By Deanna Isaacs
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Burroughs was born and raised in Chicago in relative affluence. In 1900 he married Emma Centennia Hulbert, the childhood sweetheart he had met at a public grade school on the city’s west side. For the next three years he worked in his father’s business, the American Battery Company, then joined his brothers in an Idaho gold-dredging venture. When that business went bankrupt he embarked on a series of short-lived jobs, everything from policing railroad yards to peddling lightbulbs to janitors. He worked in the correspondence department of Sears, Roebuck & Company, where he pointed out that cutting four lines from a form letter would save $14,000 a year. This endeared him to management, but he soon left to pursue a new entrepreneurial venture. This time he was going to make a killing by selling a correspondence course on door-to-door salesmanship (written by himself), then letting the students practice by selling the company’s other products–pots and pans. When that project failed he went into another sales-training scheme with a physician looking for a new business after the government took his patent-medicine alcoholism cure off the market. After that flopped Burroughs was reduced to pawning his wife’s jewelry to buy food. When the pencil sharpener scheme also went bust he took one more job–as an advice guru for a national business magazine. Subscribers paid 50 dollars a year to write in as often as necessary for counsel on their business problems; in return, they received written responses from the eminently qualified Burroughs, complete with mysterious graphs and charts. But by that time Burroughs knew his real calling. He got $400 for Under the Moons of Mars (which he intended to publish under the pseudonym Normal Bean; an editorial error made it Norman) and immediately set to work on another novel, an Arthurian adventure suggested by his editor. Tarzan of the Apes was the third novel to flow from his pen.
Burroughs’s stories and the movies based on them made a lasting impression on a lot of young males. One of them was McWhorter, whose mother taught him to read at age five with the Burroughs books. Another was Palos Park resident Jerry Spannraft, a student at Oak Park High School in the 1950s when he began reading the Burroughs canon. By the 60s Spannraft was combing used bookstores in the Loop, collecting any Burroughs materials he could get his hands on: books, toys, games, action figures. Now he’s on the board of directors of the Burroughs Bibliophiles, a 700-member international fan club. About a quarter of his personal collection is on permanent exhibit in “Tarzan, Mars, and the Fertile Mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs,” at the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest. He and McWhorter will both be present this Friday, the 125th anniversary of Burroughs’s birth, when a plaque will be dedicated on the house at 414 Augusta, followed by a dinner hosted by the Burroughs Bibliophiles and its Chicago chapter, the Normal Beans.
