https://www.facebook.com/pages/Remebering-Robert-Earl-Hughes/1453437911614105
Robert Earl Hughes Facebook Page.
Song about Robert Earl http://www.sideshowworld.com/81-SSPAlbumcover/Fat/Robert/Hughes.html
http://www.washingtontimesreporter.com/article/20080430/News/304309966/?Start=1
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2001/Heavy/
Heavy
By the time he died at 32 in 1958, Robert Earl
Hughes of tiny Fishhook, Illinois, weighed more than 1,000 pounds, earning a
place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the largest man on earth. Except
for his neighbors and family, few people knew much about his life until
recently, when an astonishing photograph sent the author in search of Hughes’s
real story: Raised in a sharecropper’s cabin, trapped inside half a ton of
flesh, this literate, companionable young man had dreamed of seeing the world.
Aside from some carnival tours and one disastrous trip to New York, he never
lived his dream. But in his short life, he found something else.
By Robert
Kurson
Published
April 14, 2011
A few months ago, this magazine published photographs from the portfolio
of Robert Natkin, a local photographer who worked in the 1940s and 1950s.
Natkin trained his lens mostly on hardened city people and landscapes, and his
work resonated with the black-and-white urgency of an artist who believed he
was shooting stories, not subjects. My job was to write a short essay to
accompany his work. Most of the photos were slice-of-life Chicago: poor folk;
bathing beauties; a jailbird; factory workers. One photo, however, seemed misplaced,
as if it had wandered from a different collection and had settled into Natkin’s
book for the night. It showed a rail-thin young farmer playing checkers with a
very heavy man. I recognized the large man immediately. He was Robert Earl
Hughes, and I knew him from The Guinness Book of World Records. I
remembered his weight—1,041 pounds—and another odd detail that had lingered in
my memory since childhood: Hughes had been buried in a piano case.
There is
much to behold in the photo—piled rolls of flesh, a five-foot-wide chair,
tent-size overalls, brotherhood. I did not think to write about any of that. I
stared at the picture for much of the day, and when I considered how to
describe such a scene, one thought kept returning. I knew the heavy man was lonely.
* * *
My dad
was fat. At the time I was born, he stood 5 feet 11 and weighed 280 pounds.
Like many little boys, I worshiped my father. He was a traveling salesman, and
my first memory of him is from a business trip we took together when I was
four. We had stopped outside a steak house for dinner, and as his business
partner, he allowed me to help close the car trunk. I slammed my thumb in the
trunk lid and it began to swell. My dad took me inside the restaurant, using
his stomach to push past the long line of waiting customers until we reached
the bar, where he ordered a glass of Coke in which I could soak my finger. When
the ice melted, he ordered another Coke. At four, the world is a rush of
ominous faces, fantastic noises, and dangerous happenings. At four, my father’s
size struck me as the perfect protection against a place so large as the world.
I took
many more road trips with my dad (my job was to read the maps, watch the gas,
and tell my share of stories). Out across America, I noticed that people
treated him differently; they were nervous around him, anxious to get away from
him, and I remember thinking as the years and trips passed that a person could
get lonely being fat in America, that my father looked lonely in America. When
customers joked about his weight, I had to will myself not to blubber, even
though I was studying karate magazines and playing Little League baseball and
becoming a pretty tough young guy. In hotel restaurants, when my dad thought I
was still in the bathroom, I peeked around corners to watch him slathering
dinner rolls with whipped butter, even though he told me he never used butter,
it was too fattening. I remember that he didn’t look lonely when he ate those
buttered rolls.
I began
to look into the life of Robert Earl Hughes. I checked libraries, the Internet,
bookstores, magazines. Though his picture in the Guinness Book was familiar to
millions worldwide, little was known of him, save for his hometown (Fishhook,
Illinois) and the year he had died (1958). I started digging. The skinny man
playing checkers in the photo turned out to be Robert Earl’s brother, who was
alive and living on a small Missouri farm. I found his telephone number. Yes,
the brother told me, if I’d like to drive some 300 miles, I could ask about Robert
Earl—might even be a few other folks around who remembered him. I hadn’t been
on a road trip since my father died of a heart attack in 1995, but I collected
my maps and checked my gas, and set out to find Robert Earl Hughes.
