The biography below is unfinished -- fitting, I suppose, since Johnny's own
autobiography was unfinished. Unlike Johnny, I plan to finish what I've started
here. To learn the rest of the story, visit the
Virtual Memorial for Johnny.
And join the mailing list for
updates on changes a the site. Much is in the works -- don't miss it.
"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."
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.'"
"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."
"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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