In 1900, Goofty told a Houston Daily Post reporter that he emigrated to the U.S. on the SS Fresia as a stowaway in 1876, was found by the captain and made to work for three crossings to earn his passage, and was finally able to immigrate by 1878.
[3][4] In his 1933 book, The Barbary Coast, Herbert Asbury wrote that Borchardt got the name "Oofty Goofty" from a February 1884 appearance at a Market Street sideshow, where he was billed as the "Wild Man of Borneo".
He was then locked in a cage, and people paid a dime to look at the “wild man” supposedly captured in the jungles of Borneo and brought to San Francisco at enormous expense.
After losing several games, members of the team kicked him and made him walk nearly a hundred miles back home.
[5] In June 1885, Oofty was charged with libel after claiming a man named C. Linear had offered him $200 to burn his house down.
Early in the 1885 libel case, Oofty gave an interview to the San Francisco Examiner, in which he described the "feat" for which he would become best known: My stock in trade was a leather pad I wore in the seat of my trousers and my customers were young men, who would pay from 10 cents to $2, according to the thickness of the cane with which I would allow them to strike me with one blow as I bent forward over the back of a chair.
Asbury claimed that the genesis of Oofty's "whack me" business was his sudden discovery, upon being thrown out of a Barbary Coast saloon onto a hard cobblestone street, that he felt no physical pain.
[10] On the morning of July 15, 1886 he was knocked into a creek at Pinole, California by farm hands who were frightened by him, and called off his journey.
[14] In the late 1890s, Oofty was living in Texas where he sold imitation diamonds and performed odd feats for money.