May 19, 1935

Detroit News Quilt History Project; Michigan State University Museum; Susan Salser

Detroit, Michigan, United States

An article about a daredevil who is making a quilt from her costumes.

Woman who Dives 100 feet into Flaming Tank Afraid of Thunder

Dares Death to Earn a Living and Is Making a Quilt in Which Every Patch Recalls a Brush with Disaster

She stood poised on a little platform high in the rafters of the gaily decorated Coliseum, poised in a bright red bathing suit her nerves at E-string tension for that whirling plunge into the little tank of water 100 feet below.

Fifteen feet in diameter, that tank, and six feet deep. Across the face of the water the assistants already had spread the film of gasoline. In a moment, at the whistle, they would light it the flames would puff up, and she, like a flashing comet, would shoot down and down, through them into the shallow water beneath.

She glanced below- measured the size of that tank, small enough at that distance; her eyes shifted to the thousands of white faces turned up to her.

Strange how white they seem how blank and waiting, hardly a motion except in the lazy waver of the big flags-of-all-the-nations hanging from the rafters.

She sensed, rather than felt, the huge flag of Sweden hanging there, five feet to her right. Then her eyes went down again, ready for the whistle.

Trapped by Flag
Shrill and clear it came. An attendant shot a match at the gasoline, and leaped back. The flames whirled up with a roar, and also, the high diver balanced on her toes, and dropped into space.

In that split second she heard a hiss of silk, the great Swedish flag answering an air current set up by the gasoline spun out, and round her, rolling her in its folds.

And, she told me yesterday "I knew I was caught. I knew if I tried to grab that flag it would tear, and draw me away from the tank below. And, you can just believe me or not, I heard a voice, just as clear as you can hear my voice, and if said,
"Roll out like it was a blanket." She rolled, all this in the flickering of n eyelash and went plunging down, even though her backhand loop to smash into the water.

Frantically the attendants dragged her through the hissing gasoline flames. She was unconscious. And the doctors in the dressing room found every bone in her left side broken. She was black and blue from ankle to neck.

But she was alive and her manager breathed a prayer of thanks to whatever gods of daredevilry manager's worship. She stirred and came to consciousness and lying there she said, "Another piece for my quilt."

"Out of her head" the doctor muttered. "No," said Bee Kyle, the high diver, "I mean it, another piece for my quilt"

Her Patchwork Quilt
Because you see, Bee Kyle who, at an early age already is a veteran high diver is making a quilt, a patchwork affair, out of pieces of her old bathing suit.

"It's fun", She told me. "Because I can look at the quilt when I am so old I can't even dive anymore and each piece will carry with it some memory.

"There's a green piece," she went on, smiling. "It's a pretty green. Thanks a piece of the suit I wore the first time I tried a really high dive- when I was 14, up in Montreal. And then there's white piece, but maybe you"d like to hear about that, only its not very exciting. Nothings very exciting in a job like mine."
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Courtesy of The Detroit News Archives.