Come See the Florida Fat Girl

My first encounter with Alpine Blitch happened by accident, in the reading room of the Garland County Historical Society.

I was there to research something else, the Government Free Bathhouse at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas¹; there was a folder in the society’s holdings with my subject as its title. No one could tell me what was in it, so I came to see for myself.

The folder contained a single item, a press clipping of a photograph that bore only a tangential relationship to my subject. It was a picture of a large woman—Miss Alpine Blitch of Miami, Florida, according to the caption—wearing a tent-like dress, her hands on her hips. She stood in front of a propped-up bathtub, demonstrating that it was too small for her. The caption explained that, upon visiting Hot Springs and discovering that she could not fit into the tubs at the ornate bathhouses, Blitch had petitioned for permission to use the free bathhouse, which was normally reserved for those too poor to pay. She explained the free bathhouse would suit her better because it had one large pool rather than individual tubs. And that was how she had ended up in my folder—an odd historical tidbit, but not helpful to my research.

Vertical File, “Bathhouses: Govt Free Bathhouse,” Garland County Historical Society, Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Alpine Blitch’s face, though, held me a moment longer. I couldn’t decide how to describe her expression. Was it haughty? Proud? Resigned? I was embarrassed on her behalf, imagining how it must have felt to find that she couldn’t fit in the tubs and then being forced to pose for this photograph. I thought about it all day.

When I returned to my motel that night, instead of typing up my research notes, I paid to access an online database of historical newspapers and searched for Alpine Blitch. The search returned far more than I had expected. She wasn’t just Alpine Blitch. She was Alpine Blitch, the Florida Fat Girl. A sideshow performer. 

A freak.

Only a handful of photographs of Alpine Blitch still exist, most of them in newspaper articles. One, though, resides in a wide-ranging photography collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The photograph shows a young woman, seated on two chairs that are facing each other. Blitch’s hands rest on the chair backs, and she gazes directly at the camera. Again, her expression is hard to read; it might be a grimace or a gentle smirk. It does not betray shyness or shame.

“Alpine Blitch, The Florida Fat Girl,” Peter E. Palmquist Collection of Photography and Photographic Formats, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Unversity.

Alpine Blitch’s dark hair is short and topped with a headband. Her arms are bare, and she wears a flouncy, shiny dress with ruffles and a lace collar. The dress is tugged up slightly over her left knee, displaying her voluminous leg. In fact, the whole portrait is arranged to best display Blitch’s size, from her bare arms to her short dress to her close-shorn hair. Blitch fills the frame, her straightforward posture and seated pose accentuating her girth. 

The photograph came from the studio of Frank Wendt, who was known for his images of freak-show and sideshow performers. The portraits he produced, printed on cards like this, were sold as souvenirs to sideshow patrons.²

The photograph was probably taken when Blitch was performing at Coney Island, sometime around 1912. On the back is a combination of printed and handwritten information. The printed information includes Blitch’s measurements and her “permanent residence,” Florida. Added by hand are Blitch’s age (20, likely a fabrication since census records suggest Blitch was born around 1884) and her hometown. Beneath that, the handwriting reads, “Alpine The Florida Fat Girl.” Alpine probably added these notes herself, given the fill-in-the-blank nature of the card’s printing. Selling and autographing cards might have helped her to break up the monotony of being on exhibit. Signing her name, making change—these may have been welcome distractions from the endless parade of gawkers.³

For many sideshow performers, these cards are among the few records we have. Alpine Blitch, as far as I can tell, didn’t leave anything else in an archive, nothing to tell me how she thought or felt. There are only newspaper articles chronicling her performances and exploits, and cards like this one, bought in a sideshow tent and carried off by a stranger.

The more I tried to understand Blitch’s life, the more frustrated I became. Old newspapers are treacherous for historians; they get details wrong or exaggerate for entertainment value, and it can be hard to know where the information came from. With Blitch, reporters treated her more like a character in a Paul Bunyan-esque tale than a real woman. Dates and ages were wrong—Blitch seems to have remained 20 years old for about twenty years—and her weight, though obviously large, ballooned to unlikely totals. Worse, there were large gaps in the coverage. A flurry of reports about Blitch might occur one year, and then nearly a decade would pass before she appeared in search results again. 

