A Note from the Hinterlands

James Mundie is one of the many talented and fascinating people I have met by way of the annual meeting of performing artists called the Sideshow Gathering. He recently passed along a bit of "Sideshow Ephemera" in the form of a program for the "Tiny Town Review" - billed as "A LARGE COMPANY OF AMAZINGLY TALENTED SINGING AND DANCING 'LITTLE PEOPLE' ". While this entire program makes for remarkable reading - as James puts it, it is a "relic of a politically incorrect time", in this case 1938 or so - one item in particular caught my eye:

"...Mrs. Rose was elated over the acquisition of two sisters, Adela and Florence Nowak, whom she had lately discovered in the hinterland of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania.”

I wonder what the story of the Nowak sisters was beyond this brief mention. Did they go out and see the world, while the rest of their more typically-sized friends and relatives stayed at home and never left town? Did they ever return to Nanticoke? Seventy-two years later, do they still dwell in the living memory of those who knew them before they went into show business?

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