Would love to have seen this third degree!

Here's a tale from Atlas Obscura about the world's tallest man who was also a Freemason and had made for him the biggest ever Mason's finger ring.

Robert Wadlow at a family picnic at Roodhouse circa 1939. (Photo: Alton Museum of History & Art)

This story was sponsored by the fine folks of Enjoy Illinois.

Robert Wadlow was born in 1918 as an unremarkably sized baby and died 22 years later, in 1940, as the world's tallest man. He was 8 feet 11.1 inches when he died. To this day, no one has been known to grow taller. 

As a kid, Wadlow could simply wear adult clothes, but as he kept growing, conveniences designed for people of average height no longer served his needs. And of all the practical problems that confronted Wadlow during his life, the ones that attracted the most attention involved his hands and his feet.

Living in western Illinois, not far up the river from St. Louis, Wadlow had reached 6 feet tall by the time he was eight years old. As a teenager, heading towards 8 feet tall, he had to duck his head through doorways. At a restaurant, he had to stretch his legs straight through to the other side of the table. By the time he was an adult, he needed a bed specially made to fit his whole body, and a giant chair to keep him comfortable.

A St. Louis event promo. (Photo: Alton Museum of History & Art)

But shoes were a particular challenge for Wadlow. He quickly outgrew the normal size chart, and newspaper reporters were fascinated both by the size of his shoes and their cost. In 1928, he wore triple E size 21 shoes that cost $30 a pair, the United Press reported. In 1931, a health columnist reported that his size 25 shoes cost $50. In 1933, he was up to size 31, at $84 a pair.

By 1936, a shoe company had signed him up as a spokesperson in exchange for keeping him in footwear: each pair of shoes, the company told the Milwaukee Sentinel, cost $200 to make, because the leather needed to be reinforced with metal.

Part of the fascination with these shoes was their incredible cost. In 1936, smack in the middle of the Great Depression, $200 was an incredible amount, about the equivalent of $3,500 today, to spend on shoes. But the shoes themselves were treated as a spectacle, too. When Wadlow traveled across the country to promote his shoe sponsor, he would sometimes leave pairs behind for people to gawk at.

One of Wadlow's very, very large shoes (Photo: Doug Coldwell/Wikimedia CC-BY-SA 3.0)

As a consequence, those shoes are some of the few of Wadlow's possessions that are still around. When he died, of an infection that started in his leg, his family took care that neither his body nor his stuff would be paraded around as curiosities. They burned most of his possessions and buried him in a huge casket, sealed in a concrete vault. Since the world's previous tallest man had arranged with his friends to sink his body into the sea, only to have it sold to an enterprising scientist for 500 British pounds, this was not an unreasonable precaution.

Wadlow's mother, in particular, "was really reluctant to make a spectacle of him," says Brian Combs, a board member of the Alton Museum of History and Art, which today has the world's largest collection of Wadlow memorabilia. The museum aims to respect that desire, by "displaying what items we have in our museum with pride and dignity," as the collection's website puts it.

There are some oddities in the museum (a 14 foot gourd with Wadlow's face painted on it, a cast of his jaw), but also some of Wadlow's possessions: eight pairs of shoes, his graduation gown, his guitar case, tennis racquet and camera.

If Wadlow's shoes attracted attention during his life, more recently, it is an ornament he wore on his finger that has become the object of fascination. To understand how big his hands were, consider this. His camera was a normal-sized camera, and the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that he used to take pictures secretly, by concealing the camera in his hand and letting the lens sneak between his giant thumb and forefinger.

From a photo taken in 1939: Wadlow's hand (Original photo: The Telegraph)

In 1939, not long before he died, Wadlow joined the local Freemason lodge and was made a masonic ring. It's widely reported that this was the largest Freemason ring ever made.

That's "very likely true," says Combs. "As far as I know it is."

At the very least, it was a very large Freemason ring—size 25. The museum has a replica, made by the same shop as the original. "We like to illustrate it with a silver piece—with a half dollar in the middle," says Combs.

Lonely lodge needs buyer

This former lodge building in Bolton needs a new owner and is on the market for £650,000.

It is part of a list of 100 historic but crumbling buildings that require some TLC. It is an 1830s Grade II listed building with two large ballrooms, bars, lounges and kitchens.

The list was compiled by Save Britain's Heritage Group.

The number's up for this train spotting Mason

From the Daily telegraph...

Railway book and magazine publisher who drove the post-war schoolboy craze for trainspotting

Ian Allan 

Ian Allan, who has died the day before his 93rd birthday, triggered the post-war explosion of trainspotting as a British pastime by publishing the first booklet of engine numbers in 1942 and starting a club which had 230,000 members by the time steam gave way to diesel. He diversified the business to embrace magazines, bookshops, a travel agency, a Masonic publisher, a printing business, organic garden supplies, commercial property and car dealerships.

ADVERTISING

Allan was 20, and a 15s-a-week clerk with the Southern Railway, when he published the ABC of Southern Railway Locomotives in response to calls from enthusiasts for information. Management declined to publish it, but allowed Allan to do so at his own risk.

