What happened to Fritz Sprandel? Allentown adventurer’s legendary exploits included canoeing the ocean and being jailed in Cuba

By DANIEL PATRICK SHEEHAN | The Morning Call
UPDATED: August 17, 2024 at 10:29 p.m.

Fritz Sprandel is 80 now, the age when a man in life’s twilight looks back on the sunlit days of his early years and tries to draw some conclusions about them.

“I had the big drive to go forward, to do something different,” said Sprandel, an Allentown native who made headlines in his day for feats of endurance and derring-do that he recounts in a new memoir called  “Finding Fritz: The Heart of an Adventurer,” with a documentary soon to follow.

Sprandel’s adventures match the definition of that term more literally than most people’s. Who else among us ever paddled his way into one of Fidel Castro’s jails or drove 5,500 miles across America on a snowmobile?

Many of the miles Sprandel traversed on that snowmobile were barren of snow, so more than once he burned the machine out or wore the skis off it. The feat stands out among his stories as emblematic of his attitude in those strange, heady days of the 1960s and ’70s: pushing ahead despite circumstances, meeting challenges, thumbing his nose at the people who said he couldn’t do something or stood in his way.

“I was on the front pages all the time,” he said, sitting for an interview in Allentown not far from the site of a long-gone bar where he used to spend a lot of his younger days drinking himself silly. Two of his proudest accomplishments, he noted parenthetically, have nothing to do with outdoor adventure: He quit drinking in 1975 and quit smoking a decade after that.

What cemented Sprandel’s reputation as a man who’d try anything was a 1970 dare from Andy Perkin, a friend and fellow drinker at the bar, Ye Olde Ale House on Hamilton Street. Perkin bet that Sprandel couldn’t paddle a canoe in the ocean.

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Not only could he paddle a canoe in the ocean, Sprandel said, he could paddle one to the Panama Canal, cross to the Pacific and make his way up to Los Angeles. The friend handed Sprandel a dime and told him to call when he gave up and needed a ride home.

Sprandel set out to do as he promised and hit the water Aug. 17 for what turned out to be a tumultuous, monthslong journey to Key West.

He aimed to go on to the canal from there, but ended up in a storm that broke the canoe. The Coast Guard rescued him and he returned to Allentown, so embarrassed at failing in his mission that he told no one he was home and snuck around in disguise.

He wasn’t done, though. Outfitted with a new canoe dubbed Miss Allentown, he headed back to Key West and resumed the journey. This time, he encountered a group of sea creatures — whales or dolphins, he couldn’t tell — that battered the canoe and knocked him off course.

” src=”blob:https://www.findingfritz.com/fdb61e1a-2eea-42e4-8877-8eccaa097eee” alt=”Fritz Sprandel aboard the ‘Miss Allentown, PA. Former Allentown resident documents his wild adventures at sea in new book. (11/29/09) ***** (The Morning Call File Photo)” border=”0″ class=”Apple-web-attachment” style=”width: 19.6145in; height: 15.625in; opacity: 1;”>Fritz Sprandel aboard the ‘Miss Allentown, PA. Former Allentown resident documents his wild adventures at sea in new book. (11/29/09) ***** (The Morning Call File Photo)

Eventually, he sighted land. It was Cuba, he learned, when soldiers on the beach shot at him before taking him into custody. After a show trial he went to prison as a spy but was freed in 46 days after a fine was paid.

Nothing like an international incident to make a reputation. Pictures of the handsome adventurer appeared in papers and on newscasts around the world. His further adventures were chronicled by Sports Illustrated and other journals.

Sprandel recounted the Cuba story at length in an earlier book, “Adventure on a Dare,” so he treats it more lightly in the memoir, which focuses on his personal history and the forces that shaped him: a turbulent childhood, heavy drinking, failed marriages. The reader learns Sprandel joined the Army at 17 after a spot of legal trouble, stealing his mother’s car and leading Allentown police on a 100 mph chase through Lehigh Parkway.

“Finding Fritz” is told in the first person but largely was written by Doug Kemmerer, an Allentown businessman who made a career in the hospitality and entertainment industry and founded Road Less Traveled Publishing to give a home to people’s life stories. Some chapters in the memoir are Kemmerer’s own accounts of befriending Sprandel and determining to tell his story.

“I wanted to find out who this guy is,” Kemmerer said. “He had a terrible upbringing, his family didn’t accept him. He was always trying to prove ‘I am worth something.’ ”

The connection between the two men runs deep. Years ago, working late one night at a limousine company he’d started, Kemmerer struck up a conversation with one of his drivers, who suddenly squinted at him.

“You’re Reds’ son, aren’t you?”

It was Sprandel. “Reds” was Kemmerer’s father, who owned a service station next to the Ale House and let the rootless Sprandel sleep in one of the cars on the lot. Kemmerer, about 10 at the time, vaguely remembered him but hadn’t known his name.

Sprandel’s Cuba adventure “is the one that put him on the map,” Kemmerer said. “He had a lot of dares before that.”

Among them: hitchhiking from Pennsylvania to California in 1968. Motorists were more willing to pick up strangers in those days, so Sprandel had a pretty good chance of making it. He didn’t expect to make it so efficiently. His first ride took him to Pittsburgh, his second to Las Vegas and his third to Los Angeles.

“About 90% of the things I’ve done you couldn’t do today,” Sprandel said. “Everything takes permits and time.”

The 1977 snowmobile journey, for example. Sprandel said a man scooting along highways and byways that way today would undoubtedly end up in jail.

Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records used to contain an account of this feat but removed it after determining Sprandel had run afoul of various traffic laws and municipal codes between Westport, Washington, and Lubec, Maine.

Sprandel soured on adventure after his last big one — an extraordinary cross-country passage by canoe, from Astoria, Oregon, to New York City. He navigated eight rivers, two creeks and a canal — about 8,000 miles of waterways — and paddled into New York Harbor on Thanksgiving Day 1978.

He was met by silence. No crowds, no media. The nation’s enchantment with the young adventurer was over.

“There was nothing to show for my efforts, my achievements,” he says in the memoir. “I started really thinking, what was I doing with my life? What was the point?”

With that, Sprandel effectively disappeared from public life, moving to western Pennsylvania and entering a long period of depression and uncertainty.

The story after that is full of of highs and lows. One chapter recalls the moment in 2012 when Sprandel opened Facebook to find a lengthy message from his son, Fritz Jr., whom he hadn’t seen since his first marriage failed decades earlier.

Sprandel learned that his ex-wife, CJ, died from complications of Lyme disease; that he had two young grandchildren; and that Fritz Jr. was open to reconnecting, which they quickly did.

“Not everything that Fritz Jr. told me was great news though,” Sprandel said. “He told me I was a taboo subject in the family and that even when he was an adult, his oldest uncle threatened to beat the tar out of me if he saw me on street.”

Sprandel today lives in Hamburg, Berks County. He is a mild, soft-spoken man who says his chief interest is helping people appreciate the adventures in their own lives, however small the adventures, however modest the lives.

Sometimes he shakes his head over how things turned out. Was it luck or fate that guided him safely through so many exploits?

“I’ve gone through a lot,” he said, “and I’m here today. I don’t understand that.”

Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.