WALKING TALL : Being Head and Shoulders Above the Rest Is a Big Job, Say Those Who Have Risen to the Challenge

We take you now to the home of Orange County’s tallest family.

Skeptical?

Mom’s the runt. She’s 6-foot-1.

Sis answers the door. She’s 6-foot-9.

Then there’s kid brother. He measures 7 feet, 1 inch. Dad and older brother each come in at 6-foot-9.

Maybe, just maybe, Gary and Karen Waikle’s Mission Viejo family is not absolutely, positively the tallest family in Orange County. But the results aren’t necessarily final.

“I think I’m still growing,” advises the 18-year-old 7-foot-1 Jim Waikle.

Being tall is generally associated with other admirable traits--as in tall, dark and handsome. Big and strong. Someone to look up to. Bigger and better.

But for tall people, especially the very tall and those who became very tall very early, life isn’t always a bed of long-stemmed roses.

UC Irvine ombudsman Ron Wilson, who is 6-foot-7 himself, recalls a painful youth.

“You want to be like all the other kids,” Wilson says. But for a very tall child, taunts and cruel jokes are counted among growing pains.

Tall is not acne. Tall is not a bad haircut or crooked teeth. Skin can clear up. Hair grows back. Teeth can be straightened.

But every day a tall child wakes up, he’s still tall. Some days, he’s even taller.

“And if you don’t have clothes to fit you, it makes you stand out even more,” Wilson says. “I always had hand-me-downs that didn’t fit.”

There was not always enough money for new clothes for the six children in the Wilsons’ Bronx, N.Y., household. Consequently, Ron Wilson often wore his father’s clothes.

“To this day my toes curl in” from wearing his father’s shoes, Wilson complains. His father is just 5-foot-9 or 5-foot-10, average by national standards. His mother was a Lilliputian 4-foot-9. Being tall “used to be a real hang-up, (including) the stereotype of tall, black and coming from the city streets,” says Wilson, who is black. “My biggest hang-up was the stereotype (that) you’ve got to play basketball.

“I am not a basketball player,” Wilson stresses with an obviously practiced inflection.

The Waikle family, however, is chock-full of basketball players. Moreover, the Waikles’ two sons reached Wilson’s height by the time they were in ninth grade.

Lounging in their Mission Viejo living room, the carpet strewn with seemingly endless legs, the Waikles talked recently about being tall in a world where, as Gary puts it, “the principal disadvantage is that everything is built for the so-called average person. There’s nothing built for us.”

Karen answered the next question as she must have answered it a thousand times before. “We knew our children would be tall; I just didn’t expect them to be as tall as they are.

“We measured them when they were small to calculate their eventual height. Girls are to be measured at 18 months, boys at 2 years.”

Based on those calculations, the Waikles’ 20-year-old daughter Connie should have stopped growing at 6-foot-2. Jim and his 20-year-old brother, John, were expected to reach only 6-foot-5.

“So much for that,” says Jim, not only the tallest Waikle but also Orange County’s tallest high school basketball player.

“There isn’t a day that goes by,” Connie says, “that someone doesn’t come up and ask me how tall I am (or) do I play basketball. Every single day.”

As a matter of fact, she does play basketball at San Diego State University. Her father played in high school and college, but he says now, “I didn’t see the opportunities I had as clearly as I did for my kids.”

Indeed, one reason the Waikle family moved to Mission Viejo from Orange was to allow the sons to play at Capistrano Valley High School, where “we’d heard a lot about the basketball program,” Karen says.

It’s no secret that there can be lucrative careers for the very few of the very tall who go on to play professional basketball. The thought has occurred to Jim.

To succeed, however, one first must be noticed. And if being tall means anything, it means “you never go unnoticed in life,” Karen says.

Adds Jim: “My (high school) coach noticed me when I first came down here. I didn’t even have to try out. He took me right off the street.”

Spotting a tall person in a crowd of average-size folks is easy, mostly because 84.5% of American males are shorter than 6 feet, according to figures compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics in Washington. And 99.29% of men are shorter than 6-foot-4. The average height for men is 5 feet, 9 inches; for women, it is 5 feet, 3 or 4 inches, depending on age.

However, the “concept of average height seems to be distorted upward, and 5-4 or 5-5 is now considered short” for women, according to Dr. David Mosier, UC Irvine professor of pediatrics and an expert in growth disorders.

Since the 1960s, there also appears to have been “an abrupt change in attitudes of girls concerning their bodies,” Mosier says.

Unlike 20 years ago, girls seem much less concerned about growing tall, he says. Also, the number of physicians administering estrogen to retard children’s growth has declined.

