“Lunch on a Skyscraper,” a photo forwarded to me by Klare Schmidt, shows a group of men on a suspended I-beam hundreds of feet above New York City.

Unless it’s a diabolical Photoshop job, in which a background is simply added, and the men in reality are seated on ground level, the scene is hard to imagine.

The photographer, Charles C. Ebbets, did a masterful job of catching the 11 men — apparently oblivious to the perils that are inherent below — earning their living. And smoking cigarettes and eating their lunch during the construction of Rockefeller Center.

The single beam has no back or foot support, and nobody appears to be fazed by it.

A glimpse of this 1932 photo gives me a chill. But I had a different reaction when I saw the photo while in my teens. Why are kids fearless of heights and oldsters quite fearful?

Back in the ‘60s, when I lived in Illinois, my girlfriend’s father, Bernard, was one of those who toted the proverbial black, dome-shaped lunch box as he worked high above most other people, in Chicago’s Loop. He felt at ease walking across beams often lacking safety nets. To be sure, there were safety nets in the construction zones more heavily populated, but, Bernie would say, “You fall off and let the net catch you, and you’re still in a mell of a hess. It takes an hour to bring you back up.”

Almost as bad was the fear of dropping tools — pipe wrenches, rivets, welding equipment, and hoping the nets snared them, lest they kill somebody down below.

As a child, just getting used to the mystery of falling objects, I would go batty (still do) over the Galilean law that — barring things like wind resistance — objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their weight.

“Do you mean to tell me a tiny marble falls as fast as a 10-ton truck?” I’d ask my brother Severino, who had just learned Galileo’s premise. He took me to the area’s highest hill, KFUN, a few hundred yards from our home on Railroad, and demonstrated.

We picked up a huge rock and a smaller one, dropping them at the same time.

He almost believed I’d proven him wrong, as the heavier rock I hefted did indeed land first. Gotcha, Older Brother! But he forced me to admit that I’d given the big rock a healthy head start by pushing it on its way, not merely dropping it.

I continued to puzzle over that seeming quirk of gravity when on an observation deck on one of Chicago’s skyscrapers. I wondered — as surely millions have — what would happen if someone dropped a penny from atop the Prudential Building, and its ever-increasing velocity hit someone on the head?

Apparently it had been tried many times: Would someone on the sidewalk be seriously injured? The amount of glass surrounding the observation deck made the penny-tossing issue purely academic. The glass was so durable that one could neither perform homicide nor suicide by testing the law with a human body.

One evening Bernie came home ranting that he’d decided against hiring his teenaged son for the crew he managed on the Marina City project. Why? Well, Junior had gotten up from the couch that morning, to join Dad at work and wrenched his ankle in the process. “How can he be safe on a 50-story building when he can’t even get across the living room floor?” Bernie asked.
Excellent point. The son never got the job.

As children, aren’t most of us envious of those who seem to defy gravity?
Didn’t we all admire circus acrobats and trapeze artists?

During the Superman cartoon craze, in the late ‘40s, I tried millions of times to take flight by tying one of Mom’s discarded flour sacks around my neck, flapping my arms, and taking a two-foot leap from the wall in front of our house. Once, I even measured the height of our “casita,” an outbuilding used for storage: 12 feet. Jumping off, with or without Superman cape, was no biggee.

So I increased the height by successively placing pieces of roofing tiles on top, until I added another foot in height. But the tiles slipped, creating more of a hazard, as I slid down the side of the casita, and I believed for a moment that nature had bent the Galilean law and forced me to fall faster than any other object — for my stupidity. Kids at that age are unbreakable, so I hurt nothing but my pride.

For many youths, gravity was simply a fact of life, not a peril. As kids, we were almost able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But age has a way of changing things. I recall taking on hills with a 100 percent grade when I was a child. I tried that on my sister Dolores’ bike, which she rented to us — usually usuriously.

Some 55 years later, at the behest of my oldest son, Stan, I attempted the same hill, different bike, with the same results, but still a less-than-stellar performance.

And though I’m not exactly a total acrophobe today, I shudder at looking at photos of skydivers or seeing my pre-teen grandchildren climbing on top of our roof to help their dad install pro-panel.

Taking in gravity-defying feats, even vicariously, still gives me a kind of rush that becomes more palpable as I age. But unlike carnival-goers, who enjoy being shaken and stirred, this isn’t as much fun anymore.

As a teen, I once went to a Halloween movie at the SERF, to watch a “B” movie showing the good guy hanging from a gargoyle 500 feet up.

My friend, Frank Reesor, had to shield his eyes during that scene. He said, “I can’t watch this; I have acrophobia,” to which I questioned whether anything on a movie screen could bring out such a reaction. All I could think was “What a wimp!” After all, it was just a movie — and not even in 3-D — and therefore, the stomach-in-the-throat syndrome shouldn’t apply.

But that was then. Lately, I’ve had several dreams about being stuck atop a cliff, something that only exacerbates my fear of heights.

I hope the condition abates, as I don’t want to be one of those who gets weak-kneed and trembly when someone greets me by simply saying “Hi!”