The Shields boys, James Grover Tarver and Erlich-Earle. (original) (raw)

P hineas 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.

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Mike Cox May 28, 2009 column
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