For as long as so called civilized societies have existed, equally uncivilized clubs and
groups have sprung up within them, allowing their members to revel in all sorts
of weird and wonderful excesses. In previous episodes, we have heard about secret
food clubs with the goal of eating every type of animal on Earth. Today's
story may not be so different, although this club's members weren't so picky about
reaching any particular goal other than just eating every type of food they could get
their hands on. These are the bizarre but true stories from history and in
some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this is the fantastic
history of Food. I wanted to say a huge thank you to all of
my supporters on Patreon. You help me out immensely in getting this show made,
and today I want to send a special shout out to two new supporters
that have joined since our last episode, Philip Sirkov and Frank Morales. Thank
you so much. If you would like to support the show in the same
way as these fine folks, it costs just two dollars a month and when
you sign up you'll have your name mentioned in an episode. Just like you've
heard today, but please, this is absolutely pressure free. More than anything,
I just love that you listen to the podcast and get some enjoyment out
of it, and that is the reason why I keep making this show.
Now back to the episode. It was the middle of August eighteen eighty four,
and for the most part it was a normal day in the northeastern United
States. It was bright and sunny, and somewhere close by to the shoreline
of Long Island Sound, a group of men began gathering together, albeit with
a significant amount of effort imposed on their chosen modes of transportation. Horses pulling
wagons strained against their harnesses, small boats crossing the bay came close to toppling
over, and any sort of public transportation was far more crowded than usual.
You see in this small part of the country, Something rather large was about
to take place. Men from all over the area were coming to one very
particular venue to take part in the Connecticut Fat Men's Club annual clam Bake.
At the time, this was by no means a club in isolation, but
rather it was just one of many chapters that had sprung up all across the
east coast of the United States, fat men's clubs were joyous places where members
would gather to consume elaborate meals and celebrate one in another weighty gains. It
was, in short, the very definition of celebrating excess in a world that
for so long had managed to just scrape by. These clubs were viewed through
wildly different lenses at the time, with some commentators alleging that these clubs promoted
nothing but mental and physical degradation brought on by their obesity, while others praised
the clubs as one of the last few bastions of true joy and pointed to
the men's good spirits and how none of these men ever seemed to commit any
sort of crime in society. In the general population as a whole, opinion
seemed to constantly shift around how the so called plumpness was viewed. Some simply
saw fat men as being men of wealth and status who could afford the finer
things in life, and regarded them as upstanding leaders of society. Others,
however, viewed the men's enormity as some kind of amusement only reserved for carnival
exhibits, or as sideshow freaks. But whichever side you were on both seen
to agree that whatever else they were, these fat men were generally virtuous,
good natured, and morally upright. Whatever the prevailing discourse was at any one
time. However, the men who found joy within these clubs seemed at all
times to be utterly unperturbed by the swirling debates. In fact, some men
would even find motivation within these criticisms that would spur them on to even greater
feats of over indulgence. Perhaps it is no wonder that the first of these
sorts of clubs sprang up in New York City, the epicenter of the New
World, sometime in the eighteen sixties. From there, their popularity grew,
and more and more clubs sprung up around the city, eventually spilling out into
the surrounding areas and beyond. There was even a mention in the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle of a particularly fun party held by the Coney Island Fat Men's Club that
was being spoken about for days afterwards by all who attended. In nineteen oh
three, in a small local tavern in Wells River, one of America's most
successful fat men's clubs was launched in New England. At its very peak,
it would record ten thousand members. But here in the midst of its humble
beginnings were a few fat men enjoying some good food and each other's company.
Their mantra was we're fat and we're making the most of it, while their
club motto was we have to be good natured because we can't fight and we
can't run. To join the club, one needed to weigh at least two
hundred pounds, pay a yearly members fee of one dollar, and learn the
club's secret password and handshake. Members would gather twice a year, but the
meeting dates announced a good while in advance, allowing the men to stuff themselves
beforehand to make sure they made the minimum weight requirement needed to stay a member.
