George Bell was 7 feet 8 inches tall. He was so tall that strangers were constantly coming up to him to take pictures and ask the same dumbstruck question: “How tall are you?”; that he learned early on to request two beds end-to-end when he made hotel reservations; that children would rush outside after church, needing to see how the quiet colossus they’d been staring at in the pews would manage to get into his regular-size car. (Bell fully extended the driver’s seat, with its back down, so that it became more of a stool—and sat with his knees squished into the dash.)
Bell received and reciprocated all that attention with patience and grace. “I never had anyone else around who was 7-8 who I could talk to and who could help me learn how to handle it,” he told the New York Times in 1982. But he tried his best. “I like being around people,” he said, “and that’s the price I have to pay.”
Bell, who died March 19 in Durham, N.C., at age 67, was named the Tallest Person in the U.S. by Guinness World Records in 2007. He lost that distinction in 2010, to Igor Vovkovinskiy, a Ukrainian man living in Minnesota who was one-third of an inch taller—but only temporarily; Vovkovinskiy died in 2021. (Before Vovkovinskiy’s death, however, Guinness stopped keeping records for individual countries, so Bell never officially regained the title.)
Down-to-earth
Bell said his size was the result of gigantism, a medical condition. But other than that, he seemed to pride himself on his ordinariness.
He was “a down-to-earth guy. A guy you can talk to and relate to, blabber and joke with,” he told the AMC network. A guy who loved playing cards, bread pudding, the Dallas Cowboys and jazz; a guy who, in the early 1990s, would walk his daughter, Dawnie Bell, to daycare every morning on his shoulders (“my own personal Cadillac,” she recalled), and then, 30 years later, get down on the floor to let his three little grandchildren climb all over him and slide down his legs.
In fact, Bell told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a production company once tried making a reality show about him but found there wasn’t enough material: “They couldn’t believe my life was as normal as it is.” He’d worked hard to make it that way—just loping around, as though in exile, in what he called “a small man’s world.”
Bell, born on June 12, 1957, in Portsmouth Va., credited his equanimity to an aunt who had helped raise him. “She always told me, ‘Don’t feel ashamed of yourself. Stand tall. God made you. Be happy and show your pride,’ ” he told the Associated Press.
After graduating from Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., in 1982, Bell played basketball with the Harlem Wizards, a Globetrotters-esque troupe, and later attracted serious but fleeting attention from the Los Angeles Clippers in the NBA. (Bell didn’t play for the Globetrotters as is often reported, according to a team spokesperson.) In 1987, he and his then-wife Joyce had their daughter, Dawnie. They divorced in 1992.
Forging connections
From 2000 to 2014, Bell worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Norfolk, Va., one of several law-enforcement jobs he held. When he graduated from the training academy, his boss stood on a chair to pin on his badge.
The shockingness of his height had the effect of getting the prisoners he was guarding to open up to him, Bell said, and gave him an easy inroad to mentor young people in the community. In recent years, he spoke at elementary schools with a program he founded, “Stand Tall Against Bullying.” (Michael Jarrett, who worked with Bell on the program, explained that as a teenager Bell had a friend who was bullied and died by suicide.)
That is, rather than let his size alienate him from other people, Bell used it to forge connections. “Me being so tall, it’s hard to live a normal life,” he told one local TV correspondent who came up to his elbows. “But I always felt that life is a challenge–it’s a challenge for everybody.”
Bell had a lifelong ambition to be an actor and, in 2014, landed a role in “American Horror Story” as a humongous ghost. His highest-profile gig, however, was during the climax of the 1984 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, as a towering alien who emerged from a 50-foot-wide UFO that descended from the sky in a riot of bright light to land at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Bell, in a rubberized buglike costume, relayed an intergalactic message of “belief in the limitless possibilities of human achievement,” then raised his webbed, seven-fingered hands in a triumphant salute while the crowd went bananas.
“That is no one on stilts,” ABC broadcaster Jim McKay explained. “That is a man 7 feet, 8 inches tall!”—because, apparently, this was the strangest, most unbelievable part of the whole thing.