I do know some things about her. Alpine Blitch—her real name, though her friends and family called her Allie—grew up in Ocala, Florida. Her father was a farmer, and her family seems to have lived comfortably. Blitch’s career as a performer began at least by 1904, when she was on display at the South Florida Fair as the “Florida Fat Girl.”⁴ Three years later, she worked at a post office; one newspaper called her the “quarter-ton postmistress.” (Her father built a post office for her, perhaps to provide stable employment.) She traveled up and down the East Coast, exhibiting at fairs and carnivals. By 1912 her father had died and Alpine Blitch had moved to New York, where she performed at Coney Island and married a man named Louis Aiken.⁵ 

For the rest of her life, Blitch traveled around the country working for a variety of exhibitors, including the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, Johnny Jones, and Ruben and Cherry.⁶ By 1925 she was working with a man named E.V. McGarry, who served as her manager and eventually became her second husband; a few years later they settled in Miami but continued to tour.⁷ In 1932, at about 48 years old, Blitch died while on tour in Richmond, Virginia, either of the flu or of heart failure; there were conflicting reports. Newspapers across the country reported her death in articles like this one from the Indianapolis Star: “Alpine Blitch, whose picture has adorned many a side show banner above the caption ‘world’s fattest woman’ died here today. A trouper to the last, Alpine wise-cracked her way through last night’s performance and then went to bed. Early this morning she was found dead in her quarters on the Virginia state fairgrounds.”⁸

Indianapolis Star, Oct. 10, 1932.

As I tried to separate truth from embellishment, I winced at the language in the stories about Alpine Blitch. Early in her career, the Ocala Banner wrote how, “in making the trip from the hotel … it was with difficulty that a hack [hackney coach] was secured which was large enough to accommodate her.” Five years later, another paper called her “truly a monstrosity,” though it noted that she was “apparently in good health and does not seem to suffer very great discomfort on account of her immense weight.”⁹

The cruelty of the press followed her. Even when newspapers reported that Blitch was hospitalized with the flu in 1922, many couldn’t resist a jab at her weight: “Alpine Aiken … is better but the hospital authorities say that the bed springs are sinking fast.” Near the end of her life, Blitch was featured in the syndicated Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper column: “Alpine weighted [sic] 200 pounds at the age of three years, 400 at the age of 12, and even gained three pounds while ill with whooping cough.” The column, perhaps intending it as a compliment, noted that “the most remarkable thing about Alpine is that she has no double chin, despite her weight.”¹⁰

For most of her spectators, at the sideshow and in the press, Blitch was something less than human. She served as a reminder of the bounds of normal social expectations, and a warning for women who threatened to violate those expectations. (One column, narrating a family’s trip to the fair, claimed that, after Blitch smiled at them, their child shouted, “Oh, mamma … someday, if you keep on you will get as fat as that and perhaps Johnny Jones will give you a job.”) As reality TV does today, freak shows allowed visitors and readers to feel better about their own lives—at least, they could say, they weren’t like that.¹¹

The more I read about Alpine Blitch, the more I felt sorry for her. I imagined her picking up the newspaper, having to read such harsh words again and again. I wondered how she felt. Without anything from Blitch herself, though, I turned to what scholars had written about other sideshow performers.

What I found surprised me. Historian Robert Bogden described sideshows performers like Blitch as “shrewd, worldly, clever, and too adventurous to be confined to a single location, regular work hours, or the rest of the trappings of conventional life.” He and others pointed out how sideshow performers worked to create their characters and entice audiences. They staged “strikes” against sideshow owners to draw press coverage. They fashioned nicknames and brands. They put on spectacles, the freak show wedding being especially popular.¹²

Nashville Tennessean, Oct. 4, 1913.

