Who is Fritz Sprandel?

I always wanted more. I always wanted to be fully alive doing things that no one had done before and, if they haddone them, I wanted to do them bigger and better than anyone had ever done them.

Luckily for me the times were right. My big adventures took place in the 60s and 70s back when you could hitchhike across the country with only a buck and a pack of Oreo cookies in your pocket, catch a ride straight through to Las Vegas, sneak into hotel lobbies for the free coffee and donuts, and land up in a railroad yard in Santa Barbara living under the stars with hobos who, with very little provocation, would initiate you into the old fashioned rite of hopping a freight car. There were no GPS trackers, nobody asking to see your permits. It was just me alone in the universe.

That hitchhiking trip was my first big adventure, and it was only the beginning.

If I have one fault, it’s that I can’t refuse a dare. It may be a fault, but it also proved to be the thing that made me famous.

My hangout at the time was the Ole Alehouse, a salon in Allentown, PA. When my bartending shift was over, I would hang with my best friend, Andy, exchanging stories and making plans for the near future.  One night, well past our second beer, I started bragging about my canoe paddling skills. I may have overstated my case because it annoyed Andy and he said, “You couldn’t even make it from New York to Atlantic City.”

It was like a red flag in front of a bull.  I charged.

“Not only could I paddle from NY to Atlantic City,” I told him, “But I can paddle all the way down the east coast, through the Panama Canal, and up the west coast to Los Angeles.”

I didn’t really think anyone would remember that I took the dare, it was more like a joke to me, but Andy showed up the next day with maps and compasses and we were charting my course.  You have to know that my boating skills were learned at camp in high school.  Not exactly preparation for paddling in the Atlantic Ocean.  But I couldn’t back down.

Fritz the daredevil was born.

That canoe trip that ended with me in Fidel Castro’s Cuban prison, but that didn’t dampen my spirit.   When my next employer thought it would be good advertising to put his company logo on a snowmobile and snowmobile across the 5,000 miles across the northern tier of the United States, I jumped at the chance and earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. When Alpo Dog Food company asked me to  mirror Lewis and Clark’s expedition, canoeing eastward across the United States with a dog in tow and a bag of Alpo dog food coupons to distribute to my fans, nothing could have prepared me for pulling my canoe—with Windsor the puppy in it—against the raging current going up the Continental Divide across the Rockies, then rising up in my tiny canoe as the water filled the 80 foot locks of the Columbia River.

Reporters and TV crews met me everywhere I went, they were on my every move I was on the cover of Argossy Magazine, Sports Illustrated, special guest on To Tell the Truth. Sponsors wanted in on my adventures, some living vicariously through me, others looking for a profit angle. The dares, the adventures, quickly followed.

I have often wondered why my adventures excited people who didn’t even know me, and I think it was this:  I was living for every person who ever wanted to get in their car after a long day at a boring job, and instead of going home, just keep driving to see where life would take them.

Something inside all of us wants to be that guy.

I told the story of my Cuban adventure in my 2011 book, Adventure on a Dare.

Finding Fritz is the rest of the story.