy

(26:34):
patches disappeared, she found at first that her vision had
a yellow cast to it, but she still kept writing
because again there was no pain. And then several days
later she had what she described as a smoky gray
curtain to her vision, which finally caused her to acknowledge
her own fear over what was happening, but she still
wrote again. That night, she wrote quote, I was also

(26:56):
protecting my pride. No one had ever had to take
place on my horse, and no one was going to.
When she finally went to the doctor, she was diagnosed
with detached retina's. The doctor hoped that he could save
the site in her right eye, but he was frank
that her left eye was beyond help. She had surgery,
but the results were not what they had hoped for.

(27:18):
They tried additional procedures but had the same result. Sonora's
remaining site got worse, not better, and she became completely blind,
as she described it quote enveloped in folds of soft
black velvet. We will talk about how Sonora came through
this period of convalescence, which was really difficult for someone
who was so constantly active. But first we're going to

(27:39):
take a quick break for award from the sponsors to
keep stuff you missed in history class going. In her autobiography,
Sonora describes really frankly her mental journey during her time
convalescing and eventually accepting what was happening to her. She

(28:01):
has this really long description of how the word blind
started appearing in her mind. First, it's just a pinpoint
of light that she refused to acknowledge, and over several days,
eventually becoming larger and legible. And when she finally acknowledged
this word, she experienced what she described as a sense
of relief at finally naming her situation, but also panic.

(28:25):
And then, as she put it, a voice came to
her that said, quote, you know you'll never see again,
will you let it ruin your life? She said no
to that, uh, And then several days later she heard
what she believed to be the voice of God saying quote,
don't be afraid you will see. She interpreted that to
mean a greater mental vision and not the return of

(28:48):
her actual eyesight, and she spent several days assessing her
relationship with the world around her. In this new state,
she wrote, quote, I decided that the best strategy I
could adopt would be to treat my blindness as if
it were a minor detail rather than a major catastrophe.
I would thus be turning the tables on my handicap,
in fact striking it. It's very potency. I was careful, however,

(29:10):
not to delude myself. The way would not be easy.
The independence that had always been part of her personality
for her entire life really came into play here. She
very quickly grew tired of Al and her sister Arnett
trying to take care of her. She felt like she
was being babied and she hated it. So she just
started trying to do things herself to see how it went.

(29:32):
And she started with bathing, which she was really proud
the first time she was able to like manage getting
bathed herself. She's like, this is not something I can't do.
She also found that she didn't want any help at
all soon, and the only thing that she let Al
do for her was cut her meat at meals. She
actually felt fine doing it, but it made him really
really nervous to watch her with a knife, so she

(29:54):
eventually gave in and just let him handle it, and
she also went along with his desire to hire a
cook for them. Does the casual socialization of life was
this whole other fight, though. She found the way she
was treated was really frustrating, and she wrote about it quote.
The attitude of over protection towards the blind, not infrequent
among the sided, often can be more of a handicapped

(30:16):
than blindness itself, and one of the most damaging aspects
is the continual effort to help the blind person physically
at the expense of the blind person's feelings. She lived
in her head a lot in her initial days without vision,
learning brail was something that actually really delighted her. She
talks about the tutor that someone found for her being
just an absolute breath of fresh air during this time,

(30:39):
because it meant that she could read to pass the time,
instead of only being in her thoughts or also having
to constantly explain to people that really she was perfectly
able to dress herself without assistance. When Atlantic City chose
to renew the contract with al for another summer, Sonora's
first reaction was frustration she would be left at home

(30:59):
and on a well to be part of this, and
this was something that had been her source of joy
for years. And then she pitched the idea of diving
again to her doctor, and to everybody's surprise, he said
it was okay as long as she wore a helmet.
Sonora knew that as long as she could get on
the horse, the rest of it would be relatively easy. Yeah,
at that point, wearing helmets had kind of fallen out

(31:21):
of favor. But she's like, I'll go back to the helmet.
That's not a problem. She was super excited that she
could even possibly do this, So first she practiced climbing
to get used to the ladder again, and al rigged
a rope that ran from the dressing room out to
the tower so she had a guide if she needed it.
She talks about how she was too prideful to ever
actually put her hand on the rope. She would just

(31:42):
feel the fringe of her robe hitting it, and that's
what she used to guide herself. She wrote, quote, I
felt that if I rode well, I needed no excuse,
and that if I needed an excuse, I had no
business riding. I tried in every possible way to play
down the melodramatics refusing to allow any publicity. Finally, in
June of ninety two, she had all her equipment and

(32:04):
practiced walking to the tower and climbing to the platform,
and she was ready to try her first jump. The
days leading up to that first jump, multiple acts that
were part of the pier show had all had accidents,
including a fatality in the trapeze act that had taken
the life of a woman who had really been one
of Sonora's close friends. When the primary dive rider was

