Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 December 1881 — The Boss Boy. [ARTICLE]

The Boss Boy.

Evansville Journal. A man giviug his rameas A. Castleman, from Casey county. Kentucky, was at the St. Cloud hotel yesterday with his family, one member of which is certainly a striking curiosity. This is a boy only three years and two and yet he stands three feet four inches high in his stocking feet, measures sixteen inches around the calf of his leg, twentyrsix inches around the thigh, forty-two inches around the waist, thirty-eight inches around the chest, and weighs one hundred and thirty pounds. The child, his father says, weighed but nine pounds at its birth, but al six months had increased to forty-nine pounds, and then jumped at rapid stages to its present enormous bulk. The child is bright enough, although physicians have counseled his parents not to tax him at all closely with mental eflbrt. Physically, although so huge for his age,he is sound and healthy,am] makes what might be called a waddling effort at a romp. Yesterday, when the reporters for the press visited him, he was found lying flat on his face on the floor eating peanuts, which h|s father, sitting on the sofa, fed to him playfully as if he had been a pig.* He devoured the nuts eagerly, though he looked the while like he would burst. When clucked to get up, he obeyed, after scpAm bling around for a moment or two to get a foot-hold, and when bantered to beat his lather to a hoop, which was rolled across the room in snort, he started off shaking like an agitated stand of jelly, and when he caught it first, as of course he was permitted to do, he .enjoyed bis triumph very much. Castleman and his wife, though both of them are of good size, are neither of them large, and cannot remember any ancestor from whom their prodigious boy could have inherited his extraordinary proportions. They have another child, an infant girl three months old, but giving no Evidence of following in her brother’s footsteps. Castleman has been exhibiting hiason at the county fairs through Kentucky.and proposes co exhibit him here.