* * *
Fishhook,
Illinois, is too tiny even for some mapmakers. Located about 300 miles
southwest of Chicago near the state’s westernmost tip, the town claims the same
general store, two churches, and one-room schoolhouse it did in the 1930s and
1940s, when the Hughes family called it home. Four of Fishhook’s 29 current residents
have agreed to meet me at the general store, where they remember the Hughes
family trading eggs and cream, socializing, and bringing their eldest son by
horse-drawn wagon to be weighed on the platform scale. First, however, they
recommend that I stop at the Pike County Historical Society in nearby Pittsfield
to view a collection of local newspaper clips.
The
historical society opens mostly by appointment in winter, and it is not heated.
One board member, a retired high school history teacher, says that if I can
stand the cold (most folks can’t) and want to read the miles of yellowed news
clippings spread across ancient wooden tables, I may avail myself of the life
of Robert Earl Hughes.
Three hours later and steeped in the outline of Hughes’s life, I arrive at the Fishhook general store. The four residents, including the widow of the long-time owner, have cleared a table in the back, where crinkle-cut snapshots of Robert Earl sit piled in a corner for my consideration. The store, they regret, is smaller than it was in its glory days in the 1940s and 1950s, when the town depended on it for meat, milk, shoes, feed, britches, and hammers; when the upstairs room hosted wedding receptions and lodge meetings; and when children paid 12 cents each to sit on benches and watch Gene Autry movies. For two hours, these people reach back into their lives to remember their friend Robert Earl, and by the time I leave for my hotel, the giant man from the Guinness Book has stepped from the gallery of freaks and oddities frozen with him on those pages, and ambled forward as a living, breathing human being.
Three hours later and steeped in the outline of Hughes’s life, I arrive at the Fishhook general store. The four residents, including the widow of the long-time owner, have cleared a table in the back, where crinkle-cut snapshots of Robert Earl sit piled in a corner for my consideration. The store, they regret, is smaller than it was in its glory days in the 1940s and 1950s, when the town depended on it for meat, milk, shoes, feed, britches, and hammers; when the upstairs room hosted wedding receptions and lodge meetings; and when children paid 12 cents each to sit on benches and watch Gene Autry movies. For two hours, these people reach back into their lives to remember their friend Robert Earl, and by the time I leave for my hotel, the giant man from the Guinness Book has stepped from the gallery of freaks and oddities frozen with him on those pages, and ambled forward as a living, breathing human being.
* * *
This
article appears in the June 2001 issue of Chicago magazine. Subscribe
to Chicago magazine.
World's Heaviest Man remembered as small-town boy
FISHHOOK [Missouri] -- Robert Earl Hughes' weight was both a prison and
a passkey.
The memorial for Robert Earl Hughes sits at Fishhook's main
intersection. Jennifer Coombes/Quincy Herald-Whig
An infant case of whooping cough shook his pituitary gland, triggering
his girth to explode. Robert Earl weighed more than 200 pounds at age
6, nearly double that at age 10 and more than a half-ton by his 30s.
For most of his life, his size left him immobile and home-bound in a
tiny farming community. But his girth also served as his ticket out of
western Illinois: as a carnival fat man, Robert Earl got to see more
of America than most poor folk could imagine.
That's why in Fishhook, residents always remember Robert Earl with a
smile on his face. Fifty years after his early death, folks still
fondly recall the small-town boy who became The World's Heaviest Man.
Robert Earl's hold on Fishhook -- a town 20 miles east of Hannibal,
Missouri, with a population of 29 -- remains remarkable, even a half-
century after he last walked these parts. Catty-corner from Fishhook
Market, the only store in the business district, a four-foot-tall slab
of black granite juts out of the earth. It hosts a light etching of a
large man in overalls, his face beaming a genial smile as he leans on
a thick cane for needed support. Underneath is this message:
"May we not only remember he was the world's largest man from the
small community of Fishhook, but also an average man with an enormous
heart for people."
The memorial went up only last year, after the small community somehow
came up with $3,500.
"In the summer, there'll be somebody stopping by to look at it every
day," says Jerry Dougherty, who owns Fishhook Market.
* * *
In 1926 in Monticello, Missouri, along came an 11 1/4-pound boy named
Robert Earl Hughes, the first child of Georgia Hughes, 20, and Abe
Hughes, 48. A sharecropper, Abe Hughes eked out a subsistence living.
