January 18, 2010
Right about now, I'm predicting our Production Manager, Robert Ray is rolling his eyes. Here's why: I conceived of the "Size Matters" as a tidbit. Gave a long speech last Friday to Robert and Abby on how we need to develop these stand-alone, sidebar, partial page deals so that they could easily be put onto an existing page and enhance our issues with added value. Get in and get out. Simple and clean. Don't overwork it.

Well, since I've posted this Size Matters work in progress, I began to get excited about the prospects for a larger piece. For example, I came back from lunch with this photo:

A casual observer might note that the guy on the left, Dennis Weaver, is a little runt of a guy. Well, this really illustrates the phenom of Size Matters because, as we all know, Mr. Weaver is a six footer. The reason he looks so diminutive is because the guy he's standing next to is Matt Dillon (James Arness) arguably the tallest Western star ever at six foot seven! Amazing.

From there I began to wonder if this warrants an entire feature, perhaps even a cover story:

Or, perhaps we show the twin towers: Clint and Duke looming, and then we have a really short guy on a box, between them, shouting, "Get back in the ditch! Come back! Get in the ditch! I'm Shane!" (Alan Ladd, as Shane was so short—five two?—that many times film crews had to dig ditches for taller actors to walk in, next to Ladd, and, legend says, he often had to stand on a box to romance his taller female co-stars (almost everyone). It must have been awful for Mr. Ladd in his private life. I remember when he came to Kingman to film The Badlanders, the local scuttlebutt was that he got in fights at the El Trovatore Bar because locals were constantly making fun of his smallness. It's hard for me to believe that someone from Kingman could be that rude and cruel.

That's a joke.

Someone who historically was even smaller is Mr. Cannibal Alfred Packer:

I need to confirm this but I think Packer was five foot, that's tall, not the number he ate.

Conversely, I read somewhere that real tall guys are often very self conscious because all their life people have admonished them ("Hey, pick on someone your own size!"), or mocked them ("How's the weather up there?"). FYI: Dan the Man Harshberger is six foot three, Charlie Waters is also. I'm six one at night, and six foot in the afternoon.

Anyway, there is the long and the short of it. Now you know why Robert Ray is rolling his eyes. Can you really blame him?

“Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well, and bring to a boil.”
—Bernard Baruch