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HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1950-05-25, Page 3Made Big Fortune From -Nightmare Some ideas even their authors can't kill --and :Car7au was one of thein. It is over a year since Edgar Rice Burroughs declared that he was finished with his famous ape - :mail and would never write another line about hhn, Now Burroughs Inas died --hi his 75th year—but Tarzan continues to heat Ins mighty chest and to tree -swing, Burroughs was known as the world's wealthiest writer. In 25 years, his incredible ---and yet' cred- ible—apeman brought -hini in a per- sonal fortune of $10,000,000 and built up gross earnings for a world. wide Tarzau industry of .°,25,000,- 000. In a movie sense, Tarzan recently came of age. It is 21.years since Elmo Lincoln first went swinging through the trees dressed from head to foot in fur. Since then, there have been nine other Tarzans, in- cluding swimming champs Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller. pause Before Parley—Beforc Plond Lex Barker tool: over as Tarzan the Tenth just before his have an informal talk at creator's death. of State Dean Acheson, Brit Thirty years old, the nein 'Tarzan Robert Schuman. Schuman was an outstanding athlete at Princeton University and is the first of the ape actors to have his name. in the select New York Social. Reg- keep yawning all. day long," he said. ister. That's how it should be for, "Every day I.think I might start after all, the original Tarzan was writing again, but thinking about the son of all English nobleman—' it alone wears me out." Then lie and once sat in the House of Lords, promptly wrote a crime story with., But nothing that has happened to 27 corpses! his jungle creation cats be half as "My books sell and entertain, ire. astonishing as the real life. story'of cance said. "That's all I ever in - Edgar Rice Burroughs,' who once tended. People who want to,escape peddled lead pencils for a living and from themselves are -wilting to pay. pawned his wife's brooches to, heir) for it. 'That's the whole , Ta'rzan pay the grocer. The first Tarzan. appeal in a word—escape!' story appeared in a magazine as long ago as 1912, but it was ttiwo r - years before lie could find a pub- Orkney Islanders lisher willing to put Tarzac in book form. Real ProduProducersIn. all Burroughs was an unsuc- cessful businessman for 15 years Inhabitants of the Orkney before he wrote a line of fiction, His Islands, off the north coast of success gives a persistent Ile to the Scotland, have their own pet ideas legend that a rolling stone gathers on food production. They are work - no moss. At one time he tried to sell ing agricultural miracles. books on the doorstep. "The upper's With a population of 292,000-men,of my shoes wore out trying to keen women and children, 56,000,000 the doors open,„ he said. eggs per year' are being produced He sold everything• from cars to for export. This works out at 38 chocolates before Ile landed a job as floorwalker in a department pounds per head of population. store. Worried, plagued -with Sponsored by the Scottish Agri - troubled sleep, he used to lio awake cultural Organization .,Society, a at night, telling himself stories, cre-, super -efficient system of egg-nnar- ating diabolical monsters out of the keting has been developed. humdrum worries of the day. He The result is that today the value spun these nighttiiares to himself of. Orkney's egg exports is greater for five years before it occurred to than all the pure-bred Shorthorn him that Ise might sell them. Even and Aberdeen Angus cattle sold at then, he thought his stories so medi- public auctions throughout Scot- ocre that they appeared tinder the land. Orkney's fowl population, 4.7 pen -name "Normal Bean" --slang in fowls per acre of land,- is greater those days for an average brain. than any county in Scotland: His first stories -were fantasies set But the industrious Orcadians do in Mars chiefly for the reason that not rely solely on hens and eggs :no one could catch him out in his for their prosperity. facts. Tarzan swung out of the Year by .year, they are increasing jungle for much the same reason. their cattle stocks. This year they Burroughs merely swotted tip Stan- expect to make $3,500,000 from their ley's "In Darkest Africa” for his herds. background. He never went to Since 1946, they have increased Africa. their mills production tenfold. When the money did start coming To accommodate their money - in, it came in a torrent. There were spinning herds was a problem they Tarzan comic books, Tarzan games solved in their typically enterprising and chewing gum. At one time manner. At Government auctions there were Tarzan trapezes, swine- they bought up discarded At -my, suits, schoolbags, soaps, statuettes Navy and Air Force huts. They j and toys. even used these to build their own At 55, Burroughs took up flying. homes, strengthening them by He married a young actress for his building cement walls round thein second bride at 58 'and, eight years and converting them into. comfort - later, became America's oldest war able dwellings. correspondent. (Tarzan meanwhile They vie with each other in their ;was banned in Nazi -i Germany for vigorous efforts to reclaim what biting German officers and feeding was once regarded as 'impossible" them to the lions). Burroughs was laird. Arabic acreage in some 'cases probably the oldest man to fly over has increased sixfold since 1948. Tokyo in a bomber. But then he No wonder there are more than suffered a heart attack and his days 4,000 cars and 900 tractors on the of adventure were over. islands (for a population of 22,000), Shortly before lie died, he de- almost one car for every family. clared that he had tired of his ape- And no wonder they are known as :man. "I yawn when I wake up and the "Milk -and -Honey" Orkneys. A The Judge Steps Out --judge 'Roy Pcatn steles impatiently out of liis slwciai airplatle, having. colliplrled an 5000-111ile air tour. The jmlge is a 1200-potind YTereford steer that: won grand chttttllti(nusllii) flollor, and sold for $It5o a potttld at. the 0411 . lnirt•ttaiiwial Live Stork 1?Aiiw4ition. ' n „bra.:. ea,,,...