Robert Wadlow, the World’s Tallest Man

Robert Pershing Wadlow, the world’s tallest man, was 8 feet 11½ inches tall, and many people remember when he came to Munichburg.

He visited Jefferson City on September 11, 1939. A crowd was already gathered when his car pulled up in front of Chicken Schmidt’s South Side Shoe Store, 124 East Dunklin. Al Case, who as a teenager worked at the shoe store for his uncle Chicken Schmidt, recalled the visit.

The front passenger seat of the car had been removed, and Wadlow sat in the backseat, his long legs extending all the way under the dashboard. It took a while for Wadlow to “uncoil” from the standard size, four-door sedan.

He stood to full height and walked with a cane to a wooden platform, which he mounted, though for him it was certainly unnecessary! There, he greeted folks and posed for photographs. Here he is with his hand on Chicken Schmidt’s head.

Mr. Case remembers Mr. Wadlow coming into the shoe store. Fortunately, the ceiling was ten feet high! When he went to use the facilities, he handed his cane to young Al to hold—it was almost as tall as he was!

Mr. Wadlow toured for Peters Shoes, made by the International Shoe Company, and Schmidt’s South Side Shoe Store was the local dealer for those shoes. Peters Shoes made custom footwear for Wadlow in exchange for his touring as a goodwill ambassador for the company.(Wadlow wore a size 37AA!)

Wadlow was born February 22, 1918, and grew up in Alton, Illinois. Due to an overactive pituitary gland, he was 5 feet 6 inches by the time he was five. At nine, he was 6 feet 2 inches. By 16 and still in high school, he was 7 feet 10 inches—taller than any of the tall men playing professional basketball today.

He was active in Boy Scouts and in his local Methodist church. He was a DeMolay and became a Freemason in 1939. He attended Shurtleff College in Alton.




His extraordinary height destined him to a life of public appearances, not as a sideshow attraction in carnivals, but for shoe companies. He toured throughout the United States mostly for the International Shoe Company headquartered at St. Louis. When he was eighteen, he appeared at the 1936 Missouri State Fair; by that time, he was 8 feet 4½ inches.

Above all (no pun intended) Wadlow had a gentle nature and was kind to everyone, despite his unusual appearance and difficulty of getting around. He always appeared in normal street clothes and was friendly and courteous with the public, regardless of the gawking and staring.




His father was his escort and manager. After all, he was just a teenager when he entered a life of public appearances. He was only 21 when he visited Jefferson City. Several persons in Jefferson City today distinctly remember his visit on Dunklin Street in 1939.

On June 27, 1940, just eighteen days before his death, doctors at Washington University in St. Louis measured him at 8 feet 11.1 inches. He weighed 490 pounds. He may have grown further before his death.

In July 1940 he experienced a blister and infection from a faulty ankle brace while appearing in Michigan. His condition worsened, and he died on July 15, 1940, at age 22. He was buried in Alton, Illinois. Today, a life-size statue there commemorates the world’s tallest man, certified by the Guinness Book of Records.

The Alton Museum of History and Art includes a special exhibit on Robert Wadlow, Alton’s “Gentle Giant.”

In keeping with the pleasant and unassuming nature of Mr. Wadlow, the exhibit is tastefully done with knowledgeable curators.



Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

Jefferson City 1939 photo provided by Al Case. Other photos by Susan Ferber.

Chicken Schmidt’s Shoe Store

In the 1940s, when I was still in elementary school, my family did most of its shopping for clothes and household items on Dunklin Street in the Southside. Since we had no car, it was the nearest and quickest place to go, but more important than that, Mom and Dad knew almost all the store owners and clerks and felt comfortable trading with them. Many of the men and even some of the women who worked in those stores got their hair cut at Dad’s barbershop, and so we returned the patronage. Also, if necessary, we could charge things, with no interest to be paid on the balance. Store owners had a lot of trust in the goodness of the neighborhood people. They knew we would pay when we had the money.

We bought our shoes at Schmidt’s Shoe Store, 124 East Dunklin, in the middle of a block of small stores. Everyone knew Schmidt as Chicken Schmidt. Few people knew his real name, John. Upon entering the store you immediately faced a choice; a partition divided the store into two stores. On the right, Mrs. Edna Schmidt, Chicken’s wife, had a beauty parlor for neighborhood ladies. Boys never went into that side, although we could smell strange odors coming from the hot hair curling machines that women had attached to their heads for “permanents.” It was a bad chemical smell that you couldn’t ever forget, though you might want to.

Schmidt’s Shoe Store, 124 E. Dunklin, ca. 1950.
Photo by Ralph W. Walker, used by permission of Al Case.

On the left, Mr. Schmidt had his shoe store. It was a long, narrow room made narrower by shelves along the walls that went up to the high, tin ceiling. Hundreds of boxes of shoes filled the shelves. To reach the upper shelves, Mr. Schmidt had a ladder on rollers, which slid along a rail near the ceiling. It would have been great fun to stand on the ladder while it rolled along the floor, but I never had the courage to ask Mr. Schmidt for permission to take a ride on his rolling ladder.

In the far back of the store was the shoe repair counter, where I had soles and heels replaced on my leather shoes. Leather shoes were the only kind of shoes we had, even children. Its shelves were lined with pairs of shoes, with tags, waiting to be picked up. The smell of hot leather was powerful. Sometimes when I entered the store, I heard Mr. Schmidt tacking on a new heel on a shoe placed upside down on a last, or the whirring sound of the pulley-mounted leather belt of his polishing machine. He looked up and saw me, and called out to me by my nickname, “Just a minute, Buddy!” He knew everyone in the neighborhood.

Shopping for shoes could be a bore at best, or a tribulation at worst, for a young boy, but Mr. Schmidt didn’t let it be. He joked with me and always had something to give me when we bought shoes. One year he gave to all neighborhood kids a tablet of white, ruled paper for school. It had holes punched in the margin so that it would fit in a notebook binder. The tablet had his name “Schmidt’s Shoe Store” on the blue cover, along with a picture of a grinning Buster Brown with his dog Tige. Mr. Schmidt sold the popular Buster Brown children’s shoes, made by the Brown Shoe Company in St. Louis.

Chicken Schmidt’s name draws laughs from people today. But when you grow up hearing a name from your earliest days, it is just another name. We didn’t ever think it was funny or wonder how he got it, so no one ever knew the origin or ever thought to ask him. Since there were so many Schmidts in the Southside, a nickname helped sort them out. For example, Chicken’s father was known as Hans, not John. Another Southside Schmidt was known as Sprudel Schmidt. Sprudel is German for carbonated water or soda. Yet another Schmidt, who had the saloon in the early Farmers Home Hotel, was known as Eisbär, or polar bear Schmidt. He had an oval wooden sign that hung out over the sidewalk with no words on it, just a painting of a big, white polar bear.




Chicken Schmidt’s Shoe Store, built ca. 1908, was beautifully restored in 2010 by Larry Kolb and Steve Rollins. The original tin ceiling, hardwood flooring, and the floor-to-ceiling oak posts are still there. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Copyright 2011 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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