World's Heaviest Man: The early years of Fishhook's most famous son
Robert Earl Hughes' weight was both a prison and a passkey.
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.
Most of his life, his size left him immobile and home-bound in a tiny, far-flung farming community. But his girth also served as his ticket out of western Illinois: as a carnival fat man, Robert Earl gladly got to see more of America than most poor folk could imagine.
That's why in Fishhook they 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.
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In western Illinois, the crop fields tend to roll more than the flat fields of central Illinois. There, about 20 miles east of Hannibal, Mo., once rose a hamlet called Lick Skillet. No one remembers how it got that name, and it really doesn't matter anymore.
The wagon trains and mail routes both ended here. Thus, as the end of the line, the community was re-dubbed Fishhook.
At its heyday, Fishhook boasted slight commerce: a blacksmith, grocer, barber, doctor. At its most bustling, Fishhook claimed 96 people and 102 dogs.
Today, 29 residents live here. Its business district consists solely of the ancient Fishhook Market. Owner Jerry Dougherty, 56, mostly sells feed, but you can also buy chips, soda and other convenience items.
Mostly, though, his store serves as the last surviving community touchstone, a place where farmers gather in the morning to sip coffee and tell lies.
Catty-corner from the store, a 4-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:
"Robert Earl Hughes
"The World's Largest Man
"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."
In and around Fishhook, when people talk about Robert Earl, their voices carry a proud respect for their once-famous native son. His hold on the area remains remarkable, even a half-century after he last walked these parts. 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," shopkeeper Dougherty says with pride.
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Twenty miles northwest of Quincy sits Monticello, Mo., a farm town never much bigger than 160 or so residents. In 1926, 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 would eke 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, Robert Earl started coughing fiercely and persistently, a sign of whooping cough. With no remedy available, the family could just wait 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. The boy had been healthy, except for that old case of the whooping cough. The doctor determined that the coughing 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.
The next year, Robert Earl went to first grade, at a one-room schoolhouse several miles from his family's farm. His weight made the walk laborious, but he enjoyed school.
There, the sociable boy liked the interaction with kids, far more than he would typically see around his farmhouse in the sticks. Over time, the other youths rarely teased him; from the start, Robert Earl had been oversized, so his weight was no big deal.
Further, Robert Earl loved his studies, especially reading. Facts naturally stuck in his head.
"His memory was amazing," recalls Mary Manley, 82, who grew up nearby.
Over the years, though, his burgeoning girth made those long walks to school exhausting and excruciating. By age 10, his weight hit 378 pounds, according to the scale at the general store. Those trips into town became something of a public spectacle, and word about the sizeable lad began to trickle through Pike, Adams and Brown counties.
Harry Manley, who lived near the Hughes home, would talk and visit with Robert Earl. Outsiders did not believe the young Manley's tales of the oversized boy.
"I took a lot of my friends to see him," says Manley, 84, now the husband of Mary Manley.
But when Harry and the other area lads played games or went fishing, Robert Earl could not join them. Nor did he ever get to ride a bicycle. Such activities were just too tiring.
TOMORROW: The world begins to learn about Robert Earl Hughes.