This handicap may have been the root cause of Linus Major IV’s reckless approach to life. As a kid, Linus made up for his “sissy” lisp by being a daredevil. He slid down hills other kids wouldn’t go near on his sled. He was the first boy his age to swing himself out and over the Mohican River (on a dare) from a rope that hung from a thick tree branch so that he could drop into the water and swim back to shore. Linus was also the culprit who (on a dare) rang Mr. O’Brien’s doorbell. Mr. Colin O’Brien was the red-faced, potbellied, tyrannical junior high school principal. When he opened the door, Linus, standing in the shadows of the principal’s front porch, heaved a quart of milk in a glass bottle into the principal’s living room. After Linus heard the bottle shatter, he rode off into the night on his bicycle.

Linus Major IV was the son of world-renowned sportsman Linus Major Jr., who was the son of industrialist Linus Major Sr., the founder of Major Iron & Steel, Major Aeronautics, Major Lackawanna & Tijuana Railroad—better known as the Wanna-Wanna Railroad—and about thirty other Major companies in the United States and around the world.

Linus Major IV was neither a corporate giant like his grandfather nor a polo-playing, skeet-shooting, mountain-climbing, deep-sea-fishing, croquet Hall of Famer like his father. Nor a ne’er-do-well layabout like his older brother Linus Major III, nicknamed Trey. Our Linus graduated from Yale, as did his younger sister Sally, his older brother Trey, his father, and his grandfather. But other than a strange predilection for archaeology and dinosaur bones, which he kept up for no apparent reason, and his daredevil stunts, Linus didn’t do much. Among members of Linus Major IV’s family and friends, he was known as Linus Minor.

Over the years, the lisp that Linus had as a child disappeared, which helped the young man face the world a bit more assured about things in general. Unfortunately, Linus continued his daredevil ways, perhaps more aggressively than ever, for reasons known only to him. And though he never made a name for himself in family affairs, his propensity for daring helped him establish new entries in The Guinness Book of World Records.

In 2000, when Linus was nineteen years old, he ate more hot dogs than anyone else at Coney Island—forty-nine in an hour—earning him his first Guinness record. In 2001, Linus bungee-jumped the longest vertical drop ever recorded, stepping off some forgettable bridge over some godforsaken gorge in Crested Butte, Colorado, for his second Guinness record. In 2002, Linus dropped the greatest distance in free-fall parachuting in the history of the sport. Linus scared even his most sniveling detractors by keeping his parachute closed longer than any other parachutist in the nation’s history up to that time. The jump earned him his third Guinness record. In 2003, Linus piloted a lighter-than-air balloon from the Boston Commons to the fairground adjacent to the San Diego Zoo, entering The Guinness Book of World Records for the fourth time. And in the year 2008, at the age of twenty-seven, Linus flew around the world in fewer than seventy hours for his fifth and final Guinness record.