(32:26):
suddenly called away, Sonora felt like she had to fill
her spot, and she put aside the fears that had
been brought up by all those other accidents around her.
I told her she could call off the show, but
she insisted that she thought she was ready. Yeah, this
is like a super strange time because these were all
accident had been contracted year after year, and they were
all normally they were in like clockwork, incredibly safe, so

(32:49):
it was very strange that several of them had accidents
clustered right together. But she made her first dive on
that same horse that had led to her injury red Lips,
and that first dive went perfectly. Sonora immediately returned to
her old performing schedule and started making multiple dives each day,
and she did this for eleven more years. She was

(33:10):
very frank that some of her dives had problems. It
was not always as great as that first return effort,
and they were actually four times she missed the horse
completely when she tried to mount. Initially, no one but
her family and fellow performers even knew that she had
lost her sight. The audience was completely clueless. She had
learned to basically turn to them and wave like it

(33:30):
was completely normal. They didn't know that she couldn't see them. Eventually,
word did get out that Sonora was blind, and a
reporter convinced her to let him write a story about it,
and this led to a new path for her. She
had initially really hated the idea of publicity around her blindness,
but soon she realized that her story might help other

(33:50):
people hope in similar situations, and her feelings about it
really changed entirely. Yes, she after that was very open
about it and perfectly willing to talk about it with
the press. But Sonora Webster Carver gave her last show
in ninety two. At that point, they were not at
the pier at Atlantic City anymore. They had started touring again,

(34:11):
but World War Two had made it really, really hard
to get the workers that they needed in all of
their various locations to maintain the horses and dig the
tank and set up the tower. So they decided that
it was really time to retire. Sonora described it as
all of them red Lips in her and al being
put out to pasture. Red Lips lived out the remainder
of his life in Houston with friends of the Carvers.

(34:34):
The Carvers relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana. They didn't really retire, though,
I'll take a job as a motel clerk, and Sonora
became a typist at the Lighthouse for the Blind. Arnett
married a man named Jacob French, who she had met
at the pier in nine, and she moved to Pennsylvania.
In nineteen sixty one, Sonora published an autobiography titled A

(34:56):
Girl and Five Brave Horses. I used it as one
of my resources this and it is an absolute delight
of a read because she was a fantastic storyteller and
she was very funny. In nineteen seventy nine, after working
as both the typist and an advocate for the blind
through Lighthouse for the Blind. Carver retired and in a
Disney film was made that was based on her life

(35:18):
story called Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, which is how
I absolutely already knew Sonora Carber was when Nallie told
me she was considering this episode. According to her sister Arnette, though,
when Sonora went to the movie, she was really disappointed
and how they changed things around. She told our Nette quote,

(35:39):
the only thing true in it is that I rode
diving horses, I went blind, and I continued to ride
for another eleven years. And part of what bothered her
so much was having her return to horse diving after
the accident portrayed as this huge challenge in this fear
that she had to overcome, when really that had been
all she had wanted to do, and it at her

(36:00):
really happy to be able to get back into it.
Sonora also lived long enough to see horse diving finally
and as an entertainment in the nineteen seventies due to
animal welfare concerns. Well before Sonora Webster joined Dot Carver's show,
the group was already under a lot of scrutiny from
the Society for the Prevention of cruelty to animals. According

(36:21):
to Sonora's account, veterinarians from the spc A would stop
by to inspect the horses, but they were always satisfied
with their condition and their care. At one point on
the tour, this landed Dot Carver in court when an
order had been issued to stop the performances until an
investigation could be made. Doc took one of the horses

(36:42):
right to the courthouse to have the judge examine it,
and the case was thrown out. There was also a
brief effort to bring a diving mule show to the
Steel Peer in the nineteen nineties that was quickly shut
down after protests over animal rights. People who participated in
horse diving are really quick to point out the level
of care that the Carver horses always received and that

(37:04):
while there were human injuries and even the fatality we
mentioned earlier, the horses did not get hurt during dives,
and they would quickly remove a horse from their training
program if it appeared to have any nervousness or reluctance
about jumping. There was, though, something we should point out,
which is that one horse fatality took place in n

(37:24):
when Doc Carver was still alive, but not on site.
One of the booked venues insisted on using the open
water as the landing instead of a tank, and without
Doc around to say no, the crew went along with it,
and the horse made the jump just fine, but it
got disoriented in this open body of water and it

(37:45):
swam in a panic into deeper water, where it became
exhausted and drowned. Carver was, by Sonora's account, both angry
and heartbroken at this and ended the contract and never
worked with that venue again. Yeah. She described in her
book that she had never seen him that upset and
never did again. But regardless of whether the horses and

