Paul's father-in-law, Harry Wilson, met Jack Earle while traveling around the country (he was the personal piano-tuner for Ossip Gabrilovitsch, the Polish conductor who founded Orchestra Hall in Detroit, Michigan). Jack became a good friend of the family, and visited whenever he was in Detroit.

Mini biography

Jack Earle (birth name Jacob Ehrlich, nicknamed Texas Giant) weighed only four pounds at birth and was so tiny that doctors feared he wouldn't live. But immediately, he began to grow at an incredible rate and by age ten was over six feet tall. He was discovered by Hollywood as a teenager and offered a job acting in comedies. He made over fifty of them, until one day on the set when he fell from a scaffolding. When he woke up, he found he was losing his peripheral vision, due to a newly-discovered pituitary gland tumour. Doctors attempted to shrink the tumor with X-rays which miraculously both restored his sight and stopped his incredible growth. He enrolled in college, during which he went to see the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus where he saw Jack (Jim) Tarver, billed as 'the tallest man in the world'. He joined the Barnum Bailey Circus in the mid-20s, traveled with them for fourteen years, and played in about nine movies, mainly comedy like Hansel and Gretel (1923) and Jack and the Beanstalk (1924). Upon retiring from the circus, Jack became a successful traveling salesman and was intensely creative. He painted, sculpted, was a prize-winning photographer and a poet. He even published a book of poetry called The Long Shadows.

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Jack Earle
the Texas Giant
 

Paul with Ringling Brothers Circus giant,
Jack Earle !
Taken in 1937