The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Conjoined twin brothers have shared public, private life

Contributed photo

ENLARGE PHOTO

Contributed photo

ENLARGE PHOTO

Submitted Advertising "Ronnie & Donnie: The World's Only Living Conjoined Twin Boys," for carnival\uFEFFgoers. Contributed photo

ENLARGE PHOTO

New pool at 'The Heights' opens
5/27/12
Huber Heights suing consultant for more than $50,000
5/26/12
4 arrested for OVI at Kettering checkpoint
5/26/12
Man found dead at bar; police seek suspect
5/26/12
Turner adopts role for Romney campaign
5/26/12
> More headlines

By Laura Dempsey, Staff Writer Updated 5:31 PM Friday, January 22, 2010

DAYTON — From the minute they were born, notoriety has colored the lives of Ronald and Donald Galyon, twins joined at the torso. Their parents, Wesley and Eileen Galyon, already had two children, and weren’t expecting twins.

Donnie came first, Ronnie surprising everyone minutes later with his very existence, shocking everyone with his very literal connection to his brother.

“We had a good doctor,” Ronnie says now. “We’re lucky.”

The Galyons have four arms and four legs, separate hearts, lungs and stomachs. Their vital organs join in the digestive tracts, with one lower intestine, one penis and one rectum, over which Donnie has control.

They were born Oct. 28, 1951, at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Dayton. At the time, separation would have been difficult if not impossible; their parents made the decision to let nature take its course.

For 57 years now, nature has kept her hands off the Galyon twins; and they’ve thrived, living a sheltered but full life, albeit one skewed by the spotlight of carnival sideshows, circus tents and, too often, curious and rude onlookers.

Polite people are fine, they say — they realize they’re quite a sight. Ignorant comments and cell-phone cameras are a source of irritation, though Ronnie and Donnie are quick to say they were raised to be courteous.

They never went to school: “They thought we’d be a distraction,” Donnie said, though their parents hired a series of women who helped with everyday tasks such as toilet training and learning to tie their shoes. As both men are right-handed, this requires intense coordination.

Even birthday celebrations have been the source of drama: “Oct. 28 — Halloween — you get the idea,” says their brother, Jim. “Draw your own conclusions.”

They’ve lived a public life, but have avoided turning their home into a tourist attraction. Once, while being followed as they walked back from a shopping trip, they led the strangers to a neighbor’s house instead of their own home. “Our brother taught us well,” said Ronnie.

Their brother taught them everything.

Mother wolf

Jim Galyon, 46, is the youngest of nine Galyon children. He oversees Ronnie and Donnie’s lives with the tenacity and tenderness of a mother wolf — he’s as tough as he is kind to Ronnie and Donnie, ferociously protective without being smothering.

It’s Jim who found Donnie and Ronnie a house in their old neighborhood, down the street from where he was living back in 1991, helping them buy it with the earnings from their days on the road.

It’s Jim who stops by every day, who arranges for a home-care worker’s visits, who takes them to Reds’ and Dragons’ games a couple of times a year, who drives them to restaurants, and who fights Medicare to get them a replacement for their old, custom wheelchair (“One wheelchair for two people — it just does not compute with Medicare. They’re not understanding this situation at all,” he says).

And it was Jim who, after getting late-night calls from Ronnie and Donnie about harassment from local high-schoolers, parked his motorcycle in their driveway “and waited.”

“They were terrified,” Jim recalled, noting that police got involved and made a visit to the teens’ school. “The sheriff told the whole school in no uncertain terms that the behavior would not be tolerated and that they would be prosecuted.”

Jim helps his brothers stay as independent as possible, withstanding outside pressure to find some sort of institutionalized setting for them. It’s a role he doesn’t see as heroic, or special: It’s just what he does. Ronnie and Donnie’s six other siblings “care deeply,” Jim says, brushing off questions about how he manages his own family — he has three grown kids of his own, his wife, Mary, has four — a full-time job, and the twins.

“It isn’t easy,” says Mary. “In a lot of ways, it’s like he has two more kids.”

“I don’t do it for anybody else but them,” Jim says. “I always have and I always will.”

Maybe it’s payback for the summers Jim got to spend with his brothers on the carnival circuit. “All the rides were free,” he said with a smile.

If not for summers on the circuit, Jim probably wouldn’t have seen much of Donnie and Ronnie — theirs was a life spent on the road. After spending 29 months in the hospital, the babies came home and started working. When the boys were 3, their father made the decision to take them on the carnival circuit as a way to support his growing family. They traveled to Canada and throughout the United States and South America, getting free cotton candy on the midway, babysitting carny workers’ kids in their downtime.

Their parents divorced (“They don’t want to talk about that,” Jim warned); their father remarried and moved to Kentucky with his new wife. Both parents are now deceased.

1 | 2 next page »

Share this article