Staring up through the barrel of his steel cocoon, all David Smith Jr. sees is a small circle of cornflower-blue sky. The angle of the 35-foot cannon is such that he is almost standing, every muscle in his body pulled taut. As the electrifying opening riff of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” kicks in, the announcer starts the countdown: “Five…four…three…” 

For a split second, everything is eerily still. Then, with a loud boom and a burst of fiery sparks, David Jr. hurtles from the cannon, soaring 80 feet in the air. Like a missile, he goes from zero to 74 miles an hour in less than half a second. But he maintains pinpoint focus. At this height, there’s no room for mistakes. He hears the crowd take a collective breath. He notices a little girl sitting on her dad’s shoulders. And he sees the red landing net hovering in the distance. But to reach it, he must first fly through a hoop that is 90-feet high, about the height of a 10-story building. Oh, and the hoop is on fire.  

David Smith Jr. shoots into the air during one of his world record-setting stunts.

After doing this job for more than 25 years, David Jr.’s movements are instinctive. He straightens and stabilizes his body, checking whether he’s rotated too much or too little. These movements are as natural to him as walking. As he approaches the flaming hoop, he windmills his arms once, twice, and sails cleanly through the center before bouncing into the net with a backward somersault and landing on his feet. As the audience roars with applause, he punches the air.  

This daredevil act is business as usual for David Smith Jr., a second-generation human cannonball. His father, David Smith Sr., is a former junior high school math teacher who ran away to join a traveling circus in the 1960s. As children, David Jr. and his five siblings were raised on the road, watching their father get blasted out of a cannon almost every weekend.  

“I pretty much grew up in the circus,” says David Jr. “My backyard was different every day, always a new coliseum or fairground or state park somewhere. Now I’m carrying on my father’s flight path, so to speak.”  

On one of the last lingering days of summer 1969, David Smith Sr. and his wife, Jean, stood outside their rented home in Salem, Oregon, surveying the front lawn. Various pieces of furniture sat on the stubbly grass: a velour couch, a couple of lamps, a double bed, and a dark-wood dining table, piled with paperbacks and kitchenware and knickknacks they had acquired over the years.  

Business at the yard sale was brisk; everything had been priced for a quick sale. The couple’s 1-year-old daughter, Rebecca, slept nearby in her stroller, oblivious to the drastic change that was about to shape the family’s way of life.  

“Are you sure we can’t take this with us?” Jean asked, touching the well-worn surface of the table. 

Her husband flashed a boyish grin. “Not unless you want to strap it to the roof rack.”  

  “I’d consider it,” Jean laughed. 

A couple weeks earlier, David had received a call from one of his old college friends, Rusty Rock. The two had trained as gymnasts in California, competing in national tournaments on the horizontal bars. Rusty had since joined a flying trapeze act in a circus that happened to be passing through Salem, and he’d invited David and his wife to a show.  

It had been a long time since David had been to the circus. In fact, as a child he’d only ever been once — and all he could remember was the back of the seat in front of him. He certainly hadn’t dreamed of joining the circus; he’d wanted to be a cowboy, like John Wayne in Stagecoach. But watching Rusty and the aerialists flipping and somersaulting through the air to a chorus of oohs and aahs, David felt the flicker of an idea. He was 27 years old, with a shock of dark curly hair, and was working as a math teacher at the local junior high school. But the students were unruly and trying to teach them felt like babysitting. His muscular arms and chest, hard-earned through years of athletics, were beginning to wane. He didn’t want to spend the next 40 years in a job he couldn’t stand. So, when Rusty told him the trapeze act needed a fourth, it seemed like kismet. 

Jean and David met at Utah State, when he was getting his master’s in education and she was an undergrad. Jean was five years younger and petite, with dark hair and a sweet smile. Jean would have been content to stay in Salem and raise a family, but she couldn’t bear to see how unhappy David was in his job. A week before the fall school semester started, he went to her and dropped a bombshell: “I want to join the circus.”   

Of course, Jean had a few apprehensions. But she also thought the circus sounded like a lot of fun, and it would provide an opportunity to travel and experience new things. “If that’s what you really want to do,” she told her husband, “let’s do it.”   

The Smiths loaded what was left of their possessions into a car David had built himself and hitched a 16-foot trailer — borrowed from his father — to the back. Then they scooped up Rebecca and drove 900+ miles south to start their new adventure in Los Angeles. They had about $1,500 in savings and a barrel of youthful optimism. As it turned out, it was all they would need. 

Trapeze artists are either flyers or catchers: The flyers perform the aerial tricks while the catcher (often only one per trapeze troupe), swings from a separate bar, ready to catch them.  

David was too big to be a flyer, so he was recruited as a catcher. His job was to signal to the flyers exactly when to leave the trapeze board for him to be close enough to catch them. After catching a flyer by the hands or feet, he would continue to swing and return the flyer to the fly bar via some midair acrobatics. A skillful catcher is the difference between a flyer staying in the air or falling to the net. 

David learned the ropes quickly, but when it came time for his first performance, he was so nervous he could hardly speak. “I had cottonmouth so bad,” he recalls. “We’d done really well in practice,” but then during the performance, “I blew the last five tricks. It was a real humdinger of an act.” 

Undeterred, he continued to practice with Rusty every spare moment he got. Watching them from the ground, Jean grew curious. Unlike her husband, she didn’t have a background in gymnastics. But she wanted to know: What would it feel like to fly? 

The first time Jean climbed the tall, narrow ladder to the trapeze board, her arms felt like jelly. It hadn’t looked so high when she was watching, but now she was 40 feet above the ground.  

“Step on up,” said David, taking her hand. “Head up, don’t look down.”  

Jean’s head jerked back up. “What happens if I fall?”  

“Well, the net will catch you instead of me.” Her husband held her gently around the waist as she inched to the edge of the board. “But falling is the easy part. Just focus on staying in the air.”   

Jean groaned. Her palms were slick with sweat. She reached for more chalk powder. 

“You can do this, Jean,” he said, drawing the fly bar toward them. “Are you ready?” 

Jean took a deep breath and reached for the bar. “Yes,” she said. 

“On three then: One. Two. Hup!” 

She closed her eyes and jumped.  

Before long, Jean was hooked. She had never experienced anything like the trapeze: terrifying but also exhilarating. She learned how to make the trapeze swing so high she could almost touch the ceiling and how to safely fall into the net — which, in the beginning, she did often. David showed her how to hang by her knees and then leave the bar for him to catch her in midair, the two of them swinging like dolls in a paper chain.  

Jean grew stronger and leaner, developing thick calluses on her hands to match her husband’s. Rusty and his girlfriend, Patty, coached her too and the three of them began flying together, David catching each of them in turn. Soon they had a brand-new daredevil trapeze act: The Rock Smith Flyers. 

In the early 1970s some of the most successful aerial artists were leaving the ring for cushy residencies at the newly built Circus Circus Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The Rock Smith Flyers were quickly snapped up for a four-month tour of North America and Canada, billed alongside sword swallowers, lion-tamers, tightrope walkers and juggling clowns. They began to make a name for themselves after mastering the elusive triple somersault — and some noted that their elaborate dismounts from the bar were even better than their trapeze stunts.  

The 1970s was a golden age of the circus, but its popularity meant the tours were long and gruelling — the bigger shows toured for 100 dates or more — and most offered two shows a day and three on weekends. For some, the circus lifestyle became too stressful. In 1975, Rusty and Patty quit the circus and decided to return to their “normal” lives. They were swiftly replaced by Greg Friel and his fiancée, Debbie, a flying trapeze duo from the renowned Ringling Bros. Circus, who helped the Rock Smith Flyers go to the next level. Despite being heavy for a flyer, the wiry and mustachioed 23-year-old Greg had learned the triple somersault as a teenager on Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach. Now he’d perfected the almost impossible three-and-a-half somersault, the red diamond of circus acts. The Rock Smith Flyers were, quite literally, at the top of their game. 

In 1976, the Flyers were invited to compete at the inaugural Circus World Championships in London. Broadcast on live television around the world, the five-day event was described as “a veritable Circus Olympics” by a sports editor at England’s Observer newspaper. “It may sound like a gimmick,” wrote Alan Hubbard. “Nonetheless, what was happening down on a particularly muddy piece of South-West London, once the African elephants, Bengal tigers and Exploding Car had done their things, was something circus folk appear to be taking very seriously indeed.”  