Soon after Robert Earl's birth, he cut a new deal outside Fishhook.
The tiny family had no running water or electricity, but the land was
cheap.
At 5 months old, Robert Earl started coughing fiercely and
persistently, a sign of whooping cough. With no remedy available, the
family waited out the disease. The coughing eventually stopped but
left its mark in a big way.
Two years later, with Robert Earl growing far larger than the average
lad of that age, the family scratched together enough money to visit a
doctor. He had been healthy, except for that case of the whooping
cough. The doctor determined the cough had permanently discombobulated
Robert Earl's pituitary gland. Instead of regulating his growth
properly, the gland was prompting a runaway plumping.
For the next four years, Robert Earl kept expanding. One day, his
parents hitched up the horse and wagon to take him to town, to weigh
him on the platform scale at the general store. Though the 6-year-old
stood just slightly taller than average, the scale registered a
remarkable 203 pounds.
After starting first grade in a one-room schoolhouse several miles
away, the sociable boy liked interacting with children, far more than
he would typically see around his farmhouse. Over the years, though,
Robert Earl's burgeoning girth made the long walks to school
exhausting and excruciating. By age 10, his weight hit 378 pounds,
according to the scale at the general store. His trips into town
became something of a public spectacle, and word of his size began to
trickle through Pike, Adams and Brown counties.
But Robert Earl was not slothful. He gladly would help on the family
farm, feeding chickens, gathering eggs and performing other jobs that
could be done at a slow pace. All accounts peg him as a gregarious,
smiling youngster -- "a very jolly fellow," as former neighbor Harry
Manley, 84, described him.
Those close to Robert Earl say he did not eat like a pig. They say he
had a hearty appetite, perhaps enough to pack extra pounds onto any
person. But they say his meals were not so big as to account for his
enormous size.
Still, by age 13 he had reached an astounding 546 pounds. At school,
he sat on a special bench braced with two-by-fours and wire. But the
walk became risky. One day, he stumbled and rolled into a ditch. His
size rendered him unable to maneuver himself out. Friends ran for
help, summoning several men who used ropes to pull him to safety.
* * *
By age 16, the 5-foot, 9-inch boy weighed 600 pounds. Two years later,
he passed 709 pounds. That year, 1944, he had to register for the
draft. But his parents told the draft board that they had no way of
getting Robert Earl to registration in Mount Sterling, 12 miles away.
So, the draft board went to Fishhook to register him.
Stories about the unusual draft accommodations made papers in Quincy
and other nearby cities -- the first time Robert Earl made headlines.
The stories said Robert Earl, likely the largest man to register for
the draft, wore size 56 overalls, to which his mother had added a 17-
inch swatch of material.
These curiosities caught the eye of savvy marketers. Two years later,
at age 20, Robert Earl made his first public appearances, at festivals
in nearby Baylis and Meredosia. To get there, he rode in the back of
pickup trucks furnished by the festival organizers.
Robert Earl brought photos of himself to the festivals, which he sold
and autographed: 25 cents for a 3-inch-by-5-inch shot or 50 cents for
an 8-by-10. At the Baylis festival alone, he sold 160 photos and took
orders for more. He loved the attention, and offers soon poured in
from other festivals, promising $50 to $100 per day -- a princely sum
to a poor family of dirt farmers.
* * *
After his mother, who had disapproved of her son selling himself as a
freak, died of a stroke, a 21-year-old Robert Earl realized he no
longer could break her heart and decided to use his size to his
advantage.
Publicity allowed Robert Earl to make a good chunk of money. He made
appearances at grand openings and other functions in Illinois,
Missouri and Iowa. One store used his photo to tout custom-made
trousers it had fashioned for him. A tuxedo shop displayed a picture
of him grinning inside a massive penguin suit.
The money was nice. But mostly he liked the appearances for the
opportunity to meet people. As something of a celebrity at these
events, Robert Earl was meeting far more folks than anyone in Fishhook
might see in a lifetime.
In 1953, he stepped onto the platform scale at the Fishhook store,
hitting 946 pounds. Robert Earl likely was the heaviest man on earth
at that time.
