Easing a Soar Point
Her graceful frame arcing just over 6 feet, Sharon Stimson has silently endured the small-minded public daggers--the open-mouthed stares and not-so-witty asides--that come with simply being tall.
When she was single, there were the crude comments from pint-size men in bars about how “we’re all the same size lying down” and the misguided Lothario who once told Stimson that if she wanted, she could probably carry him like a baby.
But for the first-grade teacher, the cruelest blow strangely came not from one of her state-the-obvious students, but one of their parents.
“It was a parent-teacher’s meeting and a mother passed off this little observation that I was so tall I probably scared the children,” she said. “To this day, she’ll never know how much that hurt me.”
For Stimson and scores like her, there exists a refuge from this height-challenged and etiquette-starved world, a place where she doesn’t have to stoop just to keep pace with the conversation, and where she even has to stand on her toes to see over people’s heads.
It’s the 59-year-old Westside-based California Tip Toppers, not merely a tall club, but a psychologist’s couch and social outlet for oversize men and women from around the Southland who meet its lofty standards: a 6-foot-4 height requirement for men, 6 feet for women.
Founded in 1938 by Kay Sumner Einfeldt--who two years earlier had written a Los Angeles Times piece on the joys, sorrows and emotional curse of being tall--the Tip Toppers ranks as the oldest and most exclusive tall club in the world.
It inspired Tall Clubs International, which boasts more than 100 branches worldwide, including clubs in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley. But the original Tip Toppers, with 85 members, remains king of the hill, holding height requirements two inches above all other clubs.
“That’s why we call ourselves the world’s highest society, the tallest club on earth,” said club Vice President Dave Rupp, a 6-foot-4 Hawthorne freight forwarding company owner. “This is a tall group. We’re not talking kind of tall. I mean T-A-L-L.”
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Indeed. New members are subjected to a tape measure and must make the grade in their stocking feet--no high-heel or platform shoes allowed. Their tallest male member, Rupp says, is over 6-foot-11 and there’s a woman who is 6-foot-5.
Club members go bowling together, throw dances and pool parties. But most of all, they offer one another emotional support as they struggle with the moments when height makes them not merely striking but painfully awkward. They share childhood stories about developing bad posture and low self-esteem just trying to shrink down to meet the much-shorter world that surrounded them. They talk about searching in vain for clothes and shoes and hats that fit, and for friends who didn’t treat them like freaks.
“I walked into their first party and for the first time in my life I felt that I was just average,” Stimson said. “It was like heaven.”
Along with advice and tall tales, proposals of the heart have blossomed. The club has inspired several marriages and boasts numerous second-generation members.
Many club members have turned consumer advocate: They say they’d like to change a few things in the smaller world at large. A big complaint concerns having enough head room in cars; several members have written letters to car manufacturers.
In the past, they have fought for size 10 shoes for women and size 16 for men, as well as tall-sized clothing for women and shirts and jackets with longer sleeves for men.
Among the other changes the tall lobby claims to have wrought: the development of the extra-long California king-size mattress. In the meantime, many have customized their own homes, raising the levels of showers and sinks, and even the light switches.
Club members also sponsor scholarships and stage benefits to raise money for the National Marfan Foundation, which helps those with Marfan syndrome, a potentially fatal condition in which the connective tissue in tall people deteriorates.
There have been more personal causes: Last year, before club founder Einfeldt died in Santa Cruz at the age of 80, club members pitched in to buy her an electric wheelchair that Einfeldt’s insurance company had refused to pay for.
For many, their membership has inspired a new attitude as well as some snappy answers to the same old stupid height questions.
“It’s fun to be out together as a group because, let me tell you, they part the waters when we walk through a bar,” said 6-foot-5 Wayne Stimson, who married Sharon Stimson after meeting her at a party sponsored by the Orange County tall club.
Just the other day, Sharon was standing in line at a convenience store when a man began to stare. “He was embarrassing me,” she recalled. “And just like I always have, I thought ‘OK, you’ve had your look, you’ve seen your freak for the day.’ ”
But this time she spoke up.
“I turned to him and said ‘Gee, I bet you’ve never seen a woman as tall as me.’ And guess what? He turned around. He left me alone. It was a victory for me. But I never would have been able to say that before I joined this club.”
