Colleagues

 

Why do we care so much about size and number? My friend Ralph Keyes, who tips the charts with me at five feet seven and a half inches, wrote an entire book about our obsession with this supposedly irrelevant subject -- The Height of Your Life. He documented the extraordinary steps that short politicians and film stars often take to avoid discovery of their secret. (Ralph couldn't even penetrate the subterfuges of Jimmy Carter's staff to discover the height of our shortest recent president, who is at least an inch or two taller than Ralph and me, and therefore at, or not far from, the American average.) The most amusing item in Ralph's book is an old publicity shot of a short Humphrey Bogart with two of his leading ladies, Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. They have just emerged from an airplane. Bogie is on the first step of the gangplank; the two women stand on the ground.

Stephen Jay Gould

As author Ralph Keyes points out: Because tallness is a symbol of power, the tall person isn't supposed to exercise any power directly, while short people can be feisty and get away with it.

Dr. Joyce Brothers

[In] The Height of Your Life, Ralph Keyes writes that our height is our destiny, and there is a strong and pervasive bias in our society in favor of tall people. It's true.

Erma Bombeck

Ralph Keyes, who wrote a delightful book about height, reports that in his search on this matter, he could find no evidence suggesting that tall employees outperform short ones.

Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life i