Bill Hillman's

Weekly Online Fanzine
Volume 050

Those Burroughs Kids Pt. 1
Compiled by Bill Hillman

 Dedicated to Joan, Hulbert and Jack Burroughs

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Jack and Hully the Pulp Story Writers

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Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939 - Vol. 13 #3, Whole No 18
Editor: Mort Weisinger   132 pages - Price: 15 cents
Cover Art: Howard V. Brown
Contents
Novelettes
The Man Without a World     Hulbert Burroughs & John Coleman Burroughs
Robot Nemesis               Edward E. Smith (as Edward Elmer Smith, Ph. D.)
The Ultimate Catalyst       Eric Temple Bell (as John Taine)
Novellas
Dawn of Flame               Stanley G. Weinbaum
Short Stories
Moon of Intoxication        (Earl Binder and Otto Binder) (as Eando Binder)
No More Friction            David H. Keller, M.D.
Passage to Saturn           Jack Williamson
Stolen Centuries            Otis Adelbert Kline
 

THRILLING WONDER STORIES February 1940
Contents:
The Lightning Men by John C. Burroughs & Hulbert Burroughs
Doom Over Venus - Edmond Hamilton
Day of the Titans - Arthur K Barnes
Secret of the Cyclotros - Jackson Gregory Jr
The Thing from Antares - Myer Krulfeld
True Confession - F Orlin Tremaine
The Great God Awto - Clark Ashton Smith

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AMAZING STORIES January 1941

The Invisible Wheel of Death Don Wilcox
Mystery Moon Edmond Hamilton
The Armageddon of Johann Schmidt Arthur T Harris
Hammer of the Gods John York Cabot
Skidmore's Strange Experiment David O'Brien

Startling Stories, September 1941- Vol. 6 #2, Whole number 17
Editor: Oscar J. Friend - 132 pages - Price: 15 cents
Cover: Rudolph Belarski

Contents
Novellas
The Bottom of the World  by Hulbert Burroughs & John Coleman Burroughs
Novelettes
Death from the Stars        A. Rowley Hilliard
Short Stories
No Heroes Wanted            Robert Moore Williams
Prisoners in Flatland       Frank Belknap Long

John Coleman (Jack) Burroughs (February 28, 1913 - 1979)

He is author of Treasure of the Black Falcon (Ballantine, 1967), co-author with brother Hulbert of three pulp SF stories (see above), co-author with wife Jane Ralston of a mystery story, and collaborator with father ERB on John Carter and the Giant of Mars for a Whitman Big Little Book which he later expanded for publication in Amazing under ERB's name.

During the '50s and '60s, JCB's oil paintings of Indians, Mexicans, western landscapes, etc. were sold at an art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico and remain in many private collections. Most of these and many fantasy paintings have never been published. He was handicapped in his later years by Parkinson's Disease.

THE OAKDALE AFFAIR AND THE RIDER (1937)
  Wraparound jacket and 5 interior illustrations

BACK TO THE STONE AGE (1937)
    Wraparound jacket and 7 interior illustrations

THE LAD AND THE LION (1938)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations

TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY (1938)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations


CARSON OF VENUS (1939)
    Jacket illustration and 6 interior illustrations


TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT (1939)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations

SYNTHETIC MEN OF MARS (1940)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations

THE DEPUTY SHERIFF OF COMANCHE COUNTY (1940)
    Jacket illustration, 1 interior & 22 small chapter sketches

LAND OF TERROR (1944)
  Jacket illustration (28 drawings not included in book)

ESCAPE ON VENUS (1946)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations

TARZAN AND "THE FOREIGN LEGION" (1947)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations

LLANA OF GATHOL (1948)
    Jacket illustration and 5 interior illustrations

APPLE VALLEY, Calif. (AP)
Two former swingers, Tarzan and Jane, have been leading a quiet married life together since 1928.

James H. Pierce, the oldest-living screen Tarzan and first radio Ape Man, was the only Tarzan discovered by the character's creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Burroughs' daughter Joan Burroughs Pierce, who played Jane on the radio serial, liked her father's choice and married him on his birthday, Aug. 8, in 1928.