The Rock Smith Flyers were up against three other flying trapeze acts from the United Kingdom, the United States and Mexico. All of them included the triple somersault in their routine, but the Flyers stole the show with their signature three-and-a-half somersault. They came away with the first-prize trophy. The four of them were ecstatic, but for Jean and David the win was extra special: While Jean was flying through the air in a rhinestone bikini, she was also two months pregnant.   

Despite the Rock Smith Flyers’ success, David had begun to experience what’s known in the trade as “Catcher’s Syndrome.”  

“If you drop your partner, it’s your fault, and if you catch him, well, he did a good trick,” David explains. “I was a little tired of being just part of the equipment.” 

The Flyers had occasionally appeared on the same bill as the Zacchinis, members of a large Italian family of trapeze artists, tumblers, riders, wire walkers and human cannonballs. This last act was always the most hotly anticipated. The loud blast, white smoke and fiery sparks, not to mention the seemingly death-defying flight, was always the dramatic finale that closed out the show. And the audiences went wild for it. 

Meanwhile, Jean had given birth to their second daughter, Jennifer. The growing family spent 10 months of the year on the road with the circus, living in a 32-foot camper David had built on the back of a diesel truck flatbed. At night while his wife and children slept, he stayed up late working on the blueprints for his next act: a human cannon. Though he’d never seen the inside of the Zacchini cannons, he was a gifted — if slightly eccentric — engineer, with mathematical expertise. His circus colleagues had nicknamed him “The Professor,” a throwback to his old teaching career as well as the fact that he could build or fix almost anything. David built his first cannon on the road, lugging pieces of fiberglass, aluminum and steel from big cities to small towns all over North America and working between shows. By the time Jennifer was a year old, David was the proud owner of his first, rather clumsily named “Friel-Smith Rocket S. Cannon.”  

The big yellow cannon was, rather unusually, set on four wheels and powered by an automobile engine. Hydraulic controls raised the barrel for firing and allowed the front wheels to align precisely with the landing net. The firing mechanism of David Smith’s cannon blueprint is a closely guarded secret but — spoiler alert — human cannons don’t use gunpowder. Usually, they work by releasing compressed air; anything else is purely pyrotechnics. 

David tested the cannon by firing sandbags that weighed the same amount he did — 180 pounds. The first sandbag sailed 30 feet into the air and hit the ground with a whomp. It worked! After a few more practice runs, he climbed into the cannon himself. He safely hit his mark on the very first shot.  

Although the human cannonball act was David’s idea, his partner Greg, who was 40 pounds lighter, made more sense as the human projectile for the act — at least for now.  

As soon as the Rock Smith Flyers added the human cannonball act into their routine it became a massive hit. They began performing the explosive stunt all over North America and were propelled to new heights of stardom.   

The family’s heightened professional success didn’t stop them from continuing to grow. In May 1977, a year after they began the cannonball stunt, Jean gave birth to another child, David Jr. True to form, little David was born on the road. When Jean went into labor shortly before showtime, David Sr. drove her to the hospital — and then returned to the circus in time for his act. His son’s birth was announced by the ringmaster halfway through the show, to rapturous applause.  

The Smiths now had three kids and three of the most popular circus acts in North America: the Rock Smith Flyers, the Friel-Smith Human Cannonball, and Captain Circus. For this last act, David Sr. would don a superhero mask and cape to “emerge” from the ceiling via a hidden platform, then drop 10 feet and catch a rope, swinging from the rigging like a cross between Tarzan and Captain America. He had performed this act dozens, if not hundreds, of times.  

Then, one snowy March afternoon in Missoula, Montana, he missed the rope. Free-falling with his cape streaming behind him, Captain Circus fell 35 feet and hit the ground.  

In the hospital, doctors assessed David Sr.’s injuries: a broken pelvis, a shattered heel, internal bleeding. Captain Circus was going to be grounded for a while. He and the family returned to their “regular” home — a farmhouse with a 45-foot flying trapeze — back in Salem, Oregon, where they lived when the circus shut down for the winter.  

Though David Sr. was unperturbed by his fall, Jean was badly shaken. By now they’d been living the circus life for eight years and had seen a lot of colleagues and friends get seriously injured and even die. As she watched her husband scooting around in a wheelchair with his left ankle in a cast and his right pinned into a metal frame, Jean wondered if it might be time for them to retire.  

