Remembering the tallest man in the world 

A VINTAGE PHOTO on social media of Robert Pershing Wadlow, the tallest man in medical history, brought to mind a long-ago conversation with 82-year-old Waide Hughes of Somerset. At the time, Mr. Hughes was showing me one of Wadlow’s size 37AA shoes that Wadlow had given him in 1937. 

“Have you ever seen a man 9 feet tall?” he asked, unlacing the story of his friendship with Wadlow. “He was so tall and such a sensation, sir, that nobody could help but stand and look at him in awe. There’s no way you can ever get used to a man 9 feet tall. There’s no use talking about it. I could talk here for a year and you’d never understand it. You can’t conceive of it!” 

Actually, Wadlow, whose abnormal growth was caused by a pituitary disorder, was not quite 9 feet tall, only 8 feet, 11.1 inches. But that was close enough to 9 feet for Hughes, whose comments I recorded. 

He’d become friends with the mild-mannered Wadlow decades earlier when he managed the shoe department at his family’s Hughes Department Store in Somerset. Wadlow, a native of Alton, Illinois, was then on promotional tours for Peters Diamond Brand shoes, and made extended visits to Somerset in 1936 and 1937, when Hughes accompanied him to towns in several surrounding counties. 

“I had a car that the Hudson motor car company made then called a Terraplane … and he’d sit in the back seat of the Terraplane. I took a (front) seat out and his feet went up under the dash.” 

At the old Beecher Hotel in Somerset, Hughes said three double beds were placed side by side to provide sleeping arrangements for Wadlow. 

“When I walked with him on the street, he walked with his hand on my shoulder, and his cane came to the top of my head,” said Hughes, who was 5 feet, 9 1/2 inches tall. 

According to Guinness World Records, Wadlow’s hands measured 12 3/4 inches from his wrist to the tip of his middle finger, his feet were 18 1/2 inches in length and his arm span was just over 9 feet, 5 inches. He weighed 439 pounds when he died at age 22 in July, 1940. Death resulted from blood poisoning attributed to an infection caused by a poorly fitted ankle brace. 

Wadlow once told a reporter that he had a special fondness for the Somerset area, which he said he had visited about as often as any place in the country. In fact, Hughes recalled that Wadlow returned for personal visits in 1938 and again in 1940 not long before his death.

Hughes died in 1994 and the giant’s shoe was passed to his oldest son, David, who lives in Morehead. But the Pulaski County Historical Society still has a file on Wadlow’s visits, and there may still be a few consumer-members of South Kentucky RECC who can recount stories told by older family and friends who once saw “the tallest man in the world.”