Olivebelle Hamon: The Girl Who Played the Skyline
In 1922 a thirteen-year-old girl went up the outside of the Wrigley Building in Chicago, thirty-three floors, playing the violin the whole way, and then came back down still playing. It was a benefit for the YMCA. Newsreel cameras recorded it. The performer was Olivebelle Hamon, and the stunt is a fair summary of a life in which serious musical training, inherited money, and an appetite for physical risk kept arriving in the same person at the same time.
The Daughter of a Murdered Oil King
Her father was Jacob Louis Hamon, born in Grenola, Kansas, in 1873, who took a law degree from the University of Kansas in 1898 and married Georgia Perkins in Sedan, Kansas, the same year. The family settled in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1901, where Hamon served as city attorney and then mayor. Their son Jake Jr. was born that year. Olivebelle was born in Lawton on September 2, 1909.
By then her father was becoming rich in the manner of the period — fast, litigiously, and in several directions at once. After moving the family to Ardmore in 1912, he built a railroad in partnership with the circus magnate John Ringling, speculated in oil leases at the Healdton Field, and during the 1919 Desdemona boom in Texas founded a short-lived town he named Jakehamon after himself. Politically he rose to Oklahoma's Republican national committeeman in 1920. Her mother was a cousin of Warren G. Harding, who was elected president that November.
That same November it ended. On November 26, 1920, Jake Hamon died of a gunshot wound inflicted by Clara Smith Hamon — his secretary, his mistress, and the wife of his nephew. She was tried and acquitted the following March on a claim of self-defense. He was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Ardmore. Olivebelle was eleven, and the family name was now attached to one of the most sensational scandals in the state's history.
A Chicago Prodigy
The violin came first and came early. Hamon became a famous child violinist in Chicago, studying under Rudolph Reiners. The distinction worth holding onto is that she was not a novelty act who learned some tunes: she was a trained prodigy in a serious teaching lineage in a serious musical city, and the stunts came out of a technique that already existed.
She also worked under names that were not her own — Loma Worth and Freddy Worth — which suggests both a performer's instinct for reinvention and, plausibly, an heiress's interest in being heard before being recognized. Beyond the concert platform she worked as an actress and as a "one-woman band," the vaudeville format in which a single performer operates several instruments simultaneously. It is a discipline of coordination rather than interpretation, and she was evidently good at it.
The Stunt Recital
The Wrigley Building climb belongs to a particular American moment — the early 1920s, when flagpole sitters and human flies were front-page business and newsreel companies would pay for anything vertical. What makes Hamon's version unusual is the instrument. A violin demands a stable left hand, a controlled bow arm, and a fixed relationship between chin, shoulder, and neck. Playing continuously while being hauled up and down thirty-three storeys of exterior wall means maintaining all of that with nothing underneath and the wind moving both the player and the bow.
The footage survives as newsreel outtakes. The event was staged as charity, but the skill it required was not charitable.
Taking to the Air
She had begun flying lessons by the age of ten — a startling fact even for an oil heiress, and one that predates her father's death by only a year or so. Aviation stayed with her longer than the concert stage.
In 1930 she took part in the National Women's Air Derby, the cross-country race from Long Beach, California, to Chicago. That same year British authorities refused her permission for a stunt flight from London to Cape Town, a route that in 1930 killed experienced pilots regularly. She obtained a federal pilot's license in 1932, in the aftermath of the death of the pilot Robert Short, whom she had intended to marry. She owned her own aeroplane and used it to travel between performances — a working musician commuting by air in the early 1930s.
She married three times: J. Lawrence Waters in 1932, Leo Cooper from 1938 to 1946, and William Augsburger from 1947 to 1948. The inheritance did not survive her. It was lost through a combination of extravagance and mismanagement.
Why Olivebelle Is Called a Genius
The claim for Hamon rests on physical skill and nerve, not on intellect, and it would be dishonest to dress it otherwise. There is no surviving body of composition, no school of playing, no recorded interpretation that shifted how anyone hears the violin. What she had was a rare combination of two things that ordinarily cancel each other out: the fine motor precision of a trained classical string player, and a tolerance for physical danger that would destroy that precision in almost anyone else. Violin technique is built on stillness — a locked instrument, a level bow, an unwavering hand. Hamon could hold it while suspended on the face of a skyscraper, and could apparently hold her nerve well enough at ten to start flight training and at twenty to race an aeroplane across a continent.
That is a real and unusual capacity, and it is worth naming precisely rather than inflating. The honest counter-case is substantial. Her fame was amplified by money and by the notoriety of her father's murder; a child prodigy attached to an oil fortune and a national scandal got attention that equally gifted children did not. Her signature achievement is a charity stunt, and stunts age badly — the 1920s produced a great many of them and remembers almost none. The surviving record of her life is short, contemporary critical assessment of her playing is essentially absent, and the sources say plainly that she squandered her inheritance. No one on the record appears to have called her a genius in print. What survives is a documented performer of genuine technical skill who chose spectacle over the repertoire, and then largely disappeared from public account.
Legacy
She died in Portland, Oregon, on August 20, 1987, at seventy-eight, and was buried in Ardmore beside her father, her mother, and her brother — returned, in the end, to the Oklahoma town her father's money and death had made notorious. Her brother Jake L. Hamon Jr. went into oil, as expected. Olivebelle went up the side of a building with a violin, which was not.
What remains of her is a few minutes of newsreel outtakes and a thin documentary trail — enough to establish that she existed, that she could really play, and that she was not afraid of heights.
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