Bob Yerkes, Circus Trainer and ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Remo Williams’ Stuntman, Dies at 92

Bob Yerkes, the acrobatic stunt performer who slid down a clock tower cable for Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future and hung around the Statue of Liberty under repair for Fred Ward in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins , has died. He was 92.

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Yerkes died Tuesday of natural causes in Northridge, Darlene Ava Williams, a stunt performer and one of his many mentees, announced .

The amiable Yerkes, who started out in the circus and was a skilled trapeze aerialist and tightrope walker, also plummeted from a helicopter through a roof in Breakout (1975), starring Charles Bronson.

“I was getting ready for the stunt and the guy said, ‘Break a Leg!,” and I broke them both,” he recalled in a 2017 interview . He said he also broke legs while working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Her Alibi (1989), but, in a career that spanned eight decades, that was the extent of his serious injuries.

Yerkes also flew as Boba Fett in Return of the Jedi (1983) in a pickup shot for the movie that was filmed in the backyard of his Northridge home, where he gave circus and stunt lessons for years (recipients included Brooke Shields and Todd Bridges).

Even though he was just 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds, Yerkes was called on to double for Arnold Schwarzenegger when his character swings across the Sherman Oaks Galleria via a balloon thread in Commando (1985). And he stood in for Eli Wallach when his character was thrown off a train in Tough Guys (1986).

Brayton Walter Yerkes was born on Feb. 11, 1932, in Los Angeles County. He performed acrobatics at Muscle Beach when he was 11, and when his parents divorced, he ran away from home at age 15 to join the DeWayne Bros. Circus, then showed up in the 1948 films Julia Misbehaves and The Three Musketeers .

As he mastered the teeterboard, he worked for the Clyde Beatty Circus and performed in shows from Las Vegas to the Catskills.

After serving in the Korean War, Yerkes got stunt work in The Silver Chalice (1954), Carol Reed’s Trapeze (1956) and The Big Circus (1959), where he doubled for David Nelson. He also toured with The Flying Artons as a catcher in a trapeze act and worked for the Ringling brothers.

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The busy Yerkes did stunts in at least six films in 1985, including Remo Williams, where he hung precariously from all kinds of poles and scaffolding , and Back to the Future. His scenes in the latter would be reused for the sequels.

His résumé included Airport (1970), Earthquake (1974), The Towering Inferno (1974), Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Big Top Pee-wee (1988), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Hook (1991), The Sandlot (1993), Batman Forever (1995), Magnolia (1999), Poseidon (2006), Water for Elephants (2011) and Killing Hasselhoff (2017), his final credit.

Yerkes schooled actors like Shields, Bridges and Willie Aames for the annual Circus of the Stars CBS specials that aired from 1977-94, and he worked with the athletes on the 1989-96 syndicated competition series American Gladiators .

His backyard was equipped with rigs for high falls, mats to practice flips and a springboard powered by compressed air that launched people end-over-end. He is said to have invented the airbag for stunt use.

“There will never be another backyard like Bob’s where you could train for free or even live for free if you needed a place to stay,” Williams wrote.

Survivors include his son, Mark, who also worked as a stunt performer. Another son, Gerald, died while serving in Vietnam.

A member of the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures since 1973 and a Hall of Famer, the beloved Yerkes was known as “Bible Bob” since his circus days and was instrumental in raising and protecting the 32-foot-tall Hollywood Cross that sits in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl.

In February, he made it to Florida to accept an honor from the Circus Ring of Fame. “The circus was always my first love,” he said then. “I did lot of movies and stunt work, too, but the circus was what I really enjoyed.”

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