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Webster answered an ad placed by William "Doc" Carver in 1923 [2] for a diving girl and soon earned a place in circus history. Her job was to mount a running horse as it reached the top of a 40-foot (12 m) - sometimes 60-foot (18 m) - tower and sail down on its back as it plunged into an 11-foot (3.4 m) pool of water directly below.
A horse-diving show was an in-residence act held at New Jersey's Steel Pier. Pressure from animal-rights activists and declining demand led to the act being shuttered in the 1970s. Although there was a brief resumption of the act at the pier in 1993, it was again shut down amid opposition.
The Steel Pier is a 1,000-foot-long (300 m) amusement park built on a pier of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, across from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City (formerly the Trump Taj Mahal). Built in 1897 and opened in 1898, it was one of the most popular venues in the United States for the first seven decades of the twentieth ...
Doc's son, Al, wins a wild horse in a card game and Sonora names him Lightning. She later surprises Doc by taming and riding him, so he promises to train her to be a diving girl if she can mount it while it's moving, which she succeeds after multiple attempts. This causes a huge fight between Al and Dr. Carver as Al says he pushed her too hard.
Jan. 10—At the Maine State Fair in 1925, Dr. Carver's Diving Horses made a splash. People flocked to the fairgrounds in Lewiston to see "The Girl in Red" make a "suicide jump" clinging to the ...
A Girl and Five Brave Horses is a memoir by Sonora Webster Carver published in 1961. [1] At the age of 20, Sonora Webster Carver joined William Frank Carver's Wild West Show which featured diving horses and performed at Atlantic City's Steel Pier. Although Carver was blinded in a diving accident seven years later, she continued to dive ...
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