Together Forever

For 68 years Ronnie and Donnie Galyon, the world’s oldest conjoined twins, were objects of curiosity

- Dennis Cavernelis

YOU do what you’ve got to do.

This was how Ronnie and Donnie Galyon described the years they spent in a travelling circus, being gawked at by strangers as they lounged in their caravan, watching TV, eating, reading or squabbling.

Exploiting people for their differences might sound like an abomination in today’s far more sensitive, politically correct world but when the twins were kids it was all they knew. And they didn’t mind it.

“It was fun,” Ronnie once said of his and his brother’s entertainment career, which began at the age of four when their dad put them on display in a traveling carnival.

But Ronnie and Donnie are no more. The brothers, who made history in 2014 when they officially became the world’s oldest set of conjoined twins, died recently at the age of 68 from congestive heart failure after years of declining health.

Ronnie and Donnie retired in 1991, having taken their sideshow across the US as well as Central and South America. “They were treated like rock stars down there,” their brother Jim (57) recalls.

In recent years the twins lived with Jim and his wife, Mary, in a custom-built house on Jim’s property in Beavercreek, Ohio.

Their arthritis had made it unsafe for them to continue living alone and with the help of more than 200 volunteers, a New York-based charity raised $40 000 (now R680 000) to buy materials to build new living quarters for them a few years ago.