Associated Press via Wikimedia Commons

Shipwreck Kelly sits on a flagpole

This photo of Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly was taken by the Associated Press while Kelly was sitting on a flagpole in College Park, Maryland, in 1942. (The photo is now in the public domain.) Flagpole-sitting is what made Shipwreck Kelly famous; he would climb to the top of a flagpole with a special platform on top, and then sit there for days or weeks on end while people gawked from below.

See our biography of Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly