Bozo The Eater

I get it from my mother. I read obituaries. There, I said it.

Now WaPo made it even easier for me to get my “in memoriam” fix – Post Mortem, the WaPo obit blog. Yes, there are so many blogs on WaPo’s website (scroll down to the middle of the page and click on View All News Columns & Blogs, I count 30) that there is even a web log for the dead.

Regardless, that’s how I stumbled upon the death of Eddie “Bozo” Miller, an “icon of gluttony.”

Check out the full obit here, but below are some of his eating highlights:

In 1963, he downed 27 chickens (2-pound pullets) at Trader Vic’s restaurant in San Francisco, a feat that earned him $10,000 and led to a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the “world’s greatest trencherman,” or heavy eater.

He once downed 30 pounds of meatloaf made from elk, buffalo and other game. In another test, he ate 324 pieces of ravioli and said that he could have eaten more but that the restaurant ran out. He also guzzled two quarts of whiskey in an hour.

In his heyday, he said, he beat a lion in a martini-drinking contest.

“Some guy from the circus came into the restaurant — Reno Barsocchini’s, I think — with a lion on a leash,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I drank them out of a glass, and they put the martinis on a soup plate for the lion. I maybe had about a dozen. The lion, he kept lapping them up until he just fell asleep.”