The press coverage of Alpine Blitch’s wedding had been one of the things that made me most sick on her behalf. On August 16, 1912, Blitch married printer Louis Aiken, whom she had apparently met while on exhibit. The newspapers had a field day. One headline read, “Will Wed Whale This Afternoon.” Another reported that “Aiken fell in love with his bride at the third or fourth look. She was too big for him to see all at once, otherwise it would have been a love-at-first sight match.”¹³

The Times-News in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, was perhaps the most elaborate: “A 135 pound printer, who doesn’t stand more than 5 feet 3 in his stocking feet, took to himself 650 pounds—weigh ’em, 650—of bride today. The colossal knot was tied on the groaning floor of Borough Hall, Brooklyn, after a creaking, wheezing taxicab had brought the blushing couple thither. Miss Alpine Blitch, who gets a salary down at Coney Island for letting the public marvel at her stupendousness, was the bride, and Louis H. Aiken, of Springfield, Mass., was the printer who won her… As the bride and bridegroom started for their taxicab photographers advanced. Aiken flung up his hat to cover the bride’s face, but alas, it was not large enough.”¹⁴

Though the language was undoubtedly cruel, I began to read it differently. After all, if there were photographers ready when the couple emerged, it was likely they had been tipped off. A slew of newspaper stories that exaggerated her size and mentioned where she performed—they were undeniably great publicity.

Alpine Blitch was a larger-than-life character, and that was partly of her own making. When face-to-face with sideshow visitors, she played on their expectations to enhance her performance. One article related how she made a group of young boys “laug[h] out loud” after asking one of them “to let her sit on his lap.” Though this article meant for us to share in the boys’ alarm, we can also share in Blitch’s enjoyment of the performance, as she teased her audience rather than passively sitting in a tableau.¹⁵

I remembered the photograph that first introduced me to Blitch, in which she posed for the camera, standing next to a too-small tub. Had she gone to Hot Springs because she knew what would happen? I had been embarrassed for her, when maybe I should have been impressed by her marketing skill.

Freak is a complicated word. It connotes insurmountable difference, and it bites the tongue like a slur. In both scholarly and modern sideshow circles, though, many have sought to reclaim it. “Freak studies” (the study of sideshow performers and other outsiders whose bodies were displayed for entertainment) revolves around a central debate: are freaks exploited and abused, forced into a life of public display as the only means of survival? Or are they entrepreneurial souls, managing their images, profiting from others’ curiosity to make their own place in the world?¹⁶

The answer is clearer in some cases than others. Child freaks, for example, rarely had any say in their display. Deeply disfigured performers likely had little other choice to survive. For Alpine Blitch, though, it is harder to draw a conclusion. Her size would have limited her options, but she could have had another life. After all, she had a job as postmaster, a town that seemed to embrace her, and a family that cared for her. She seems to have chosen her life as a freak. 

Building on that inference, I can tell a story about how she managed her image, deftly expanded her fame, and manipulated people into parting with their cash. She traveled around the country, managed a career and supported herself, and enjoyed such events as a high-profile boxing match in Miami, where she was listed among the celebrities in attendance. In 1919, she traveled to Cuba to present at a circus exhibition.¹⁷ She even took flying lessons—which, although certainly designed as another publicity stunt, may have also been a personal thrill. Few women of that era had as varied a life as did Alpine Blitch.¹⁸

Miami News, Feb. 14, 1929.

This is not to say she was not exploited. Managers and sideshow owners took their cut. Being on the road for long stretches, away from home, was surely difficult at times. And despite her skilled management of her own image, Alpine Blitch did not get the final word. A few days after her death, the Baltimore Sun reported that Blitch’s “secret passion” had been to reduce her weight through surgery. A physician at Johns Hopkins confirmed that Blitch had scheduled the surgery, and her husband and manager E.V. McGarry concurred. True or not, it is striking that these men were comfortable discussing such private details, in an article that rather reads like an advertisement for weight-reduction surgery.¹⁹

Once more, the language was cruel—the doctor said that when Blitch arrived at the hospital, “they brought her in a truck” and “she waddled.” And now she was no longer around to craft the narrative. Assertions by men that Blitch was unhappy with her body drowned out whatever she might have had to say on the subject.

Alpine Blitch continues to elude me. I have sometimes felt like a sideshow patron, ushered into a dark tent, offered a peek that is somehow both tantalizing and overwhelming, and then hurried out. I am left asking myself what I have seen, and how I might try to explain it.

One of the great frustrations for a historian is that you can’t ask your subject for clarification or give them an opportunity for rebuttal. Historian Jill Lepore once observed that, for historians writing intimate histories of individuals, the fact that they “cannot interview their subjects makes many of them more, rather than less, anxious about betrayal.”²⁰ Without being able to ask Blitch how she viewed her own life, I worry that I am only doing more harm, subjecting her to the same kind of exploitation she experienced in life. No matter how I have rooted for her, followed her, or tried to understand her, I have never been able to shake the idea that I am just another member of her audience.

I have also been manipulated by what Blitch wanted me to see. There are suggestive hints and gaps in the archive; I know she was married twice, but I don’t know what happened to her first husband. People saw her off at the train station after visits home, but there is no way of knowing if these were friends or curious rubberneckers.²¹ I cannot access these aspects of her life. All that is left are her publicity stunts. For Blitch, I am merely another reader, held at arms’ length.

What would Blitch think of my plucking her from a file and thrusting her photograph before a new round of observers? I have subjected her body to more examination and analysis, attributed meanings to her body which have less to do with her than with those now viewing her. Would she hate me for reopening old wounds, subjecting her to more indignity? Would she be resigned, believing that her circumstances left her little choice?

Or would she smirk? This may, after all, be another public-relations coup for Alpine Blitch, the Florida Fat Girl.

1. Kathryn Carpenter, “‘Cesspools,’ Springs, and Snaking Pipes,” Technology’s Stories 7 (March 2019).
2. Robert Bogden, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 13.
3. Bogden, Freak Show, 15.
4. “A Florida Attraction,” Ocala Banner (FL), Oct. 28, 1904.
5. “Bloomingdale Improvements,” Tampa Tribune, Oct. 27, 1907; “Big and Little in Florida,” Deland News (FL), Nov. 12, 1909; “Fat Woman Weds Printer,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 16, 1912.
6. “Circus Lady out With ‘Flu’,” New York Tribune, April 15, 1922; “Miss Alpine Big Hit at the Show,” Greenville News (SC), April 6, 1923; “Rubin & Cherry Shows Breaking Midway Records,” Ithaca Journal (NY), Aug. 7, 1929.
7. “Alpine, Fattest Girl, Back Home,” Miami News, Nov. 29, 1931.
8. “‘World’s Fattest’ Woman Succumbs,” Indianapolis Star, Oct. 10, 1932.
9. “A Florida Attraction,” Ocala Banner, Oct. 28, 1904; “Big and Little in Florida,” Deland News, Nov. 12, 1909.
10. “Booze and Crime,” Brattleboro Daily Reformer (VT), April 19, 1922; “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” Tampa Times, Dec. 5, 1931.
11. “Wonders of Midway Thrill Youngsters at Fairgrounds,” Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 19, 1930; Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 7; Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 65.
12. Bogden, Freak Show, 83; David A. Gerber, “The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), esp. 39.
13. “Will Wed Whale This Afternoon,” Daily Gate City (IA), August 16, 1912; “In Funny Old New York,” Scranton Tribune-Republican, Aug. 22, 1912.
14. “135 Pound Man Takes Bridge Weighing 650,” Mauch Chunk Times-News (PA). Aug. 17, 1912.
15. “Star Carriers Visit Rubin, Cherry Shows,” Anniston Star (AL), April 14, 1931.
16. Robert Bogden argues for the agency of freaks, while David Gerber suggests that too much emphasis on agency ignores the way that such performers navigated a sharply limited set of choices. Bogden, Freak Show, 83; David A. Gerber, “‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows,” 48.
17. Alpine Aiken passport application (1919), U.S. Passport Applications: 1795-1925, Passport Applications: January 2, 1905–March 31, 1925; Roll 0955, Image 96, Ancestry.com, accessed Feb. 26, 2020.
18. “Largest Girl Takes to Air in Plane Here,” Miami News, Feb. 14, 1929; “Jack Sharkey Defeats Stribling in Unimpressive Match,” Coshocton Tribune (OH), Feb. 28, 1929.
19. “‘World’s Fattest’ Girl Looked to Hopkins to Cut Title Away,” Baltimore Sun, Oct. 11, 1932.
20. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 137.
21. ”Morriston,” Tampa Tribune, March 18, 1917.