Death of world’s oldest conjoined twins
For 68 years Ronnie and Donnie Galyon, the world’s oldest conjoined twins, were objects of curiosity
YOU do what you’ve got to do.
This was how Ronnie and Donnie Galyon described the years they spent in a travelling circus, being gawked at by strangers as they lounged in their caravan, watching TV, eating, reading or squabbling.
Exploiting people for their differences might sound like an abomination in today’s far more sensitive, politically correct world but when the twins were kids it was all they knew. And they didn’t mind it.
“It was fun,” Ronnie once said of his and his brother’s entertainment career, which began at the age of four when their dad put them on display in a travelling carnival.
But Ronnie and Donnie are no more. The brothers, who made history in 2014 when they officially became the world’s oldest set of conjoined twins, died recently at the age of 68 from congestive heart failure after years of declining health.
Ronnie and Donnie retired in 1991, having taken their sideshow across the US as well as Central and South America. “They were treated like rock stars down there,” their brother Jim (57) recalls.
In recent years the twins lived with Jim and his wife, Mary, in a custom-built house on Jim’s property in Beavercreek, Ohio.
Their arthritis had made it unsafe for them to continue living alone and with the help of more than 200 volunteers a New York-based charity raised $40 000 (now R680 000) to buy materials to build new living quarters for them a few years ago.
Their previous home was a conventional one, with regular-sized hallways and doors that made it difficult for the twins to get around.
Arthritis prevented them from walking more than a few steps at a time, and their specially designed two-person wheelchair was too big to move around their house.
Jim said the pair were forced to spend most of their time sitting on the floor.
Their new home had large doorways
and wide passages to accommodate their wheelchair, as well as a ramp that led to the main house where Jim and Mary live.
“Having things that actually work for them is great,” Jim said at the time.
“Everyone who came together to help bring my brothers into our home gave them 10 more years of life.”
THE twins’ late parents, Wesley and Eileen, weren’t expecting to have twins, much less conjoined ones. “Actually, it was a fast delivery,” Wesley recounted in a TV interview years ago.
It was a natural birth and Donnie, “the little one, he was out first head first, and Ronnie was feet first.
“The doctor said they were probably going to die, but I knew in my heart they were going to live.”
The twins spent the first two years of their lives in hospital as doctors tried to figure out if they could be separated. Eventually they said there was no guarantee either of the twins could survive surgery, and their parents decided to return home to their farming community in Beavercreek with their sons.
Ronnie and Donnie were joined at the abdomen and shared a lower digestive tract. Donnie had the rectum and Ronnie had the bladder and penis, while each had his own heart, stomach and a pair of arms and legs.
Coordinating their movements required feats of concentration, which they perfected pretty early on.
Their parents wanted to send them to school but they weren’t allowed to attend, as officials feared they’d be “a distraction” to other learners. “It was a different era,” Jim says. It was the twins’ sky-high medical bills that saw Wesley decide to hit the road with his boys and join the World of Wonders, a self-proclaimed “freak show” run by carnival impresario Ward Hall, the last showman of his kind in the US.
In a biography about Ward, it emerged Eileen had rejected the twins and they were raised by Wesley and later their stepmother, Mary.
Jim says the twins’ earnings were used to help support him and their six other siblings.
“That was the only income. They were the breadwinners.”
Wesley always maintained putting the twins on show was never his plan. “We had offers from the day they were born,” he said.
“We were constantly hounded by people to put them on display, and regardless of where we went or what we did, they were always on exhibition.”
He eventually gave in. “This way they get something from it. What else can [conjoined] twins do?”
By the ’70s sideshow acts were widely considered offensive and exploitative but in the ’60s “human oddities”, as performers were described, were a staple of many North American carnivals.
And for people who felt they didn’t fit in elsewhere, sideshows could be a haven of sorts – a welcoming community for the unaccepted.
Ronnie and Donnie found camaraderie in the carnival where their circle included Little Pete the “smallest man in the world” and Johan “the Viking giant”.
“When we were on the road it was all like one big family,” Ronnie said.
The boys’ life as a sideshow attraction amounted to little more than them sitting in their caravan watching TV and going about their day while onlookers peered at them through the windows. As sideshows fell out of favour in the US, the World of Wonders headed south to Central and South America where the boys got the rock-star treatment Jim described.
AWAY from staring eyes, the twins were like any other siblings. As boys and as adults they loved collecting Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, commemorative plates, autographed photos from Playboy playmates and baseball caps. And they fought too. “Ronnie, the big one, has always been a good-natured kid but Donnie, the little one, he’s temperamental. He always wants his own way,” their father once said.
In one interview the twins admitted they’d get into punch-ups when they squabbled.
Their nephew Cade Elkins says he’d heard stories from relatives about how they’d “occasionally get in arguments and fistfights with each other. “I always found the idea of my fist-fighting uncles doubly absurd. Not only did they wear gigantic replica Dallas Cowboys championship rings [knuckle adornments bearing the American football team’s insignia], but also it was literally impossible for them to run away from each other.”
Despite their differences, Ronnie and Donnie never wanted to be separated.
When they were in their twenties a plastic surgeon offered his services, saying he believed he could successfully separate them. But Ronnie and Donnie said, “No way. We like who we are. We can play baseball, we can go hunting and fishing. We like it.”
The twins were laid to rest in a custom-made casket specially built to accommodate them.
Having lived far longer than anyone expected – conjoined twins have a survival rate of between five and 25% – the twins lived a happy life, Jim says.
“Their bodies were tired and it was time.”
‘We were constantly hounded by people to put them on display. They were always on exhibition’