Lake Erie Lives

“I’m sending him back home,” the raven-haired circus beauty would tell Jay Cochrane’s mother over the phone. 

“He won’t stay here,” his mother would respond despairingly. “He wants to run away to be with you guys — I don’t know what to do with him!”

She could hardly believe that Cochrane, barely a teenager, had already mapped out his career, come hell or high water or the wrath of his very own mother. But this was the 1950s (a very different time, Cochrane points out now), when little boys who dreamed of running away to join the circus actually stood the slimmest of chances of succeeding. 

“I was infatuated,” says the Canadian-born wire-walker. “My mother took me to the circus when I was about 8 years old, and I saw this man do a somersault on the wire, and I said, ‘Mom, that’s what I’m going to do when I’m older.’” 

Cochrane came back to the Royal Hanneford Circus so many times, Princess Tajana (or Struppi Hanneford, as she was known in real life) eventually gave up. Under her tutelage, Cochrane learned the ropes, from acrobatics and the cannon to trapeze and the high wire. By the ’70s, he had begun performing the act that would make him world famous: the skywalk. 

“I was a skywalker before there was Luke,” Cochrane says proudly. Where a high wire might be strung 25 feet in the air across the length of a circus tent, the wire for a skywalk dangles between two skyscrapers. It’s hundreds of feet in the air. It’s open to the elements, to inclement weather and unforeseen updrafts. There is no net, and he wears no safety harness. It’s incredibly dangerous. Or so one might think. 

“People refer to us as daredevils,” says Cochrane. “We are not daredevils. We are professional athletes. People like us, we don’t take a gamble. We take a calculated risk.”

For Cochrane, it’s more calculated than some; after a major fall off a faulty wire in 1965, he used his convalescence to get his master’s degree in structural engineering. At Skywalk 2012, his show in Niagara Falls, the 69-year-old spends two hours every day checking the wires and equipment. He’s so solid on the wire, he wears a headset and speaks to the crowd, telling them his story and talking, as he always does, about his commitment to kids. In every city where he performs, he finds a local children’s charity to donate proceeds from the act. 

“I may be up in the air,” he quips, “but I’m very down to earth.” It’s an attitude that’s kept him going for more than 50 years, with only the rare day off due to inclement weather. 

“You have to know when to say ‘not today,’” he says. The Niagara wire climbs steeply from its origins at the Skylon Tower to the top of the Hilton Hotel — almost 600 feet off the ground — and when it rains, water pools in tiny grooves of the wire, making the incline impossibly slick. Wind, though, is his biggest enemy. So far he’s had to forego a handful of evening walks. 

“I’m always ready to go,” he says. “I never cancel the show until the very last second. I get very disappointed. I’m here because I want to do it. I love what I do.”