There once was a man from Patucket. His name was Sam Patch. And when he was a little kid

he did what most little kids in Patucket, Rhode Island did in the early 1800s. He went

to work. Six days a week in the textile mills, 12 hours a day in the winter, 14 or 16 in

the haze in swalter of the summer. And when Sam Patch was seven or eight, maybe nine,

he did what some of the men in the mill did. On his break, little Sam would follow them

up to the top of the high bluffs by the waterfall that powered the mill. And he'd jump. He'd

leap out over the rocks that could break your legs and plummet down into that one spot

in the river that was deep enough that you wouldn't break your neck. And for those few

seconds, falling through the air and cutting through the cold churn of the black stone

river, he'd be free of the mill. And then he'd swim to shore and dry off and go back to

finish out the day and the lifetime that lay ahead of him inside. Soon Sam's favorite

escape became the favorite escape of most of the other workers. They wouldn't jump themselves.

They'd sit down by the river bank and eat their lunch and watch him do it. And Sam Patch

found his calling and falling. In 1827 he had been working in the mills for a decade

and a half. He was 20. And he was ready to take his lunchtime leaping to the next level.

On September 30th, a crowd in the hundreds watched him plummet 70 feet from the top of

Pisek Falls in Patterson, New Jersey, where he was working at the time. The next day,

the papers dubbed him the New Jersey jumper. And Sam left the mills behind for good.

For two years, Sam patched toward the northeast. He jumped off flag poles, off factory

poles, off ship's mass. If you could drum up a crowd and some cash and you had access to

something really tall, Sam Patch would totally jump off of it. In the fall of 1829, he climbed

up onto a platform 125 feet above the Niagara River and the mist of Niagara Falls and stepped

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