OBITUARIES - Aug. 15, 1999

Robert D. Lewis; War Hero Inspired ‘Great Escape’

Robert D. Lewis, 84, the World War II hero whose exploits inspired the 1963 movie “The Great Escape.” The North Carolina native first went to war for the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was so badly injured on a strafing run to France that the British grounded him. But that did not deter him from joining the U.S. Air Force, which soon sent him on missions over North Africa. He was shot down there but eluded capture for two weeks by disguising himself as an Arab, dressing in flowing robes and darkening his face with clay. When the wind blew his robe open, exposing his clay-free white legs in front of German soldiers, he was taken prisoner and transported to Stalag Luft III in Germany. His first two escape attempts were made by squeezing under the wire fence in a spot missed by the German searchlights. His third attempt came as he was being transferred to another camp on a freight train. On his fourth attempt, he slipped into a prisoners’ work detail that was assigned to clean up debris from Allied bombing raids. He escaped during the confusion of another raid, caught a streetcar to the edge of Munich and then headed for the Swiss border. While in the prison camps, he made moonshine from raisins and prunes and dug a tunnel that became the centerpiece of “The Great Escape,” the movie that starred Steve McQueen as the Lewis-inspired character. After the war, he returned to his home in Goldsboro, N.C., went into the insurance business and became president of the chamber of commerce. Last Sunday in Goldsboro of pancreatic cancer.

Jeanie Tomaini; ‘Half Girl’ Performer

Jeanie Tomaini, 82, a 2-foot-6 circus performer known as “the Half Girl” and longtime matriarch of the carnival workers’ haven of Gibsonton, Fla. Tomaini was born without legs in a small Indiana town and began her career when her father, a struggling carpenter, charged people a few pennies to see her in a backyard tent. Her father later deserted the family, and her mother died when she was 13. Tomaini was sent to an orphanage, where a carnival operator discovered her and took her on the road for “freak shows.” While crisscrossing the country, she met her future husband, a gentle 8-foot-4 behemoth named Al Tomaini, whose carnival name was “the Giant.” The two worked together as “The World’s Strangest Married Couple.” In 1941, they retired from show business and settled down in Gibsonton. They adopted two infant girls, and Jeanie Tomaini became a Girl Scout leader. More carnival workers gravitated to the small town, and soon it became a winter haven for people in the carnival and circus business. Elephants were parked in backyards and Ferris wheels in frontyards. On Wednesday, longtime resident Billy Rodgers told the Tampa Tribune that Tomaini was “grandmother to all the circus performers.” Despite the years she spent as an oddity, Tomaini was not bitter. “When I was young,” she told the paper, “I had a ball. I loved all the attention. Only if I meet a person who is morally, spiritually and physically perfect will I ever hang my head in shame.” On Tuesday of heart failure at a Tampa hospital.