page_title: Hazel Marion Eaton
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Hazel Marion Eaton / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Hazel Marion Eaton Watkins performing with Hager's Wall of Death. Photo was latered published in the Portland Sunday Telegram, March 12, 1939 with permission by Hazel Eaton Reis.
context_page_description: Hazel Marion Eaton was one of the first "mile-a-minute girls" to ride an Indian motorcycle in a carnival motordrome known as the Wall of Death.
context_section_description: Raised in South Portland, Maine, Eaton enjoyed a local reputation for diving and long distance swimming. After the Portland Sunday Telegram ran a story touting her swimming abilities, representatives from the Johnny Jones Exposition hired her to perform shallow diving feats from an elevated platform into a tank, hoop rolling and trained monkey acts. By 1912 Eaton had taken on another spectacular, but dangerous occupation - motordrome thrill racing.
  Hazel Marion Eaton was born on July 4, 1895 in the lighthouse tower at West Quoddy Head outside Lubec, Maine where her father, Edwin L. Eaton, was the assistant light keeper (1895–1900). She was the only child born in the candy-striped tower due to construction in the permanent living quarters behind the lighthouse. Her mother, Jennie L. Johnson, a South Portland native, suffered from nausea due to paint fumes in the main house. Her husband ushered her into the tower to seek relief, but she immediately went into labor with Hazel. 
  When Eaton was five years old her father was transferred to the Cape Elizabeth Lightship off the coast of Portland Head near Portland, Maine. The family moved to South Portland to a house on Preble St. In the next few years, Eaton was joined by a brother, Morris in 1902, and two sisters: Sybil in 1904, and Doris in 1906. 
  In 1910, Eaton ran away from home to join the Johnny Jones Exhibition as a high dive act in Bangor, Maine. Within two years she met Ira Watkins. Watkins had his own show and lured the adventurous Eaton to train, then participate in “Watkins’s Wall of Death” motordrome. She married Watkins in 1917 and one year later gave birth to her only child, Beverly June Watkins. In 1920, due to the nomadic lifestyle of circus performers, Ira Watkins’s mother, Emma, took custody of Beverly and raised her in Rutland, Vermont.
caption: Hazel Eaton in 1927 riding in Hager's Wall of Death.
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