In 1902, a seamstress named Katherine Berger married a trolley-car conductor named John Branca and spent half of the next 26 years pregnant, giving birth 17 times. One of her children, Ralph Theodore, grew taller than the others. And he was a teenager, the only Branca to reach 6 feet, when he began to wonder why he alone had been so physically blessed.
“He used to say,” his brother John remembered, “‘Why did God give me this gift of being bigger and stronger?’ He used to say, ‘Why me?’ quite often.”
Branca had long since found his answer when, on Oct.