The first 2,000 copies of the shilling booklet sold out in days. Further ABCs on the Great Western, LNER and LMS railways, and London buses, trams and trolleybuses, went like hot cakes, friends and neighbours helping to distribute them.

It had not occurred to Allan that “bagging” the locomotives he listed would take off as a hobby. But within weeks, knots of schoolboys armed with his booklet appeared at the end of station platforms, and in 1943 he and his colleague (and future wife) Mollie Franklin launched the Ian Allan Loco-spotters’ Club.

By 1951 it had 150,000 members, and by 1956 when the London Midland Region ABC sold a record 250,000 copies, nearly that many. Branches mushroomed and special excursion trains were run. Out of this activity grew the travel business.

Spotters had to sign a pledge “not to interfere with railway working or trespass on railway property” on pain of expulsion from the club. In the deferential post-war years it was largely adhered to – though unruly scenes on Preston station in 1951 led to spotters being banned there. By 1964, however, Allan was lamenting that “mods and rockers” had infiltrated the club.

^{Trainspotters at Newcastle Station, August 1950 (SSPL/NMeM/Daily Herald Archive)}

While railways remained a national obsession, spotting – and sales of ABCs – declined as steam gave way to diesel. Allan anticipated this, and in 1962 formed the Ian Allan group with its headquarters beside the terminus of the Shepperton branch line – with the boardroom a Pullman car once used by King George VI.

In 1946 he had founded Trains Illustrated (today the industry “bible” Modern Railways). He became a large-scale publisher of railway books and launched numerous other magazines, among them Buses Illustrated, Tramways and Urban Transit, Model Railway Constructor, Aircraft Illustrated, Combat Aircraft and Hornby Magazine. He went on to acquire the Oxford Publishing Company (1998), Midland Publishing and Midland Counties Publications (1999), and, in 2002, Classic Publications. The rail magazine business was sold in 2012.

In 1967 a political row erupted when the British Rail chairman Sir Stanley Raymond sacked Gerry Fiennes, the entrepreneurial general manager of the Eastern Region, after Allan published his book I Tried To Run a Railway. In it, Fiennes revealed in alarming detail the lengths to which the BR hierarchy would resort to stifle enterprise and drive away business. Twelve years later another of Allan’s publications sparked controversy: a book by Stanley Hall, BR’s retired safety officer, warning that cost-cutting had put rail safety at risk.

One of Allan’s aviation titles “scooped” the national press. Sqn Ldr Eric Annal’s Harrier and Sea Harrier (1984) revealed how during the Falklands conflict experts at Farnborough and Marconi had invented and supplied a “black box” radar jammer to protect the aircraft in 15 days, when such an innovation would normally have cost four times as much and taken two years to develop. An enthusiastic Freemason, Allan could not resist the opportunity to acquire, in 1986, A Lewis, publishers of books on Masonic ritual and the quarterly The Square. He also took on a Surrey fertiliser business, Chase Organics, and through it a stake in (and ultimately control of) a local motor dealership, which grew to five garages in the south of England.

Ian Allan was born on June 29 1922, at Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, the son of George Allan, clerk to the school, and the former Mary Barnes. He would become a governor of the Hospital in 1944 and an almoner there from 1960-89, yet he was educated at St Paul’s.

^{A young trainspotter examining a Battle of Britain Class locomotive at the Southern Region British Railways Works at Eastleigh (Getty)}

At 15 Ian lost a leg following a camping accident during exercises with the OTC, and this seemed to limit his career opportunities. Already a railway enthusiast (and regular visitor to the signal box at Christ’s Hospital station), he left school when war broke out to join the Southern’s staff at Waterloo. He helped to produce the company’s magazine and handle enquiries from the public – and increasingly from enthusiasts.

As soon as the war ended, he left the Southern – who were by now paying him £3 a week – and founded Ian Allan Ltd, taking over a bomb-damaged office in Vauxhall Bridge Road with a colleague and a typist; his father soon joined as financial director. In 1951 he moved the business to Hampton Court, removing the need to commute.

Allan bought the Hastings Miniature Railway with friends in 1948, going there whenever he felt the “need for steam”. In the 1960s he acquired the Great Cockcrow miniature railway near Chertsey on the death of its founder. When British Rail at the end of steam banned steam-hauled excursions using privately owned locomotives, he led an ultimately successful campaign for their return.

As the railway preservation movement grew, Allan took an active part. He became president of the Main Line Steam Trust (Great Central Railway), vice-president of the Transport Trust and the Heritage Railways Association, chairman of the Association of Independent Railways and the Dart Valley Railway, and patron of the Mid-Hants Railway. From 1982 to 1984 he served on the Transport Users’ Consultative Committee for London.

Had Ian Allan not fallen into publishing, he had thought of becoming a hotelier and in 1969 he purchased the picturesque Broadway Hotel in Worcestershire, followed by the Mansion House Hotel in Evesham. He chaired the governors of King Edward’s School, Witley, and was treasurer of Bridewell Royal Hospital. He was appointed OBE in 1995.

He married Mollie Franklin in 1947. She and their two sons survive him.

Ian Allan, born June 29 1922, died June 28 2015