Possibly the name was rendered something like 10’ 8" Kelly, and possibly his last name was spelled “Kelley.” Anyway. . .
I remember reading this newspaper article about him in the early 1970s. Sounded like an interesting character who wove some interesting stories about himself–such as how his name was derived. Supposedly (as I attempt to dredge up 40+ year old memories), it was because his gestation period was 10 months, 8 days. The only other thing I can recollect from the article was he was able to *talk [something] out of people–but he couldn’t give away how he did it or he would lose the power.
That’s it.
*Some backwoods folk claimed to be able to ‘talk’ ailments away. I’ve heard of talking warts off, talking fire out (i.e., making the pain of a burn go away), and talking the pain out. I don’t recall exactly what his specialty was.
Honey, you know you should have started with me. I found two articles in The State - one’s an obit and one’s an article. Evidently he could “talk out fire”. I’m trying to figure out how best to post images.
Well, yeah, but last time I imposed upon you for some research, I said it would be the last time! (But if you could get an image of some sort, that would be cool! )
Sorry, I was far too lazy to actually walk thirty feet over there and scan this from the microfilm so I took six times as long getting it into a format I could put on Flickr and it’s a little clumsy.
)