Eating strange foods is a strange way to make a living. Especially when the foods aren’t even foods. In the late nineteenth century, William V. McKenna regularly gulped down such odd items as carpet tacks, chunks of glass, ten-penny nails, pieces of cutlery, and live frogs.
If a June 1889 article about his life is to be believed, the 138-pound, 21-year-old performer started eating glass by accident at age 14 while working at Myer’s Glass Factory in Brooklyn, New York. Some glass dust got mixed into his lunch, and he liked it.
“Before long the glass habit grew upon him to such an extent that the proprietors of the factory became alarmed,” the New York World reported. “They noticed a terrible depletion in their stock, which for some time they were at a loss to account for.”
Then the proprietors caught young McKenna munching on a piece of a glass bottle. He confessed his curious appetite and word spread of his glass-eating prowess. Soon after he was employed at a dime museum where he became known as the “Human Ostrich.” There, McKenna could eat all the glass he wanted, in front of an audience—reportedly nine times a day. For years.
McKenna claimed the act earned him $75 a week, which today is equivalent to about $2,500 a week.
“He also eats daily three hearty meals of the kind enjoyed by ordinary human beings,” the article noted, but stressed his affinity for glass. “It is said that he was once arrested for climbing up a lamp-post and devouring the glass which protected the gaslight.”
The reporter added that “there was no sleight-of-hand business and no trickery.” However, he did not state whether or not McKenna regurgitated any of the items later. Though glass eaters know how to safely pass glass through their systems, Mac Norton and The Great Waldo famously swallowed live frogs and brought them right back up, still perfectly alive.
Perhaps McKenna did a bit of both. Disturbing as it all sounds, whichever way it all came out was surely worse. It’s also possible much of it stayed right inside.
Though McKenna’s fate is unknown, the death of another dime museum human ostrich in St. Louis, Missouri, was reported in March 1892. Joseph Kennedy also ate tacks, nails, screws and bits of hardware. Before his death he stated that doctors had offered him $5,000 for his body in order to examine it and reveal some form of uniqueness within his stomach. Instead, the medical examiners discovered “its walls and lining” were “entirely normal, but literally filled with the nails, screws, tacks, and broken glass which the man had swallowed.” The report added that “there was not one instance of perforation of any part of the stomach or throat by the sharp points or edges of these substances.”
