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Biographical Information

Basic Data

"On a hot summer night, some years ago during a violent thunder storm, in the second-floor bedroom of a red-brick row house there would occur an event that would shock the neighborhood. It was 10 o'clock and the first baby would emerge normal and weigh six pounds. Twenty minutes later in this dim room lit up only by the flashes of lightening and an open-jet gas burner, a second baby began to emerge; with more than half of it seemingly missing. This baby, with almost nothing below his rib cage- (a monster?) It weighed two pounds.
"These were the years that children were born at home, attended by midwives with neighbors helping out, and so it was that the room had a number of 'first viewers' on hand. Eager hands reached out and took up the normal baby; no one cared to touch the 'monster' or rather dared to even come near it, lying on the bed. And then, an elderly devout and wise woman bent over and said, 'My God, My God, this is a broken doll!' And that is what I appeared to be! I was less than eight inches in length. As my nurse stooped to pick me up and turned me toward the gas-jet, I was accidentally brushed against one of the neighbor women who let out a scream and fell in a faint to the floor."
(from Johnny Eck's own typewritten account, published in Pandemonium)

The date was August 27, 1911. Johnny's account is the only one we have of the event, and we must take it as written, although among Johnny's multiple congenital anomalies we might count a tongue perhaps permenently imbedded in his cheek. Johnny was a story teller. In the spirit of P.T. Barnum, Johnny was given to embelishment. Protective of his privacy, Johnny was also wont to give flippant or bogus answers to what he considered prying questions. We enter Johnny's world on Johnny's terms.
The working-class family living in the rowhouse at 622 N. Milton Avenue in Baltimore had a single child already, a 12-year-old girl named Caroline. And of the two sons born into that family, it was not the older, healthy baby, the one expected to live and to carry on the family name, that was named after his father. It was the second, younger son, the fraction of a baby who nobody really expected to survive, who was given that honor. John Eckhardt, Jr. later wrote, "It was as if God had chosen that family for me to be born into."
Amelia Dippel Eckhardt was devoted to her sons, although they surely turned the poor woman's hair prematurely gray. As a child, Johnny dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer. Amelia would carry him across Monument Street over to the Eager Street railroad tracks, where Johnny would contentedly lie on the hot gravel, watching the trains go by and imagining how wonderful it would be to stand at the controls of the iron horse, to be free, to be going places. Later, he would ride the rails all over the continent. But in the mean time, this affectionate soul and his partner in crime, "brother Robert," would prove a tad too independent and fiesty for their mother's nerves.

"One cold day in December, 1923, Robert and I were invited to see a big magic show to be held in the auditorium of a church. Any time church was mentioned, our dear mother would be over-joyed. She would go along with us this fateful day. I must add that the audience would be make up of poor and also crippled children, and of course I already passed that test. We were very poor, and of course, poorly but neatly dresssed. Though in winter, brother Robert was wearing patched up knickers, long black stockings with holes in the knees and cheap tennis shoes. I had on a tiny pale-blue sweater with the elbows out and the bottom beginning to unravel. Our mother gave us a firm warning: 'Keep under cover and don't let people see you two!' She also said she'd be watching our every move.
"The first shock she received was when the Great Magician asked for a volunteer assistant to come up on the stage. There was a great shuffle of feet and a clatter of crutches, canes and sticks and braces from the audience. None could leave their seats or attempt to climb the run-way steps to the stage. One brave soul did however; my twin brother Bob. I thought I heard a steam pipe burst. It was steam alright. It was our mother. There stood Bob on stage under a spotlight looking like a scarecrow right out of a corn field.
But the show moves on quite smoothly until the magician tears a large sheet of paper and it turns into a 'lace table cloth.' The magician invites anyone to come to the stage and get it -- free. Once more there was shuffling of feet, rattling of crutches, canes and sticks. And suddenly a lone figure darts out from the audience and swoops right up on the stage, standing on one hand and reaching up with the other; gratefully accepted the prize! The figure sitting down to roll up the table cloth seemed to go right through the floor of the stage, and then taking the paper in his teeth, returned to his seat. The audience went wild; they applauded, they screamed; hadn't they just witnessed an extra added attraction -- a monster? Our poor mother fainted."