Just a year after the New England Fat Men's Club formed, the local
newspaper reported on one of their gatherings, this village is full of bulbous and
overhanging abdomens and double chins. Tonight for the New England Fat Men's Club is
in session at Hailey's Tavern. The natives, who are mostly bony and angular,
have stared with envy at the portly forms and rubicund faces which have arrived
on every train. But these clubs were not without a healthy dose of self
deprecation either. At each and every Fat Men's Club event, away in was
held at the end of the night, with the heaviest member being presented with
a pig as his prize for the night. The title of heaviest member was
so coveted that some members were even caught stuffing pillows up their shirts or carrying
coins or lead balls in their pocket in an attempt to help tip the scales
in their favor. And so it was at our aforementioned Connecticut Fat Men's Club
annual clambake. The event was covered rather extensively by the local press at the
time, and they provide us now with some fascinating insights into exactly what occurred
that day. The chef, who hailed from Brooklyn, was widely regarded as
an artist in his field when it came to the preparation of clams, and
that day it is reported that on top of his hickory log fire, he
baked around twenty four thousand clams. But if you thought that was the only
thing on the menu, you would be sorely mistaken. Added to this clam
genocide were, in quotes, wagon loads of spring chickens, both loads of
lobster, and many many crates of green corn and vegetables. The chef had
begun many hours before the members arrived, slow cooking all of this food for
hours. The New York Times also spent a good amount of column inches writing
about this particular club's president, saying, mister d'orlon is huge. He is
ponderous. His obesity borders on the infinite, and the most hardened lean man
cannot gaze upon his magnificent proportions without being unconsciously made purer and holier. That
is some high praise for a man whose greatest achievement was filling himself to bursting
with food. Mister dawlon opened the day with a short speech, knowing that
all in attendance were eager to get started, And once the feast had come
to an end and there were clam shells strewn all across the surrounding area,
the president once again took to the stage to give a speech. He held
up the club's ceremonial golden staff, inscribed with the names and weights of the
club presidents who had come before him. As he spoke, he began to
weep as he compared how relatively slim his frame was in relation to many of
the club's members, and in so doing offered to resign from his role as
president out of sheer embarrassment, so that he could be replaced by a worthier
and more importantly heavier member, But the crowd was having none of it,
and he was unanimously re elected. The menus of these clubs offer up a
fascinating insight into the world of what these wealthy gentlemen engaged themselves on whenever they
regularly met together. Oyster roasts and Texan barbecues were just two of the staple
favorites for these fat men's clubs. Over indulgences. At any one of these
events, you could eat your fill of oyster cocktail, cream of chicken soup,
boiled snapper, filet of beef with mushrooms, roast chicken, roast,
suckling pig, shrimp salad, steamed fruit pudding with brandy sauce, amongst a
veritable smaugus board of assorted cakes, cheeses, and ice creams, before finishing
off the night with coffee and cigars. Some of the clubs had very specific
rules for joining, as can be found in the charter of the Bedford Stuyvesant
Fat Men's Bicycle Club, which stated that you had to weigh in excess of
two hundred fifty pounds before you were even allowed to join. Under no circumstances
were women allowed to become members, and most hilariously, if any member was
caught eating Limburger cheese outside of a meeting, they would have to then provide
enough to feed the entire club as a punishment. In what was a rather
interesting turn of events for these clubs, they began competing with one another in
a variety of different sporting events, as was foreshadowed by the aforementioned bicycle club.
The New York Times has an article from eighteen eighty five in which it
describes in detail a baseball game played between teams representing the Brooklyn Fat Men's Club
and that of Flushing Queens. The article was by no means flattering in its
descriptions. The individual masses of row tunned corpulency made up the famous Fat Men's
Baseball nine of Brooklyn, and they had gone down with all the speed they
were capable of to test the agility of a similar set of linear and latitudinal
giants upon the team's arrival at the field, The Brooklyn teams somehow managed to
cram themselves onto an agricultural scale, weighing in at a collective two thousand,
two hundred and eleven pounds or two hundred and forty five pounds per person in
average. As it turned out, all of the men competing that day were
formerly professional baseball players who had since grown obese due to their excessive beer drinking
habits and the sedentary lifestyle of politics into which many of them had ventured.
Still, they were adamant that they could run their own base on condition that
at each base they positioned a so called resuscitating keg of beer to drink in
between plays. Before the game started, the captain of the Brooklyn team,
only known as Supervisor Jones, addressed the assembled media. I say with pride
that no man is allowed into this organization if he should weigh less than two
hundred and twelve pounds. And he himself led this team by example, tipping
the individual scale at a hefty three hundred and twenty five pounds, all by
himself. In his speech, he proudly announced that he had had such trouble
fitting himself into his uniform that he had had to pay a young boy twenty
five cents to help stuff himself inside. Before long, it was clear that
their opponents were going to be no shows. The local newspaper reported that the
team from Flushing had arrived, seen the caliber of man they were up against,
and fled in shame at their own embarrassing frames, which on average weighed
just over two hundred pounds per man. As mad as the Brooklyn team was,
they were apparently mollified by the distribution of even more kegs of beer.
Just after the turn of the century, in nineteen oh four, the Lewiston
Evening Journal reported on a basketball game between the local Fat Men's club and a
professional men's team from Livermore Falls in Maine. By all accounts, so many
people turned out to watch the game that when the players took to the court,
the cheering was so deafening that the announcer couldn't even be heard above the
ruckus. At their peak, these clubs spread as far as Nevada, Utah,
and Tennessee, as well as all the way to France. But as
attitudes began to change towards obesity, and medical doctors began stressing the dangers that
came with it, the numbers of members and clubs in general began to steadily
fall. Nowhere was the change in attitude towards fat men felt more acutely than
in the New York Police Force. They went from holding fat men's races at
their annual police department get togethers to in stating a policy whereby you could not
even become a per police man if you weighed more than two hundred and fifty
pounds. In fact, in nineteen ten, one of the police captains was
relieved of his duty due to his obesity. By nineteen twenty four, the
movement had all but died out, and at the very last meeting of the
once popular New England Fat Men's Club, they were down to just that he
ate members, all of whom were now disappointingly under two hundred pounds. At
their final meeting, they raised their glasses in one last whimsical toast, A
toast to us, my good kind friends, to bless the things we eat,
for it has been many a year since we have seen our feet.
But who would lose a precious pound by trading sweets for sours? It takes
a mighty girth, indeed, to hold such hearts as ours. This show
is made entirely by me, Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having
been made by the Enigma that is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like
to support the show, the simplest way to do that is over on our
Patreon account. There's just one option, so for just two bucks a month,
you'll help me keep producing this show, and in return, you'll get
your name forever etched onto our supporter's Wall of Fame over on our website and
then maybe listen out for your name in an upcoming episode. So until next
time, bon apetite,