A 15-year-old girl from Vance County got out of her boring job in a cotton mill for one brave moment at the NC State Fair in 1908. She got into the basket of a hot-air balloon, rode up 3,000 feet, and threw herself off the side.
She was born Georgia Ann Johnson, but she was quickly known as “Tiny” Broadwick. She was a 5-foot athlete who made her own parachute and flew to Raleigh, where she landed in a blackberry bush while the crowd choked on cotton candy.
She soon took this show on tour, thrilling crowds all the way to California. She landed on a train caboose, bounced off a windmill, and got tangled in a power line.
She hung from the side of her partner’s airplane on a trapeze in 1913, sat down on the swing, and went on a thrilling ride over Los Angeles until she pulled a handle and became the first woman in history to skydive from an airplane.
She wrote in The N&O 50 years later, “It took my breath away, and I couldn’t breathe.” I loved it, though.
After 116 years, the State Fair is still going strong this week, and the yearly fog of funnel cake and fried pie falls over Raleigh. Let’s take a moment to remember the most exciting act the fair has ever had.
In 1974, she said, “The balloon once burst when I was about 100 feet up, and I bounced over a wire fence.” “I was given more Coca-Colas that day…”
How the fair changed Tiny Broadwick’s life
Georgia Ann Johnson was only 3 pounds when she was born, and she never got bigger than 4 feet and change. That’s how she got the name “Tiny.”
She had a hard childhood in rural North Carolina—she was the youngest of seven girls, got married when she was 12, and became a mother when she was 13. Soon, her husband left, leaving her to work in the mills alone.
Then, in 1907, she saw Charles Broadwick at the Fair for the first time with his “Famous French Aeronauts.” This show with a hot air balloon happened just four years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight. For a young mill worker, the thought of flying away from Earth was the most exciting thing in the world.
She said many years later, “I was always a bit of a tomboy.”
Broadwick hired her and taught her how to use the parachute. He also adopted her so that they could move without drawing attention to themselves. She was known as “The Doll Girl” at carnivals, where she wore frilly bloomers and a bonnet that she hated.
A woman who had stopped parachuting many years before would try on her old parachute at the NC Museum of History and show a N&O writer how to attach the straps.
She said, “I tied this around here so my dresses wouldn’t get lost.”
An itch for recklessness
She jumped over 1,000 times, often three times a day, from 1908 to 1922. On the way down, she would wave flames and flares. She set another record when she parachuted into Lake Michigan and was the first woman to land in water. She would later teach troops who were going to fight in World War I.
She only got a broken wrist and a scratch on her face during that whole time. But she had trouble with her knees, and by the 1920s, taking risks in the air wasn’t worth much money anymore.
After the State Fair added the Inferno and the zero-gravity spinning, anyone with a few tickets felt like they were on a dangerous ride.
But even though she was in her 80s, she often wished she could be careless and risk her life on the strength of hemp lines and silk.
In 1974, not long before she died in 1978, she said, “I want to jump in the ocean.” “They now have these rubber suits…”