111 Years of Schlitze

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This week's banner boy Schlitze is the best known and loved of the so-called pinheads from Tod Browning's 1932 horror masterpiece Freaks, and he was born on this day in 1901. He lived to the ripe old age of 70, dying on September 24th, 1971. Besides his best-known role in the aforementioned Freaks he also played "Bird Woman" in 1941's Meet Boston Blackie, "Vasectomy Patient" in 1934's Tomorrow's Children, and "Furry Manimal" in the Bela Lugosi version of Island of the Lost Souls, which I only saw for the first time last year and I didn't keep an eye out for Schlitze - guess I'll have to watch it again.

Here's a fun fact I just learned about him from his bio: He "had a relatively developed intellect for a micro-cephalic" and was "taught to talk by California speech experts, and could count up to ten but refused to speak the word eight."
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