He was fragile, sensitive, and prone to reckless fits of enthusiasm as well as deep periods of despondency when one of his enthusiasms didn’t work out. Weston went to school in Boston, apprenticed with a jeweler in Providence in 1859 he pops up, age 20, working at a newspaper in New York. The family, not atypically for the 19th century, was constantly breaking up and reforming as various members traveled and got married. Weston’s mother Maria wrote sentimental novels with titles like The Weldron Family, or Vicissitudes of Fortune and Kate Felton, or A Peep at Realities. He wrote a book about the experience, Four Months in the Mines of California, or Life in the Mountains, that his teenage son published in 1854. When Weston was 10, Silas disappeared to dig for gold in California. His father Silas stood 6-foot-4, played the viol, and wrote poetry. Just straight-up walking made Weston, for a while, probably the biggest sports star on earth.Įdward Payson Weston was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on March 15, 1839, into a respectable, if slightly eccentric, middle-class family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. In his 20s and 30s, he somehow became one of the most celebrated athletes in the English-speaking world despite the fact that he was physically unprepossessing - 5-foot-7, 130 pounds, with a body resembling “a baked potato stuck with two toothpicks,” as one journalist wrote - and that his one athletic talent was walking. By his mid-teens, he had already: worked on a steamship sold newspapers on the Boston, Providence, and Stonington Railroad spent a year crisscrossing the country with the most famous traveling musicians in America, the Hutchinson Family Singers, selling candy and songbooks at their concerts and gone into business for himself as a journalist and publisher. Weston, whose story is recounted in the spectacularly entertaining book A Man in a Hurry, by the British trio of Nick Harris, Helen Harris, and Paul Marshall, lived one of those fevered American lives that seem to hurtle from one beautiful strangeness to the next. For Weston, it was a pretty typical week. ![]() When Weston was too sick to perform in Boston a few days later, he was unceremoniously sacked.įor most of us, being hit by lightning and kicked out of the circus would be an extraordinary turn of events. Nineteenth-century circus managers were about as tenderhearted as you would expect when it came to physical infirmity. One day, as the troupe’s wagons passed near Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, he was “affected by a stroke of lightning” and nearly killed. He was 17 years old and had been traveling with the big top for no more than a few weeks - “under an assumed name,” as he reassured the readers of his 1862 memoir, The Pedestrian. In the summer of 1856, Edward Payson Weston was struck by lightning and fired from his job at the circus.
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