Tarzan and Me

06/07/2005 22:35 Filed in: Culture Watch
In an earlier blog , I made reference to the fact that there was a picture out there somewhere of Ron Ely and me. Well, I found it. This picture is about ten years old. It was the mid-nineties, and former Tarzan and Miss America Pageant host, Ron Ely , had turned author and was signing copies of his new Jack Sands mystery novel, Night Shadows at the now-defunct Hawley-Cooke Booksellers (if you live in Louisville, you always have to refer to Hawley-Cooke as "now-defunct").

When I first read that he would be appearing locally on his book tour, I remember saying to Kathy, "Hey, Ron Ely's going to be in town!"

"Who's Ron Ely?" she asked.

Who's Ron Ely? Who's Ron Ely? Come on! Doesn't everyone know who Ron Ely is?

For me meeting Ron Ely was like meeting a character out of mythology. He was a hero of my childhood, a legend, the kind of person you don't expect to meet unless you're on a top-secret mission adventure. However, for those of you who don't know, Ron Ely was a television and movie actor most known for his portrayal of Tarzan in the late sixties and early seventies. No, I'm not old enough to have seen him as Tarzan in its original run, but by the time I was old enough to know who Tarzan was, the television show was on in reruns in the afternoon after school. He was also the larger than life Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze in the 1975 movie of the same name (I have it on VHS). Ely was also the first replacement for Burt Parks on the Miss America pageant after Parks was unceremoniously canned around 1980 after twenty-five years of hosting the show.

Some characters you build up in your mind when you are a kid and then you are a bit disappointed to meet them in real life. Well, let me tell you that even in person, Ron Ely is a giant of a man. If you look in the picture above, notice that even though I am over six-feet-tall, he towers above me. He was still in great shape when I saw him even though he was in his sixties. According to the Internet Movie Database, Ron Ely did all of his own stunts in the Tarzan movies including the animal fights!

The amazing thing about the book signing was even though Ron was there to promote Night Shadows, there were throngs of people there with Tarzan and Doc Savage movie posters, comic books, and other memorabilia they wanted signed. Ely was very gracious to everyone. He seemed to understand what he meant to so many people like me who had seen him on television and the movie screen so many years ago. Granted, he was never an A-list action hero of the kind we're familiar with today. But when I was a kid, he was one of my heroes. I told him so on that day ten years ago when I met him at (the now-defunct) Hawley-Cooke. He smiled warmly and shook my hand. He said, "Thank-you." I think he really meant it.

But for me, at that moment, I was seven-years-old again. And Tarzan had just shaken my hand.