The magician was a John McAslan, who was to become the bane of Johnny's existence.

"All he could do was look at me and for a full five minutes -- gasp. Then he started to sweet-talk; I was a God-send to our family. He would put me on the stage! That stage would turn out later to be a six-inch pile of hay, covered over by an old worn green piece of carpet, in a pit show in a rag-bag carnival."

"Well," Johnny recalled, "the first performance I put on I was a little bit shy. And THEN, when I saw neighbors, people in the same block that came in to the tent, the exhibition, to see me, I felt like a fool! Jesus, I couldn't even look 'em in the face, I had to look at the ground." But, Johnny said, he was able to overcome his "bashfulness."

Johnny had a love/hate relationship with McAslan, and his stories of his treatment at McAslan's hands vary widely, depending upon their context. Although in his autobiogrphy Johnny describes being displayed in a shabby pit show, he tells a different story when interviewed.

"I gotta give it to the man; he was good there. He did get a big tent and he was always boostin' me up. Now the banners that we had out front -- like a circus sideshow? He got the biggest ones he could. They were ten feet high and twenty feet long, and colored. They were BEAUTIFUL. And of course they had me." One thing is known for certain, though. McAslan, or one of his partners, had typed up the contract with the term -- 1 year -- written only in a number, and not spelled out. It was a simple matter to add a 0 to the 1 and a "s" to "year" to make Johnny's family belive he was bound for a decade. Poor and trusting, the parents had signed the contract which was to haunt Johnny for a decade.

For his part, Johnny seemed to take to the sideshow like a fish to water, and from the beginning he was not merely displaying his unusual body; he was giving the tip an ACT. "I like animals. He gave me two damn white cats, and a cage full of white mice and rats. He said, 'Now here -- you train 'em.' And I DID. Man, I'd make them rats jump on little chairs and tables ... and the crowd, they loved it. Ha! And up on the banner out front I was called 'THE GREAT JOHNNY ECK ... THE HALF-MAN (or quarter man) WITH HIS UPSIDEDOWN TRAINED CATS AND RATS.'"

"Robert and I are now fourteen yars of age, and having tasted the nectar of traveling from one town to another and untold adventure, we both knew our lives would never be the same."

Johnny told an interviewer that his parents planned for him to become a typist. But, "When I saw those tents, that was the end of sitting at a desk for me. God, how I loved to get out under those big tents. I loved the animals, and I loved camping out. Rob and me, we'd go over to the horse barn and get the sweetest smelling hay for a bed, and we'd sit up late and shoot the breeze with some of the most wonderful people in the world. I met hundreds of thousands of people, and none finer than the midgets and the Siamese twins and the caterpillar man and the bearded woman and the human seal with the little flippers for hands. Inever asked them any embarrassing questions and they never asked me, and God, it was a great adventure." Johnny, as the saying goes, had sawdust in his blood. As a youth, he no doubt believed he would go out horizontal -- work the sideshows until he breathed his last breath. And it could be this expectation, that Johnny Eck's spectacular single-o would always be able to roll into town and put on a show -- that doomed Johnny and Rob to poverty every bit as much as McAslan's duplicity. Johnny and rob cast all their eggs into one basket in 1924.

"We bought a show business magazine called The Billboard and checked the route section. Off went a letter with a list of what we needed to put on our own side show. Three days later we receive a wire: Johnny and Bob Eck, Baltimore, Md. 'Join us Plainfield New Jersey next week.' Signed 'Captain John M. Sheesley'.... Our parents were now more than happy to give us their blessing and let us go. Captain Sheesley would have a crew at the station with a big truck to greet us and take us back to the show grounds. There we would find a brand new tent and a four-ton empty circus wagon, painted Chinese-red trimmed in gold and with the biggest artillery-type wheels I had ever seen. At times it would take double teams of heavy draft horses to move it off the lot.

This is where it ends for now. More to follow

Because Johnny's actual grave is in his old East Baltimore neighborhood, described by many as "a war zone," I have established a Virtual Memorial for Johnny.

(Photo credit: Jeff Gordon Collection, Baltimore, MD.) See who else is buried in the same cemetery as Johnny and Rob at Find-A-Grave

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