“Hobbit” Edward Noble, 24, walks through the large, circular, hand-painted door of the Hobbit House in Manila, Philippines.

Manila, Philippines ? Every night without fail, Jim Turner is there at the far corner of the bar, chain-smoking his Marlboros and sipping ice-cold San Miguel beer from the bottle, watching over the Little Ones.

He considers them family, but they’re not his children. They’re the dwarfs and other little people the 70-year-old Iowa native has rescued from the heartless streets of this capital city to offer them friendship and honest work.

For 35 years, the former Peace Corps volunteer has operated the Hobbit House, a bar themed on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels, a realm marked by all things miniature.

Under his care, hundreds of dwarfs have adopted new cultural identities. They’re no longer shunned or even feared as supposed evil spirits, but have become popular characters called hobbits — merry figures who serve drinks, crack ribald jokes and even entertain onstage.

At Turner’s bar, on a dingy block of strip clubs and speak-easies in central Manila, the dwarfs draw a loyal crowd. They’re entertainers who get the joke, always ready to use their small size for a few good-natured laughs.

The Hobbit House features what may be the world’s smallest Elvis impersonator. There have been hobbit jugglers, comics, dancers, flame-eaters and a singer who sounded eerily like Frank Sinatra.

Many of the waiters and bartenders are the grandchildren of the dwarfs who helped Turner launch the bar. There’s now even a second location, at a tourist resort in the central Philippines.

Yet critics have accused Turner of exploiting his workers. Stubbing out a Marlboro, he frowns.

“We took many from the worst slums in Manila, where they were mocked and ridiculed,” he says. “Now they’re no longer carnival freaks. They’re respected entertainers and businesspeople.”

And Turner is their godfather. He has provided many of his workers with loans and housing and has paid tuitions. Several years ago, he gave them something perhaps even more precious: the Hobbit House itself.

He founded a corporation, naming seven of his employees the main stockholders. Now they make the decisions and call the shots. From his perch at the bar, Turner watches over the business as a consultant and takes only enough salary to pay his bills.

The dwarfs call him “tito” and “kuya,” “uncle” and “older brother.”

Pidoy Fetalino, a 35-year veteran of the bar, likes to stroll into business meetings, raise his hand to greet average-sized clients and proudly announce that he’s the establishment’s general manager.

Over drinks after the bar closes, he gets emotional about Turner, who has helped him put two children through college and discover self-respect.

“He’s our protector, a big man with a big heart,” Fetalino says. “One day he said to us: ‘This Hobbit House belongs to all of you. You earned it.’ A lot of us cried that day.”

Turner arrived in the Philippines in 1961, a young idealist out to change the world. Among the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in the country, he taught English for two years in a rural province, then moved back to Manila.

He did odd jobs, eventually becoming a television station manager. That’s when he was introduced to his first dwarfs.

“We ran a lot of variety shows where we cast midgets, dwarfs and transvestites,” says Turner, a graying man with bushy eyebrows. “They were a staple of TV then.”

In 1972, then-President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and shut down the station. Turner needed work, so he and some friends came up with an idea for a theme bar.

He’d read Tolkien’s books as a boy in Cedar Rapids and knew that little people were easy to find in Manila. Word got out and little people from all over the country began asking for work.

Soon Turner was overrun with little people. They worked as waiters and bartenders and he built them miniature sets of stairs that they climbed to conduct business at the towering wooden bar.

But they soon wanted more: They asked to entertain. So Turner let them have the stage for vaudeville-type acts that featured little people as the big stars. His first performer was a woman named Little Lucy, who ate fire and juggled, balanced on a fulcrum.

“For a while,” Turner recalls, “everyone wanted to be an Elvis impersonator.”