Columbia church solves mystery of daredevil steeple stander

Barely visible at the top of a photo that hangs in the First Presbyterian Church Sunday School building is the image of a tiny figure – 108 feet above the ground, arms outstretched in apparent pride, standing atop a newly restored steeple in 1911.

“We’ll never know who that nut was,” Jack Haynes, 69 and a lifelong member of the church, used to lament.

The picture is printed in the church history book, too, identifying the man only as “a worker” who helped rebuild the iconic steeple after a fire in 1910.

The mystery of the steeple stander continued to intrigue Haynes and others at the church over the recent winter months, as the church had its exterior walls and steeple repainted in its signature salmon color, with a crane and bucket used to reach the top regions where the mystery daredevil once proudly stood.

Sydney Whalen solved the mystery. He knows exactly who “that nut” was.

Over a century ago, Sydney’s grandfather – John Roy Whalen Sr. – made a living as an iron worker and a steeplejack who scaled tall structures across the country, from water towers to bridges to skyscrapers to steeples, doing construction, repairs and painting.

“He would always say it’s just like walking down the street on a sidewalk,” Sydney Whalen, 65, said of his grandfather, who lived to be 88. “He had no fear of heights at all.”

The elder Whalen was 24 and young enough to have no fears when he was photographed with his hat in one hand and arms tossed above his head as he stood on top of the First Presbyterian steeple, which at the time was one of the tallest structures in Columbia (and remains the tallest church steeple in the city, Haynes said).

Sydney Whalen and his twin brother, Harry, apparently inherited their grandfather’s adventuresome spirit. As teens, they would sometimes join their father, John Whalen Jr., on side jobs he worked as a steeplejack.

It was Harry who, some three decades ago, gave First Presbyterian a copy of the photograph of his grandfather standing on the church’s steeple. Sydney says his brother had passed along his grandfather’s name at the time he donated the photo, but Haynes figures the church must have lost the information somewhere along the line.

Haynes was sharing the then-unsolved mystery of the steeple stander with a group of church members counting money on a recent morning when one of them, Dick Steed, said he knew who the man was and that the man’s grandson had recently joined the church.

“Yeah, right,” was Haynes’s immediate response, before he got in touch with Sydney Whalen and learned more about his new friend’s daredevil of a grandfather.

John Whalen’s first job as a steeplejack, Sydney believes, was atop the flagpole on top of the State House dome in 1907. He has a picture of that stunt, too, with Whalen’s tiny body barely noticeable.

“He was just a character, a hoot,” Sydney Whalen said.

John Whalen worked on many steeples all over the United States, and especially in South Carolina, which became his home after growing up in Tennessee and then following work across the country.

He was a Christian, but not a churchgoing man, Sydney Whalen remembers. “I think he felt he was closer to God doing what he did than being in church,” Sydney Whalen said. “Being on steeples and stuff, that was his way.”

This story was originally published March 27, 2015 at 6:50 PM.