In 1908, a 15-year-old girl from Vance County shook off her dreary life of cotton-mill work in one daring moment at the NC State Fair, where she climbed inside the basket of a hot-air balloon, rode up 3,000 feet and tossed herself over the side.
She was born Georgia Ann Johnson, but the world soon knew her as “Tiny” Broadwick, a 5-foot daredevil with a homemade parachute, who floated down to Raleigh and landed in a blackberry bush while the crowd choked on its cotton candy.
Before long, she would take this act on tour, thrilling crowds clear to California, once landing on a train caboose, once bouncing off a windmill, once tangling herself in a power line.
In 1913, she attached a trapeze to the side of her partner’s airplane, sat down on the swing, and dangled for a white-knuckle ride over Los Angeles until she flipped a lever and dropped into history — the first woman to ever parachute from a plane.
“It took my breath away,” she recalled in The N&O 50 years later, “and I couldn’t breathe. But I loved it.”
So as the State Fair chugs on this week after 116 years, and the annual fog of funnel cake and fried pie descends over Raleigh, let’s pause to remember its most thrilling act ever.
“One time the balloon busted when I was about 100 feet up and I bounced over a wire fence,” she recalled in 1974. “I got more Coca-Colas offered to me that day …”
How the fair changed Tiny Broadwick’s life
Georgia Ann Johnson got the nickname “Tiny” because she weighed only 3 pounds at birth, and she never grew taller than 4 feet and change.
She endured a rural NC childhood almost impossible to grasp a century later: youngest of seven daughters, married at age 12, a mother at 13. Her husband soon ran off, abandoning her to work the mills.
Then in 1907, she first saw Charles Broadwick performing at the Fair with his “Famous French Aeronauts.” This spectacle with a hot air balloon came only four years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, and nothing excited the mind of an adolescent mill worker more than the idea of soaring away from the Earth.
“I was always something of a tomboy,” she explained much later.
Not only did Broadwick hire and train her on the parachute, he adopted her so they could travel without raising eyebrows. On the carnival circuit, she became “The Doll Girl,” dressed in ruffled bloomers and a bonnet she hated.
Decades later, as an elderly woman long retired from parachuting, she would try on her old parachute at the NC Museum of History, showing an N&O reporter how to attach the straps.
“I tied this around here,” she said, “so my dresses wouldn’t go astray.”
An itch for recklessness
From 1908 to 1922, she jumped more than 1,000 times, often three times a day, sometimes waving torches and flares on the way down. She once parachuted into Lake Michigan, notching another record as the first woman to land in water. Later, she would train soldiers heading into World War I.
In all that time, she suffered only a broken wrist and a scratched-up face. But her ankles gave her trouble, and by the barnstorming ‘20s, there wasn’t much money in airborne risk-taking anymore.
The State Fair would go on to add the Inferno and the zero-gravity spinners, making daredevils of anybody with a handful of tickets.
But well into her 80s, she felt an itch for recklessness, for betting her life on the strength of hemp lines and silk.
“I want to jump in the ocean,” she said in 1974, not long before she died in 1978. “Now they got these rubber suits…”