"To me, he looked like Tarzan," Mrs. Pierce, 64, recalls, "very trim and well-muscled and  his face looked like Tarzan as my father imagined him to be -- gray eyes, something of a Roman nose, and a beautiful smile."

Now, Pierce, 72, does his swinging with golf clubs, rather than grapevines. Standing 6 feet 4, Pierce wears glasses and his hair has turned white, but both his step and handshake still are firm.

Pierce was the fourth of 15 screen Tarzans and the last from the silent era. About his movie role, Pierce says, he's "not an actor at heart -- I was in it for the money. I never was hung up on the fact that I was the world's greatest actor... I was passable. I could do my job, what I had to do that was it."

His silent Tarzan film, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, was a box-office flop. It was released in 1927 when theaters were converting to sound, and it was difficult for silent films to get theater bookings.

"There wasn't too much dramatic acting available in the script or in the people," Pierce says.

The female characters needed only to react, and even Boris Karloff, making his screen debut as a tribal chieftain had little chance to act.

"It was kind of a hurry-up production," Pierce says. "The director was always a dollar short and an hour late trying to keep on schedule and keep within the budget, so they were always in a hurry. You didn't have time to rehears, you didn't have time to redo anything."

For $75 a week in pre-inflated dollars, Pierce was both star and stuntman, taking risks by doing dangerous stunt work.

One scene required the hand-over-hand crossing of a 60-foot-deep canyon on 30 feet of rope camouflaged with vines. The vines started twisting, but Pierce managed to crawl back to safety so studio technicians could attach wire hooks to his wrists before attempting to cross again.

Tarzan and the Golden Lion was filmed at a studio owned by Joseph P. Kennedy. Pierce wrote Sen. Edward Kennedy last year asking if he knew where an existing print was available, but none has been found.

Pierce was discovered by Burroughs at a party. He had been a star football center at Indiana University before  his movie career began.

In 1932, Burroughs organized and narrated a Tarzan radio show, casting his son-in-law and daughter as the principal characters. The 15-minute serial, broadcast three times weekly, lasted for 364 episodes. It was the first sustained "canned" show -- on discs rather than tape -- in an era when live radio was the norm. Although some predicted failure for that reason, the show ran from 1932 to 1934.

"It was a beautiful love story," says Mrs. Pierce. "It was a clean story. There was no obvious sex, just pure love."

She recalls that years ago self-styled censors who believed Tarzan and Jane were living in sin tried to have the books barred from the libraries. However, the censors overlooked the fact that the Ap[e Man and Jane were married by Jane's father in the book The Return of Tarzan," Mrs. Pierce said. "They thought they were living in sin, which would be perfectly acceptable now, but it wasn't considered proper 15 to 20 years ago," she says.

The radio show ended in 1934 because the producers wanted to replace a pregnant Jane, and Tarzan quit. Pierce returned to films, but his strong identification with the Tarzan character proved a hindrance when seeking other roles.

His height also created a problem, Pierce says, because the average height of leading men in the 1930's was about 5 feet 6. Western star Fred Thompson asked for Pierce because he wanted big men to beat in fight scenes.

Richard Dix also liked Pierce but was of average height, so "I would have to sit down or dig a hole in the ground or stoop" in scenes with Dix, he said.

Because he could only get infrequent roles in films, Pierce left Hollywood to join the war effort as a commercial pilot and instructor at government flying schools.

But Pierce was unable to pursue the flying career he had envisioned because private flying changed so much during World War II. He then got a broker's license and sold real estate until his retirement in 1966.

"I have no regrets," Pierce says about his life. "I'd go the same route again the same way... Everything I did fitted into the pattern of what I could do and wanted to do at the time. I never was tied down to anything. I was sort of a free soul: do what I wanted to, when I wanted to, where I wanted to."

See the Joan Burroughs and James Pierce gravesite in the photo gallery at:
https://www.angelfire.com/trek/dumdum1/12graves.html