ME TARZAN . . . YOU JANE.

Way long before Superman, Batman and others of their breed were saving girl reporters or police commissioners’ daughters, Tarzan was rescuing one particular damsel from myriad menaces in the steaming African jungle. The Ape-man, as his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs had christened him, had a twenty year head start over the modern day comic book heroes. And Tarzan was the man I admired most in my pre-teen years.
I was fifteen years old before I stopped clipping the Sunday comic strip Tarzan from the Elmira Sunday Telegram and pasting it into what would eventually become a four-scrapbook series. It constituted part of the Jimmy Whiting Tarzan Collection. You might say I was a true Tarzan aficionado. That weekly full page, full color dosage, the work of writer/artist Burne Hogarth not only transported me to places both exciting and vicariously dangerous; the drawings were spellbinding. Hogarth was in his prime in the early 40s and I worshiped his artwork. Many years later, it was such a treat to meet this comic art icon and to be on the staff of Cartoonists & Illustrators School in New York City with him.


Each Christmas I received a Tarzan book to add to the Collection. I joined the Tarzan Clans of America; my Official Guide is #90. In it I learned how to form a Tarzan Clan; what the Duties of Officers --including the Medicine Man, Scribe, and High Priest are. I even learned, by virtue of the guide’s English-Ape Dictionary, how to use words just as Tarzan did in talking with apes from the tribe of Kerchak.  How’s this? Tand-ramba! po! Popo ut! That means: Get up! Hungry! Eat corn!

By the way, several years ago I saw this booklet listed in a price guide. 1939, Mint condition: $1000. Mine could be described more accurately, Tattered and Torn

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Never, ever missed a Tarzan movie starring Johnny Weissmuller, the champion Olympic swimmer who is still the most identified player of the jungle man. I wrote to him--Weissmuller--not Tarzan, and received a nice picture.

A lesser known celluloid Tarzan sent an autographed picture AND a nice hand written letter which encouraged me to work hard in school and keep physically fit. The letter almost made up for the disappointment I felt upon seeing Glenn Morris’s leopard slippers. Look at this. Can you imagine?!

Every once in a while I’m pleased to see a magazine article or watch a special TV program devoted to some aspect of the Tarzan phenomenon; we’re only five years from his 100th anniversary. 
One last thing:  I really think that--in my youth--I did a terrific Tarzan yell. (More correctly, I should say “victory cry of the bull ape.”) Yes, I’m confident it was even better than Carol Burnett’s rendition. 


But the pipes are old now and the cry is more like that of a baby’s than an ape-man.


Swing by on your vine to my wala (house) next time, OK?


Jimmy Whiting