The next year, Robert Earl signed his first carnival contract.
Fairgoers flocked to see the spectacle of the half-ton man: 25 cents
per adult, a dime for the kiddies. Despite the gawking, most fans
treated Robert Earl with respect. He didn't mind personal questions,
such as those about the size of his bed (six legs) and his ability to
tie his shoes (he could not).
* * *
Although he loved life on the road, Robert Earl sought more
opportunities. In late 1956, he hit 1,041 pounds. He had officially
become the World's Heaviest Man.
An East Coast publicist saw an angle there. He said Robert Earl was a
natural for variety shows hosted by the likes of Ed Sullivan, Jackie
Gleason and Steve Allen. The publicist offered $40,000, plus expenses.
An amazed Robert Earl agreed eagerly. But the logistics were tricky.
A private ambulance -- apparently, the only vehicle large enough for
Robert Earl to take a long-distance trip -- took him from Missouri to
Chicago's O'Hare Field. There, thanks to special permission from the
Civil Aeronautics Board, he would be allowed to board a freight
carrier.
Newspapers chided the spectacle. The Sun-Times asked in a headline,
"Will He Fit on TV Screen?"
Once in New York City, the publicist put up Robert Earl and a pair of
family friends in a swank hotel. Tailors arrived to take Robert Earl's
measurements for a special suit: He was to appear on TV as The World's
Largest Santa Claus.
But it never happened. Robert Earl never heard another word, not from
Ed Sullivan, not from the publicist, not from anyone. Soon, the hotel
kicked him out for failure to pay his bill. Robert Earl and his
companions were on the street, with no money or hope. They went to the
Salvation Army, which took pity and covered the large tab to fly him
back to the Midwest. He rarely talked of the matter again.
"He was pretty blue," his sister-in-law Lillian Hughes says. "He
thought he could trust people."
* * *
In 1957, Robert Earl joined the Gooding Amusement Co. for a Midwest
carnival tour. In early July, Robert Earl developed a skin rash. When
family members asked if he was all right, he replied, "You know, I
always have this heat in the summer." But days later, Robert Earl's
fingernails began to turn dark blue. His brother summoned a doctor,
who suspected a heart attack and told them to take Robert Earl to the
nearest hospital.
Weakened and unable to move, he was too big to transport into the
building. So physicians came out to the carnival trailer to examine
him. The diagnosis: the measles, possibly from his two nieces. The
disease was causing uremia, a kidney malfunction, and he was fading
fast.
Robert Earl would never leave that trailer -- not alive. He fell into a
coma and died two days later, on July 10, of congestive heart failure.
He was 32.
Robert Earl was not buried in an old piano case as per an apocryphal
story long published in the Guinness Book of World Records. Rather,
the Embalming Burial Case Co. of Burlington, Iowa, built a custom
casket: 85 inches long, 52 inches wide and 34 inches deep. It was made
of heavy cypress and reinforced with steel.
In Mount Sterling, a forklift hoisted Robert Earl's body off the
carnival trailer and into the casket. The funeral was the most-
attended in Brown County, with more than 2,000 mourners paying their
last respects to the World's Heaviest Man. Twelve pallbearers moved
the casket on rollers to the grave site, and a crane lowered the
casket into its final resting place.
A simple granite marker stands atop the grave: Robert Earl Hughes;
June 1, 1926-July 10, 1958; World's Heaviest Man; Weight 1,041
Pounds."
Those who know him say he likely was somewhat heavier at the time of
death. No matter, his record has been far eclipsed since then.
Not that they care in Fishhook. There, they still care about Robert
Earl Hughes -- not about the size of his waistline, but the size of his
heart and his smile.
All-time world weight records
The following list notes the top six heaviest people of all time as
well as his or her country of origin and birth and death years.
Carol Yager, U.S., 1960-94, more than 1,600 pounds
Jon Brower Minnoch, U.S.,1941-83, 1,400 pounds
Manuel Uribe, Mexico, born 1965, 1,235 pounds
Walter Hudson, U.S., 1944-91, 1,197 pounds
Michael Hebranko, U.S., born 1953, more than 1,100 pounds
Robert Earl Hughes, U.S., 1926-58, 1,069 pounds
Source: Wikipedia, based on news articles
http://www.sj-r.com/News/
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