Clarence Dale "The Big Head Boy"

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Lindsey Birdseye, aka Clarence Dale, was born in Texas around 1882, and was first exhibited in about August 1890 by a manager named Davis as a 6-year-old in Buffalo at The Wonderland Museum: "To open the season Wonderland proposes to show the worst case of big head on record. The disease is not uncommon, but such a case as Clarence Dale is really unique. The boy...weighs 83 pounds while his head weighs 45 pounds. It is plain to be seen that his head is a great Dale too big for his body. Notwithstanding the fact that he wears a 40-3/4 hat, the boy is intelligent." Bad pun aside, the description is extraordinary........At The Fifth Avenue Museum in Pittsburgh, in October 1890 Dale is examined by doctors, where his case is supposedly not hydrocephaly, as: "the skull is healthy and hard as other skulls are. The boy is intelligent, has a most pleasant appearance, and converses on most any subject, and is a musician of skill, playing well on a number of instruments."....................Clarence was also managed early in his career by soon-to-be world famous magician and illusionist "The Great Lafayette," who met him as they both played dime museums. On April 12, 1891 Clarence's life was saved by Lafayette along with the albino Zola Lorenzo, the Fat Woman Mme. Carver, and her son the midget General Willis Carver when a huge fire broke out in Chicago's Kohl & Middleton Museum......................In November 1896 Clarence was making one of his many return performances at Huber's Fourteenth Street Museum in New York when he was described thusly: "Master Dale is a freak of nature whose like has never been seen. His head measures forty-eight inches in circumference. He is positively uncanny. He has a penetrating glance and a thoughtful manner, wears glasses and does not ride a bicycle." Newspaper writers in the Nineteeth-Century seem to have a thing for the odd humorous detail. Held over for a second week, the New York Herald reporter remarks "He is said to be occasionally given to the cracking of jokes, which would seen to be in startling defiance of the adage, 'Big head, little wit'".........Sadly, the last we hear of Clarence is in October 1900 when he is taken from a "gypsy camp" in Waverly, NJ to Elizabeth Hospital in NY. We are told he is now 18 years old, and that he had lost the use his limbs when he was 16 and they were now ossified. Six months earlier he had lost his sight: "A succession of fits he had on Monday night scared his gypsy custodians, and they took him to the hospital. He has only one sister living in Burlington, Iowa. If he recovers he will be sent to his sister. His mother has deserted him." It is unknown whether Clarence ever recovered.

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