Your blogging about Bomba the Jungle Boy reminded me of a thing Pete Hamill wrote about the series. I found the following excerpt from Jim Trelease's THE READ-ALOUD HANDBOOK:
If you think today's best writers were all reading the classics as children, guess again. A few years ago at an event at the Museum of the City of New York, two men were huddled in deep conversation. There were perhaps no two people in the room more disparate than they.One was Louis Auchincloss, son of a corporate lawyer and one himself, Yale graduate, novelist, biographer, essayist, and president of the Museum of the City of New York. He's been described as the closest thing this age can offer in the way of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Anthony Trollope.His partner in conversation was Pete Hamill, eighteen years his junior, son of impoverished Irish immigrants, college dropout, sheet metal worker, advertising designer, journalist, and New York newspaper editor. While Auchincloss spent much of his life writing about boardrooms and bankers, Hamill won awards for writing about the Bowery and boozers. Yet here they were, deep in conversation. About what? If you'd been close enough to eavesdrop, you'd have heard them discussing the fact that Auchincloss had just found a used copy of Bomba, the Jungle Boy at the Death Swamp, the favorite series from both of their childhoods.(This scene was recounted by Hamill in Ronald B. Schwartz's book, For the Love of Books (Grosset/Putnam, 1999).
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I read somewhere, long ago in the mists of time, that scientists utilized the movies of Johnny Sheffield to study the development of the human anatomy. He was a perfect subject since he spent so many of his growing years filmed in a loin cloth.
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