(38:05):
Carver Show were happy or not, the time for animal
acts of this nature is clearly passed, as most animal
protection groups denounced the use of animals and entertainment. The
future of circuses, for example, is often in the news,
and it's likely animal free or switching to virtual animals
created using projection, which has opened up an entirely new
area of artistry. If you go hunting for any of

(38:28):
those videos online, they're quite cool. So a resurgence of
horse diving seems entirely unlikely, but you can if you
want to see it find a couple of videos online
that show Carver and other stunt rider's horse diving Sonora Webster.
Carver died in September of two thousand three in Pleasantville,
New Jersey, at the age of nine. Do you have

(38:48):
some listener mail for us? I do. I actually have
several pieces of listener mail, because they're all related to
do Konamoku and they're all pretty short. Um. The first
one I will say is from our listener, Susan, who
writes Aloha the behind the scenes episode for Duke Kahanamoku,
where you talk about that this is your life host
pronouncing Hawaii with the W sounding like a V. You

(39:10):
do know that in the Hawaiian language, the V sound
is the correct way to say the W in the
word Hawaii, right, because the mistake is not educating people
about the Hawaiian language and not the host using the
correct Hawaiian pronunciation of Hawaii. No grimace needed. It sounds
so much the way like someone would say a Bavarian
V to me that I think that's why I recoiled
a bit. I do know that does sometimes subout, but

(39:31):
I didn't realize that that was normally the preferred pronunciation
of Hawaii. But this has, of course, um inspired me
to start taking Hawaiian lessons in du a lingo. I
have not seen the this is your life that we
were talking about, um, and so I had interpreted it
as like the cringe e over pronunciation things people do

(39:53):
like it is to me, Yeah, as though we were
talking about Paris and we kept saying Paris every time,
like that's how that is exactly how it vibes to me.
But again, I'm not a I'm certainly not a Hawaiian speaker.
So I don't know if she has seen that footage
or not. But um uh. If she says I don't
have to cringe, that's a huge relief. Um. The next

(40:17):
one is from our listener Alana. Again it's fairly short.
Uh made me laugh so and it's about laughing, so
that's great, she writes, High Holly and Tracy, thank you
for the two parter and mini on the Great Duke Kahanamoku.
I have to let you know I was listening to
you while driving and when you mentioned the way he
messed with journalists about the pronunciation of his name, I

(40:37):
had to pull over because I was laughing so hard.
I cried like sobbing tears and kept starting up again,
just imagining their faces. I haven't liked laughed like that
in at least a year, So thank you. I also
love that he woke up from a nap, then a
few minutes later one an Olympic race, when after I
wake up, I am useless for about half an hour.
What a man. Thank you for such a good time.

(41:00):
I've been a very long time listener and you never
disappoint Uh. That delighted me. I have anytime. Laughing makes
you pull over, and thank you for pulling over for
safety makes me please. Our last one is from Christine,
who writes, after listening to last week's episodes, I wonder
if it's possible Duke had an ecilepsy. I don't think so,

(41:20):
because he didn't seem to have trouble staying awake when
he was like doing something. Uh. Normally people with an
ecalepsy just not off when they are not planning to.
He just seemed to be much more of an advantageous napper,
like I got a minute, I can lie down, and yeah,
the only nap in that story that's that raised my

(41:42):
eyebrows in that regard at all. Was the filling asleep
underwater one, Yeah, which still to me was more about
his like his comfort level in the water than something
that that was potentially an illness. Yeah. He seemed to
be so completely relaxed that when he was, as you
recalling that story, he was in expecting the pilings for

(42:02):
piers under water and had a counterpart above ground that
would go to the end of the pier and they
would communicate back and forth, and then that person would
run to the next one. And I think he thought,
I'm faster than him. I have a couple of minutes.
I'm just going to arrest my eyes. Yeah, just as
a as a general rule on the show, we also
just try not to armshair diagnose people because we're not doctors,

(42:24):
and even if we were doctors, the person is not
here to examine. So I did a little digging after
this email to see if there had been any like
medical historians who had made that conjecture, and I definitely
did not find any. No. Uh, yeah, no one in
his family ever mentions like this, be like there being
a moment where they're like, how is he asleep? They

(42:46):
just knew that he would curl up and go to sleep. Right.
He felt like he had a couple of minutes. So um,
thank you though for your question. If you would like
to write to us about Duke Kahanamoku or any other things, boy,
I sure like those stories, you can do so at
History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also
find us on social media at miss in History pretty
much everywhere. If you would like to subscribe to the

(43:08):
podcast and you haven't gotten around to it yet, no worries,
You can do that right now if you wish. You
can subscribe on the iHeart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
or wherever it is you're listening to podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I

(43:29):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
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