Club Celebrates 52 Years of Filling a Tall Order

Usually members of the California Tip Toppers favor T-shirts with such slogans as “No, I don’t play basketball. Do you play miniature golf?”

But Friday night, the members of the world’s first tall club will put on their extra-long tuxedos and spike heels to celebrate the 52nd anniversary of their founding by a 6-foot-3 woman who worked at Disney Studios, helping to animate “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

As Bob De Lyser, the club’s president, explains, California Tip Toppers was founded in 1938 by artist Kae Sumner, who that same year wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times magazine about the tribulations of being tall and female.

“Do you suppose I very often have the pleasure of dancing with a man cheek to cheek?” Sumner asked. “Oh, no! It’s chin to cheek. My chin. . . his cheek.”

Sumner invited others similarly menaced by low-slung chandeliers and the umbrellas of the average-sized to contact her. “We could form a longfellows’ club,” she suggested. On May, 1, 1938, she and eight other people who were sick of being called “Shorty” did just that.

Today there are more than 50 tall clubs in the United States and Canada, De Lyser says, and similar organizations in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Sweden and elsewhere abroad. The clubs have a toll-free number--(800) 521-2512--that allows tall travelers to locate the nearest group or to start a club of their own.

California Tip Toppers is not only the oldest of the clubs (it has several second-generation members), it differs from most, including those in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County, in restricting membership to women 6-feet and over and men 6-foot-4 or taller.

“All the other clubs throughout the United States are two inches shorter,” says Andrea Tabor, 42, a 6-footer who lives in North Hollywood.

Linda Goldman says she initially resisted joining the group because “it seemed freakish” (she’s now social chairman).

“My mother has been telling me for years to join the tall club, but who listens to mothers?” says Goldman, a teacher who lives in West Los Angeles. Goldman, 40, remembers her first Tip Toppers event a year and a half ago. “I’m used to standing out in a room,” she says. “But I tell you, I felt short. I kept looking around for the hole I was standing in.”

According to Goldman, one of the pleasures of membership is a chance to feel almost dainty--not easy to come by when you wear a size 10 or 11 shoe.

“Around these men, I can feel petite, I can feel feminine, I can feel fragile,” she says. “Usually we’re almost treated like men.” Once, a fellow Tip Topper casually swept her off her feet. “I’m 6-feet and over 180 pounds, and I haven’t been lifted off the ground since I was a little girl,” she says.

Like other women members, Goldman says the club has given her a new appreciation of her height. “A tall woman can’t get away with being cute or like a little doll,” she says, “but we can be sexy and sultry, and we can be glamorous.”

De Lyser, who met his wife, Jan Scheuermann, through the club, agrees. “Tall women can be very impressive,” says De Lyser, 37, a Lancaster man more than 6-foot-7 whose T-shirt collection includes one that declares: “I may be the first to be rained on, but I’ll be the last to drown.”

Goldman says the club has been much more than a place to meet guys taller than she is. “It’s an extended family,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been adopted. These are people who understand what you’ve gone through your whole life. They’ve shared the same embarrassments.”

Goldman boycotted Green Giant food as a teen-ager, she was so stung by comparisons to its Jolly Green trademark. And like other tall children, she felt especially prominent and exposed when her shorter peers called her names or queried her, as they inevitably did, about the weather up there.

Life is easier for tall adults, whose height is often admired, but not perfect.

“The world’s just built for shorter people,” says De Lyser. The club takes an activist approach to society’s indifference to the special needs of the tall.

“We are not above writing to car companies and saying we need more head room,” says Goldman. Among the changes the tall lobby claims to have wrought: the development of the extra-long California king-size mattress.

The group also raises money for the National Marfan Foundation, which helps those with Marfan syndrome, a potentially fatal condition that afflicts the tall.

The Tip Toppers routinely meet with members of the two other local clubs for parties, game nights, outdoor activities and special events like Friday’s masked ball.

Goldman said the dance will be held at 9:30 p.m. at the Officers Club on the U.S. Naval Station at Long Beach. Those interested in attending should call (213) 670-5770 for information and reservations.

Tall people are especially welcome, Goldman says, “but we’re not going to turn short people away.”