Jump! Jump! Jump!

Every evening, as darkness falls in Louisville, a big beer sign on top of a building at Fifth and Walnut Streets begins flashing a bright neon-lighted toast: "HERE'S GOOD LUCK TO YOU." One rainy night last week, its intermittent flash disclosed an odd, yet strangely familiar spectacle. A dark-haired youth was edging his way up a fire-escape ladder high on the 19-story Kentucky Hotel. The climber reached the top, took a quick step and balanced erect on a narrow ledge at the roof level--just as a 19-year-old soldier who called himself Louis Turini had balanced on a narrow ledge of Boston's Touraine Hotel and threatened to jump one drizzly evening last June.

After that, Louisville was treated to a terrifying replay of the Boston incident. The Louisville crowd reacted exactly like the Boston crowd. Voices from the street called, "Jump! Jump! Jump!" One cried, "Hurry up. I've got to go to work in 30 minutes." The figure on the Louisville ledge reacted, in turn, just like the figure who had poised on the ledge in Boston. He took off his shirt and threw it down to the street as the crowd yelled.

During the Boston incident, a hotel flunky, a priest, various policemen and a pretty girl from the crowd had taken turns in a desperate attempt to dissuade the would-be suicide from jumping. Last week in Louisville, a duplicate cast arrived, as if by magic, to plead with the ledge-walker on the Kentucky Hotel. A hotel clerk named Melvin Tobias leaned out a 19th-floor window, began trying to talk the youth down. A police lieutenant named R. C. Walling quickly arrived on the scene. The clerk and the cop were soon joined by a priest, Father William H. Zahner of the nearby Cathedral of the Assumption, and by a pretty, blonde girl from St. Louis, Mrs. Connie Fry, who came upstairs to help after watching the youth's terrifying antics from the street.

As they cajoled and pleaded, the dark-haired boy on the ledge went on acting just like the youth in Boston. At one point, the priest, who climbed to the roof, got close enough to him to hand him a rosary. But most of the time, the boy warned off his rescuers by crying, "I'll jump!" Staring down at the crowd, he said: "The people down there tell me to jump. The people up here tell me not to. What am I to do?" For two hours and 35 minutes, the nerve-racking struggle went on. But finally, after the priest and the policeman promised that he would not be jailed, the youth climbed slowly back down the ladder and slipped through the 19th-floor window.

Once safe inside, he admitted that he was a soldier absent without leave. His name, he said, was Louis Turini. Startled, authorities wired Camp Pickett, Va., learned that the Boston ledge-walker had sneaked out of a hospital ward there a month before. Still unbelieving, they got a photograph of the Boston Turini.* He was the same man.

* The youth uses three names. He was christened Albert Santos. Due to a clerical error, he is enrolled in the Army as Albert Thomas. After both suicide threats, however, he gave the name Louis Turini.

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