“I gave it up completely myself,” Mosier says. “I just thought it was not entirely acceptable to practice that kind of cosmetic endocrinology.”

During the 1950s, when such growth-stunting practices were more common, Gail Foster of Sunset Beach and her sisters were among those treated “to keep us from being as tall as we might be.”

“It obviously didn’t work--or were you supposed to be 7-1?” teases Foster’s friend Vicki Kondzela, 40, a Corona del Mar school teacher.

Foster, a 38-year-old real estate broker, is 6-foot-3. And Kondzela is no squirt either. She’s 6-foot-1.

Both women belong to the Tall Club of Orange County. With 301 members and more than 200 others also attending its functions, it is one of the nation’s largest affiliates of Tall Clubs International. Pipsqueaks need not apply. Women must be at least 5 feet, 10 inches; men, 6 feet, 4 inches. The organization, which has 45 clubs in the United States and Canada, was founded 50 years ago by Kae Sumner Einfeldt, a 5-foot-10 Walt Disney Studios artist.

“People laugh, but we have to go try on cars like other people try on shoes,” Kondzela says.

“The funniest one was the Mustang. The top was down in the showroom and I got in it and it wasn’t too bad. My legs went fairly straight, and they didn’t bruise too bad at the bottom of the steering wheel.

“The man put the top up, and it came all the way down and completely covered my head and I made a bump in the top of it.

“I peeked out and said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be getting a Mustang, thank you.’ ”

Foster recalls the first time she realized she was taller than everyone around her.

“I was in Brownies . . . probably fourth or fifth grade,” she says. “I didn’t quite blend in. I was like Big Bird. I didn’t really enjoy Brownies.”

“That’s because they made Brownie uniforms for little kids this big,” Kondzela says, holding a hand about knee high.

“Did you ever go shop for your Brownie uniform?” Kondzela continues, wide-eyed. “Even the beanie was too small--pleeeeease!”

Kondzela is this year’s (Foster was last year’s) Miss Tall Orange County, an annual title bestowed on their club’s queen. Miss Tall also serves as ambassador for “tall awareness,” which may seem a curious cause, considering the visibility of their ilk.

But some tall people will tell you that it can be lonely at the top.

For many Tall Club members, the group is a means for them to discover they are not alone. Other tall people just like them have been experiencing the same agonies.

It was through the Tall Club that Kondzela realized “how difficult it’s been for all of us to find clothes, how tough it was to begin dating--all these common things that we share.

“I was the only really tall girl I ever knew. I thought the whole world was spent looking down at people and didn’t realize what a treat it was looking eyeball to eyeball.”

The club strives to prove that being tall need not be a downer. It can have an up side, so to speak.

“The first Tall Club event I went to was a dance,” Kondzela says. “I walked into this room and there were about 150 tall people and at least half of those were tall men.

“I went nuts. I felt like a kid in a candy store. I just thought: ‘Oh, my goodness. Look at all these wonderful tall men, and they are all here because they like tall women. This is marvelous.’ ”

Sharon Murray, 30, another Tall Club member, believes that being tall means “somehow you just command more respect by your stature.

“I think people assume we’re smarter and more aggressive and more assertive,” she says. “I think a lot of us are because of the things we have to deal with growing up.”

Kondzela believes tall women have “distinct advantages over ladies who are 5-2, blue-eyed, blond hair . . . because everybody wants to ‘honey-baby’ them and put them under their wing.

“That rarely is one of our problems.

“Being tall I found that I rarely have to lose my temper,” she says. “I rarely have to get confrontational. And that’s really nice.

“There’s a difference when you’re 6 feet tall and say: ‘I don’t think you should do that.’

“Somebody 5 feet tall hears that as: ‘ I don’t think you should do that! ‘ “

Although periodic surveys claim correlations between height and success in life, pediatrician Mosier remains skeptical.

“I think it is a misconception,” Mosier says. “I can find lots of examples of very short people who are very outstanding.”

His favorite example is 4-foot, 9-inch Joseph P. Strauss, the designer of the Golden Gate Bridge.

But 6-foot-9 Connie Waikle, a senior marketing major at San Diego State University, is undaunted by such talk. She hopes to capitalize on her height in the workaday world.

She recalls sage advice given her by a man who claimed his success was rooted in his own distinctive physical form.

“This man was very heavy,” she says. “He was telling me to use my height to its advantage.

“He said: ‘People remember me because I’m such a heavy man. They’ll remember you because you’re such a tall lady.’ ”

Nevertheless, Connie Waikle, who has dated mostly shorter men, wouldn’t mind being “a couple inches shorter--maybe 6-5.”

For that matter, “maybe a couple shoe sizes smaller. I wear size 13-14, and it’s almost impossible to find shoes.”