Apron

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Up the steps of St. Anthony's Hospital, St. Louis, waddled a fat man, one A. E. Phillips. His paunch hung down to his knees, an apron of fat, a masonic ponderosity. Each lift of his thighs made his ample pants toss like garments wind-blown on a wash line. His story. . . .

Until last spring he had played the "father" with the Kahns, circus fat family. He could not be the real father, for some of the Kahns were almost as old as he, 47; and, besides, no one had ever really loved him, for all his fat. The familial relationship was purely commercial, his particular job being to sit with his front spread over his lap as bumpkins paused to wonder and snicker. Once he noted a youngish couple squeeze an impertinent witticism through their clasped fingers. He was sad for days.

This sideshow life impressed him finally as no commerce for a man approaching middle age. So he journeyed to St. Louis, opened a gasoline station for himself. This was a real business; a man was more like his fellows . . . turning the pump crank, making change. But when he would stoop to open an oil cock, his hanging plait of fat interfered. He decided to rid himself of it. . . .

At St. Anthony's Hospital last week, surgeons lifted his flabbiness as it spread, like a batter of yeasted dough, over his hips and thighs. Then they cut* —two curving slashes to form an ellipsis almost three feet long horizontally across his abdomen. This released a section of skin and fat that looked most like a slice of a huge pumpkin. It weighed (with other scoopings of fat) 31 pounds, and left a yellow gap across Mr. Phillips's belly, which the surgeons promptly closed by lifting flesh up off the thighs and nether parts to the steadier waist line. In three weeks he can be back at his gas station, can function with less discomfort.†