"We all grew up in Sarasota. We have always loved it here. This is home," says Tino. "As a kid, you don't look at it like, wow, there are your parents and your grandparents up on that wire and they aren't like the other kids' parents. Back in those days especially, there were a lot of circus kids in the Sarasota schools. It wasn't that unusual. We all just looked forward to the day we could join our family in the show."

Tino does allow for the advantage of growing up in the one city in America where circus performers were plentiful outside the ring. "It really works both ways," says Tino. "The circus is certainly a very rich part of the heritage of Sarasota. And we've always been the best promoters of Sarasota. Everywhere we go, people always want to know where we're from, where we live. We tell them Sarasota, Florida-it's a wonderful, beautiful place, beautiful beaches, museums, and we bring that message with us everywhere we go."

The Wallendas were associated with two of the greatest tragedies in American circus history. On July 6, 1944, in Hartford, Conn., a fire broke out in the Ringling Brothers' Big Top while the Wallendas were on the high wire. The troupe quickly climbed to the ground, where flames had engulfed the grandstands; they were credited with saving dozens of lives. One hundred sixty-eight men, women and children died in what is still the worst circus disaster in history.

On Jan. 30, 1962, after more than 15 years performing the triple-tiered Seven without incident, the Wallendas fell in Detroit during the Shrine Circus. Dieter Schepp, Karl's nephew on the bottom tier, lost his footing and the pyramid toppled. Schepp and Richard Faughman, Karl's son-in-law, were killed. Mario Wallenda, Karl's son, was paralyzed. Gunther Wallenda remained upright, Karl and Herman Wallenda grabbed the wire, and Karl snared Jana Schepp-Dieter's sister, who had been sitting in a chair at the top of the pyramid-as she fell. Karl Wallenda held on to her until rescue.

"Oh, I can remember the night it happened, all the tears and anguish," says Tino. (Faughman was his stepfather; Schepp his mother's cousin). "My sister and I were in Sarasota with my grandmother, going to school. I remember the funeral, the headlines. It was all a surrealistic experience for a 12-year-old boy. Later, I realized it was circus history."

The Seven was mothballed. Karl Wallenda only permitted his family to attempt the maneuver two more times: once the next year in Fort Worth, "to show that the family could keep going and the show must go on. My grandfather was very conscious of being in the public eye, and he did not want the name Wallenda to be associated with a failure," says Tino. "He wanted to show that life must go on. That is the heart of the performer, to keep on going."

In 1977 Karl permitted a re-creation of the feat for a network television movie, shot in Sarasota, about the family-and the fall-starring Lloyd Bridges and Cathy Rigby. During rehearsals, while showing Bridges a maneuver, Karl fell 20 feet and nearly broke his neck; he was unable to appear in the movie (he was replaced by Tino, and at times other Wallendas, as stunt doubles, wearing blond wigs). The Seven was performed more than 300 times during the filming of the movie, without incident.

The collapse of the Seven followed the 1950 death of Karl's brother Phillip, killed on a Nebraska roadside while changing a flat tire, and his niece, Yetti, who died when equipment malfunctioned during an aerial "loop" act in a 1960 Mexico City show. Gunther, the only one left standing on the wire after the "Fall," retired from the act the next year and returned to Sarasota; there, he graduated from high school and college and became a popular history and geography teacher, training high-wire performers at the Sailor Circus, a Sarasota school fund raiser, until his death in 1996.

A year after the Seven, Karl's sister-in-law, Rietta, fell 50 feet to her death from a sway pole in Nebraska. In 1972, Karl's son-in-law, Richard, was electrocuted on the wire when a pole he took from Karl brushed a power line. Then, in a promotional feat for a circus starring his nieces, in March 1978, "the unthinkable happened," says Tino, who was leading a separate troupe of Wallendas in the Dakotas at the time.

In a tragedy viewed by thousands on the ground and many millions in oft-repeated newsreels, Karl fell 120 feet during a windy skywalk between buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This man who had back-flipped on the mast of a seagoing schooner, who had remained on the wire during an earthquake in South America, the indestructible Great Wallenda, was gone. At the age of 73, he had no plans to retire, and, the circus people say, would have preferred to die this way.