"Robert Earl fell into a muddy ditch and had to be pulled out with a tractor and belts by the town’s men."

Robert Earl Hughes was large of mind, heart and, unfortunately, body. Born in 1926, Hughes was a sweet-tempered Illinois country boy with uncanny mnemonic skills, who suffered from a malfunctioning pituitary gland, which caused him to grow larger and larger. As his weight gradually rose above the half-ton mark, he worked intermittently as a carnival attractiom, before dying at the young age of 32. Persistent rumors that he was buried in a piano case were unfounded. In “Heavy,” a Chicago magazine article, Robert Kurson recalls the man who became a prisoner to his ever-expanding flesh. An excerpt:

“Most Saturdays, the Hughes family would travel to the general store, where they would trade their farm goods for life’s essentials. When he was ten, Robert Earl stepped for the first time on the store’s platform scale, where the owner, Gerald Kurfman, added counterweights, then more counterweights, before announcing a reading of 378 pounds. Word spread to neighboring counties about the heavy lad in Fishhook. A doctor who came to examine Robert Earl told his parents that the boy would likely die by 15—that no heart could stand such stress. After that, Robert Earl avoided doctors whenever possible; he thought they were interested only in experimenting on him. While the Hughes family continued to visit the store, no one remembers Georgia watching Robert Earl’s calories or scolding him for coveting marshmallows or treating him differently in any way than she treated his brothers.

At school, Robert Earl leapfrogged his peers in reading and writing, and startled teachers with a memory that bordered on eerie. ‘If he read something or met someone, he would remember it forever,’ says Harry Manley, 77, who worked for a couple of years in the general store. ‘He only needed one time.’ Robert Earl sat in a specially constructed chair reinforced with wires. Every month that chair got tighter and tighter, and every month the boy seemed to get smarter and smarter, to know more about the world and its odd places with strange names. By 12, Kurfman had weighed him at 500 pounds, and Robert Earl had taken to carrying a gallon of milk and two loaves of bread to school every day for lunch. In the fifth grade, while walking home from school, Robert Earl fell into a muddy ditch and had to be pulled out with a tractor and belts by the town’s men. ‘It scared us all so terribly,’ recalls Gladys Still, a childhood friend who watched the rescue. Though the boy never spoke of dying, kids knew he wasn’t supposed to live long, and they remember that day as the first time they were scared for the life of their friend.” (Thanks Longform.)

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Robert Earl Hughes’ relations recall him: