TRAPPED! THE STORY OF FLOYD COLLINS

If you aren’t a nonagenarian, you wouldn’t have personal memories of super-athlete Seabiscuit. In your 20’s or younger? You probably didn’t see the Seabiscuit movie that filled in that cultural memory gap. From that movie, we learned that at one point winning race horse Seabiscuit was an athlete as famous as Michael Jordan. Backtracking—you know about Jordan’s 3-peat, yes? Or has Michael Jordan already receded from our cultural memory just like Seabiscuit and his contemporary Floyd Collins?

Floyd Collins?

Unless you travel in spelunking circles you are likely thinking— Floyd Collins Who??

Like Seabiscuit, Floyd Collins’ story was at one time front page news. His story sold papers and the newspapers knew it.

The gist of his story—- Collins was from a hard scrabble farm family, hoping to hit the jackpot by discovering a cave rival to lucrative Mammoth Cave. His fame was not from making that discovery— it was the tragedy of being trapped in a cave for 17 days. His plight captured the collective imagination. Friends, neighbors, fellow cave explorers, relatives and scores of would-be saviors joined the effort to free Collins from the rocks that pinned him in place below. Meanwhile, a carnival atmosphere above the cave quickly grew, and the rumors about the rescue efforts and Floyd Collins grew faster and wider still.

We learn these things and much more in the HIGHY RECOMMENDED, vividly descriptive and detailed book, Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins, co-authored by the late historian Robert K. Murray and Roger W. Brucker. Brucker’s caving expertise was key to helping the two writers sort out the fact from fiction of contemporaneous accounts. When they ventured into the very cave where Collins met his end, Brucker and Murray could use the physical realities of the cave to help sort the massive pile of newspaper reports into fact or fiction.

Here, Picture This Post (PTP) interviews co-author Roger W. Brucker (RWB) about how his spelunking background drew him to the Floyd Collins story and more.

(PTP) What was your first caving experience?

(RWB) I became interested in caves as a young boy when I visited Mammoth Cave with my mother, but my first caving experience, as an explorer, happened at age 22. I bought a hard hat, carbide light, and knee pads from Outdoor Outfitters in New York City, where I was stationed in the Air Force. I went to Carpenter Cave in Pennsylvania. It was my kind of cave, with just the right size passages—one straight segment and one branch decorated with formations. I could see it in my sleep. I knew that cave well enough to crawl in the dark from end to entrance. I even made a 16mm movie in Carpenter Cave, using a Bolex camera and two aircraft landing lights to light the passages. I called it “The Spelunker.”

When and how did you first learn of the Floyd Collins story?

I became aware of the name Floyd Collins as a boy, when I saw a poster advertising Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave, near Mammoth Cave. I did not know much about him, though, until I read a book titled “Tragedy of Sand Cave” by Howard W. Hartley, in my 20s. Hartley was a newspaper reporter who had covered the Floyd Collins tragedy. I read his book over and over. At that time, all stories about Floyd were based on Hartley’s book, which was based on newspaper articles, and many of the newspaper articles in 1925 were inaccurate, so there are a lot of inaccuracies in his book.

When the Air Force transferred me to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, I joined the Central Ohio Grotto of the National Speleological Society, a caving organization. That’s where I met two of my early caving friends, Phil Smith and Roger McClure. They introduced me to Jim Dyer, the former manager of Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave. As a result of meeting those cavers, I became involved in a week-long expedition in Crystal Cave in 1954, where I met Skeets Miller, the only reporter who had gone into Sand Cave while Floyd Collins was trapped. Skeets’ stories for the Louisville Courier-Journal were picked up by the Associated Press and he became very famous and later won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the tragedy. During the Crystal Cave expedition in 1954, I spent a week underground with Skeets. He described his times with Floyd and his nightmares ever since. His emphatic description of Floyd informed me of the man, on a personal level.

How do you think knowing Floyd Collins’ story so intimately— and knowing it was front page news worldwide but now largely forgotten— affects your take on news developments today?

I assume all news developments are faulty in some way. In other words, it is highly probable that some unimportant details are garbled. It is possible that some mid-level details are incorrect, and it is unlikely, but possible, that some major details are wrong. I don’t trust a lot of news. Much of the original reporting about Floyd Collins was inaccurate. When Bob Murray and I started writing Trapped!, I kept thinking that I wanted to find the “Rosetta Stone” that would enable us to unlock who was truthful in those early news stories, and who was not. The answer was getting into Sand Cave, which no one had entered since 1925. Going into that cave allowed us to compare descriptions of certain details by would-be rescuers with how the cave really was.

How did your collaboration with your co-author, Robert Murray, unfold?

Bob Murray was a history professor who had already written several books about the 1920s. He called me and said that he was writing a book about Floyd Collins which, coincidentally, I was also planning to do, so I suggested we collaborate. He handled most of the historical details and I focused on the caving angle. I knew the key to the story was an accurate account of Sand Cave. I negotiated with the National Park Service for access to Sand Cave with a promise to keep our exploration secret. We made six trips into the cave, surveyed, mapped, and photographed everything. This information told us who was telling the truth, who was exaggerating, and who lied about what occurred in that cave in 1925. As a history professor, Bob tended to write very long sentences. I heavily edited Bob’s draft and described every scene. Both our fingerprints are on every line. We went sailing on his Bluewater boat twice in the Caribbean. It was a great collaboration!

Did working with Robert Murray change YOUR understanding of the caves, cave wars, Kentucky history, etc.?

No. I already had a pretty good understanding of the period, but Bob Murray did not know anything about caves, until he read a book about Mammoth Cave that I cowrote, titled The Longest Cave. He had read that book very carefully, to learn about the history of Mammoth Cave, before he contacted me.

What were some of the memorable moments in the talkbacks you participated in after the Landau play performances?

I have participated in about 20 or 30 talkbacks following productions of Floyd Collins all over the U.S., and one in London. What I remember from all of them is the most common question that audience members ask: “Could Floyd have been saved?” The answer is a little more complicated than I have gone into before. If you had asked that question in 1969. I would have said “no.” If you had asked it in 1987, I would have said “maybe.” If you asked it in 2007, I would have said “probably.” If you asked it now, I would say “Yes, he could be saved.” The rescue capability has increased a lot in recent years, particularly in treating the physiology of the victim and the ability to organize an expert rescue team and get to the victim quickly. One of the best examples of that was the rescue of a boys’ soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018, which received international attention.

My other memorable experience from talkbacks is when Tina Landau joined me on stage at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Until that time, I had only spoken with her by phone. Meeting her in person, and spending time with her in front of an audience showed me how insightful she was. She asked me why I thought the story of Floyd Collins was so popular, and I said that I attributed it entirely to Skeets Miller’s original reporting. He was the most empathic person I had ever met. I thought that Tina was remarkably in tune with Floyd’s desperate position. She really understood the motivations of the characters.