At the end of 1978, Jean and David Sr. announced their retirement from the circus. They lived on savings and a series of odd jobs. Once he’d recovered from his injuries, David Sr. went back into teaching. To occupy his mind, he wrote children’s books and tried his hand at a Western novel. Jean looked after the baby, typed up her husband’s manuscripts and thought about going into real estate. But the big yellow cannon was still parked in the basement, and the circus kept calling.  

The 3,000-strong audience perched anxiously on the edges of their seats. Waiting in the wings, David Sr. was a little anxious too. After three years of retirement, he was finally back — and now that his old buddy Greg Friel had quit for good, he was the one in the spotlight. As he took a deep breath and stepped into the ring, the legendary Cannonball Smith made his debut.  

Sporting a silver jumpsuit, a thick mustache and a white helmet over curly hair — which was now graying at the temples — David Sr. crossed the field toward the giant cannon. Since his accident, he walked with a slight limp; it only added to the sense of danger in his act.  

The barrel of the cannon raised to a 45-degree angle; Cannonball Smith gave the crowd a final wave and dropped inside. The ringmaster asked for silence, and the audience, recognizing the gravity of the situation, obliged. Nobody moved an inch. Then a drumroll started, its repetitive beat rippling with suspense. The ringmaster led the countdown — five, four, three, two — but Jean fired the cannon a split second before the audience expected it. Somebody shrieked, though it wasn’t clear whether they were surprised by the loud blast or simply overcome with excitement. By the time the shriek ended, Cannonball Smith had flown 115 feet in the air and landed in a giant net on the far side of the field — and the audience burst into screams of wild delight.  

David Sr.’s first performance back was perhaps more dramatic than he would have liked; the cannon shot him high enough to touch the coliseum ceiling, and he landed on the far edge of his 50-foot net, right in the danger zone. But with a whole circus tour lined up, there would be plenty of opportunities to practice. 

By 1984, Jean and David Sr. had five children, ranging in age from 6 months to 15 years. The Smith children spent their youth traveling to shows all over North America, watching their dad get shot out of a cannon. The circuses came in all sizes, from rinky-dink family shows to three-ring extravaganzas. But no matter where they went, Cannonball Smith was treated like a rock star. “It was just what my dad was,” says Jennifer. “I didn’t think it was strange until I was older.”  

Jean and David Sr. home-schooled their children, but once they’d done their homework and chores, they were free to run wild in the best playground a kid could imagine, one with elephants and tigers, trampolines and flying trapeze. While other kids their age played at arcades or hung out at the mall, the Smith clan spent their days playing on trampolines in between shows, learning to do flips and taking turns shooting their dad out of the cannon. They were encouraged to do stunts: David Sr. had even installed a trapeze bar in the trailer for them to practice on. The phrase “don’t try this at home” did not apply.  

The circus was a close-knit community of fun and fascinating people from all over the world: lion tamers, contortionists, tightrope walkers. The performers all brought their families too, so the Smith children had plenty of circus-kid friends to play with.  

Surrounded by jaw-dropping acts, the Smith kids soon started performing in the circus themselves. By the age of 9, Rebecca was already following in her parents’ agile footsteps. She had her own solo act on the single trapeze — one of the most difficult and demanding acts around, even for an adult. Rebecca entranced audiences with daring heel catches, single toe hangs, and dizzying Russian rolls. Soon, her younger sister Jennifer joined her and their dad for a triple trapeze act. The pièce de résistance saw the three of them swinging upside down from a single trapeze; David Sr. hanging by his knees, holding Rebecca by a single foot while she held Jennifer’s foot. The trick was performed without a safety net — if something had gone wrong, the kids would no doubt have fallen headfirst.  

At 10, David Jr. joined the family business, flying on an aerial apparatus 90 feet above the ground in a double act with his sister Jennifer. They performed leaps so high they sometimes had to duck to avoid whacking their heads on the ceiling. Despite the danger involved, or because of it, the Smith children loved the thrill of performing, and they trusted their dad above all else. 

Cannonball Smith was in high demand, as, unsurprisingly, human cannonballing was a pretty unusual occupation, even then. David Sr.’s a