Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers with Robert Wadlow
(Music: "A Rag" from the 1935 Sons of the Pioneers' Standard Transcriptions)
Robert Pershing Wadlow (1918 - 1940)
(Photo courtesy of the Roy Rogers Family Trust)
This photo was taken at the Texas Centennial in 1936 when Robert Pershing Wadlow was 18 years old. In the picture he is holding Bob Nolan's standing bass and playing it like a "guitar". He died four short years later at 22. He was 8 feet and 11 inches tall and 439 pounds. (Bob Nolan, standing like a child beside him, is 6 feet tall in his boots.) At this time Robert was enrolled in college, intending to study law. He was the tallest recorded human being to date. He was born of average sized parents but his pituitary gland was producing an abnormally high level of growth hormone. He still hadn't reached his full growth when he died of blood poisoning from an infected blood blister.