Articles and Clippings

Excerpt from Stunt People a 1983 book by George Sullivan and Tim Sullivan:

Mary Wiggins belonged to the last category. In Tampa, Florida, where she grew up, she won acclaim as a diver for her high school team. Not long after graduation, she was doing spectacular high dives in motion pictures.

That was just the beginning. Mary took up flying, earned a pilot’s license and started parachute jumping and wing walking. She also drove motorcycles through fences and crashed and turned over automobiles. Once, on a barnstorming tour that took her into New England, Mary drove a huge locomotive head on into a second locomotive at the Brockton (Massachusetts) Fair, leaping from the engine cab an instant before the collision. She escaped with a broken thumb.

That broken thumb was about the worst injury Mary sustained in a stunting career that lasted for more than a decade. When she did seriously hurt herself, it was when she went swimming for the fun of it. She dived into shallow water, fracturing several vertebrae.

“I’m stunting,’ Mary once told an interviewer, “first, because it’s full of excitement, and I like excitement. Next, because I can make a better living at it than I probably could at anything else.”

Mary Wiggins feature in Hollywood magazine, Dec-Jan 1937