ep11 final uniq

Alton, Illinois, 19 July 1940: a coffin ten feet nine inches long is too big for the hearse, it takes twelve pallbearers and eight more men to carry it, and the family has the vault sealed with concrete so that nobody can ever dig him up. Eighteen days earlier, doctors had measured the man inside at 8 feet 11.1 inches. He was 22, and he had never stopped growing. Robert Pershing Wadlow was born in Alton on 22 February 1918, an ordinary baby of about eight and a half pounds. This is the story of what happened next: thirty pounds at six months and five and a half feet in kindergarten; the overactive pituitary gland found at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis; the world's tallest Boy Scout, the turnstile at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and the car with no front seat; the Ringling Brothers center ring, where he refused the top hat and tails and never stood in the sideshow; Dr. Charles Humberd's 1937 article that called him "surly" and the $100,000 libel suit he lost in 1939; 300,000 miles and 800 towns for the International Shoe Company in size 37AA shoes; and the badly fitted leg brace in Manistee, Michigan, in July 1940 that rubbed a blister he could not feel. Where the sources disagree (his weight at death, 439 or 490 lb; the coffin, over 1,000 or 855 lb; the number of pallbearers and mourners; his shoe size) we say so. Some scenes are historical reconstructions. Chapters 0:00 Cold open: Alton, 1940 1:19 I. Monroe Street 3:14 II. The Tallest Scout 5:05 III. The Center Ring 6:27 IV. The Doctor at the Door 8:18 V. Three Hundred Thousand Miles 10:16 VI. Manistee 11:42 VII. At Rest