Phineas
Taylor (“There’s a sucker born every minute”) Barnum knew talent when
he saw it.
The Connecticut-born showman employed talent scouts to scour
the country looking for new acts for his wildly successful franchise, the Ringling
Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
In 1877, though some sources say
it was in 1880, one of the circus magnate’s men heard about the Shields boys
in Hunt County – Guss, Frank, Shadrack and Jack.
The Shields –
born in 1852, 1853, 1855 and 1859 respectively -- worked on their family farm,
but Barnum’s agent did not need common laborers. He sought talent, a term for
which the sideshow world had a very broad definition. “Talent” included being
too short, too tall, having multiple limbs or none at all as well as assorted
other traits that made someone unusual or shocking in appearance.
The
Shields boys had talent in that stacked head-to-toes they would extend almost
32 feet, taller than a three-story building. Each of the boys stood just a bit
shy of eight feet.
Barnum offered the boys $100 a week, a heady sum in
those days. Billed as the Texas Giants, the Shields brothers traveled with
the circus across the U.S. and Europe, donning martial-looking uniforms and high
police-style helmets that made them look even taller. A descendant later revealed
that his towering forebears also wore elevated shoes. Barnum, being Barnum, fudged
on their true heights.
Still, the Shields boys existed at a higher elevation
than most. And, like liking like, Shadrack “Shade” Shields married up – his bride
stood seven-foot-ten. Betrothed on Christmas Day, 1890, they went out on their
own for a time as the Tallest Married Couple on Earth.
Guss is
listed as the author (who knows if he actually wrote it) of a rare, eight-page
pamphlet published in Chicago in 1884, “A Biographical Sketch of the Four Texas
Giants, the Shields Brothers.” In addition to the booklet, the brothers peddled
photos of themselves.
Shadrack and his red-haired wife stayed on the road
until around the turn of the 20th century, but the other brothers had called it
quits after about a decade. Jack died in 1896. Guss and Shade later ran a saloon
in Greenville, though Shade would
go back out, teaming up with a three-foot tall circus veteran named Major Ray
for an act on Mississippi river boats. Frank’s grandson, Marcus Ross Freiberger,
grew to six-ten and went on to win a gold medal in the 1952 Olympics at Helsinki.
The Shields boys stood at the height of their career in 1885 when James Grover Tarver was born in Franklin.
He grew up to a strapping eight-foot-two and hit the circuit in 1909. He worked
for four different circuses, billed either as the Texas Giant or Tallest
Man in the World. “I
was a cowboy until I got bigger than the pony,” he told crowds.
Tarver
stayed in show business until 1933, when Jack Earle got discovered.
The last of the really tall Texans came into the world as Jacob Erlich
in 1906 in Denver, but his family moved to El
Paso, where he grew up. Since he weighed less than four pounds at birth, his
parents may have worried whether he’d grow to full size. They needn’t have fretted.
He made it to eight-foot-six, big enough to make a professional basketball player
look like a little guy.
As a teenager, Erlich went to Hollywood hoping
for a movie career and found it. As Jack Earle, the name he went by from
then on out, he ended up in 48 silent movies, including a role as the giant in
the film version of two classics, Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk.
Back
in El Paso, Earle took
in a performance of the Ringling Brothers Circus when it came to town. When someone
with the show noticed that Earle stood taller than Tarver, he got hired as the
World’s Tallest Man. Looking even taller by wearing boots and a cowboy hat,
the Texas Giant spent 14 years with the circus. (Tarver retired to the life of
a farmer in Arkansas, where he lived until his death in 1958.)
Earle left
the circus world in 1940, sold wine in San Francisco and dabbled in poetry and
the arts. He retired to El
Paso and was having a high-ceilinged, king-sized house built when he died
in a hospital there of kidney disease on July 19, 1952.
The Shields boys, Tarver and Erlich-Earle weren’t the only non-vertically-challenged Texans to make
it big, so to speak, but they got the most ink over the years. True tall tales
from Texas.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" May
28, 2009 column
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