+inA .n �, iA.- a.,u:.G;,, tackling Cold War problems,. the Big Three foreign ministers ancaster House, London. From left to right are U.S, Secretary ish Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin and French Foreign Minister gave an account of the plan for pooling the coal and steel industries of France and Germany. Catching Shark firings "Wealth .. . The shark—murderer of the high seas—is called' in France, a requin. It comes from the Latin requiem; and therefore :speaks for. itselfl But today, ratan -eating shark have, through the brains and ingenuity of a Frenchman, *,become useful members of society.. The story of how this came about has a dash of romance to it. The Frenchman is an ex=refrig- erator salesman named Andrd Couard. In 'a lonely spot, -sonic 200 miles south of Dakar in french West Africa; he has built a factory which is the ceintre , of what the French call "A Shark Trust." Cou- ard ha's already made a Vast fortune extracting an oil from sharks' liv- ers, which contains even more vitamins than cod liver oil,. But as Couard says, first catch your shark! ,Norway was the country which. supplied the world with most of its cod liver 'oil .before Germany over- ran her. When that happened, the." Allies became desperately short of Vitamin A—obtained from cod liver .' oil and essential to bomber pilots ` as ,an aid to night visition. So -'the Americain began. to liunt sharks off the coasts of California and'Florida. The U.S.A. was not thein in the tear, but khew what a vital contri- bution would be made if shark liver oil could be 'supplied. At that time, France had capit- ulated and Andre Collard was in Dakar with his -Wife and two chil- dren. Suddeinly, .he had enough of it. He assembled his entire fortune of 2300 packed his family into his old Renault, and drove southwards until he reached a place called Joal-Cap Vert. Couard knew that the waters around Joal were just where lie might find sharks. He decided to build a factory, but had no tools. First, he made his own spades—out of old petrol tins. He needed rakes, so he drove nails into sawn-off planks of wood. There were no wheelbarrows, so he used discarded hospital stretch- ers. Then he began to build with sand, sea shells and chalk, which tools five weeks to dry. That was his cementl Stones! -He hired a native canoe and fetched them from 15 miles away. Wood came from a near -by forest. Couard cut down trees and hired 17 ponies to drag them to his building -site. Meanwhile, lie was getting ready his first shark-liuntitng boat. She was called the Dorade. Madame Couard made the net. Knives to cut up the sharks Couard made from some old motor car springs; three hundred were made in this -way and riveted on to wooden handles. Collard bought an old lorry. From time to time lie removed the motor and let it run a mechanical saw, When lie could afford a jeep, the lorry became a fire engine. In his first year, Couard caught sharks which yielded 40 tons of liver, which, in turn, yielded 20 tons of oil. In twins of vitamins, this was 400,000,000,000,000 of units. Today lie has a flee!: of nine shark hunting vessels, and lie catches all average of 40 sharks a dayl There is no danger of the supply running out, because there are approximate- ly 4,000,000 shark, in the world's oceans. Every nuorning the nine boats put to sea, all of them, incidentally, built in Couiard's own shipvards, A ,a TTEP,, AI LRIcwr owmow rvAMt+ or °miD5- m1; TH108LIF, our, Re tI Awft THiO N . VE /LST alrr�it e ,r)4, �" •p �P 111%rr � � r 6 vessel called the' Vitamina leads the line, with the Thiof bringing up the. rear. Between them, the boats -carry 280 nets. When the signal is given, the boats fish over an area -of 10 miles. In each boat is a crew of nine natives. The crews know their prey are about when they see shoals of fish leaping out of the water, fleeing from the sharks, of which there are a dozen kinds. Some of them, like the'whale-shark, are harmless. But the hammer shark and particularly the tiger shark, a man-eater, are very dangerous. They have enorm- ous appetites and 'are always gorg- ing'themselves. 'Curious things have been found, its their stomachs. One had a tom-tom, half a donkey and .a human foot. Even when a shark is mortally injured, lie goes on eat- ing and. dies with his mouth full. Other sharks will set on him at such a time, finish him off and eat him —all but -the head. . Natives ,are .not afraid -of . sharks. They say they'll eat white meat only. If a, native's cork hat blows overboard, he will calmly dive after it. But he takes care to rub tar over the palms of his hands, be- cause they are whitish. After a shark is caught and killed, it is cut up and taken to .the factory. Th'e liver is extracted to produce oil. The flesh is boneless. Fresh, the meat is delicious and tastes ex- actly like tunna fish. Most of it, however, is salted, packed and dis- patched to various countries where it masquerades as salted cod. The less tasty portions are dried and ground down into an excellent manure. The fins are dispatched to China, where shark fin soup is a great delicacy. Teeth Make Jewelry The skins of the sharks are tan- ned and make a very pretty leather which has several varieties of pat- tern, according to the species of shark from which it is taken. The lining of the stomach is soft and durable and comparable to chamois leather. Inside the stomach of the shark are certain deposits which are extracted and sent to chemical laboratories. The jaws of some spe- cimens are often found in contin- ental bric-a-brac shops. Sharks' teeth are often used as costume jewelry. It is not surprising, there- fore, that Couard's £300 has been turned into a limited liability com- pany with a capital of 2100,000—ill less than five years! Couard makes his own anchors. He has a staff ashore of 120—cut- ting up sharks, salting, packing— besides mechanics, builders and carpenters, Between spring and autunin, the height of the season, Couard takes on . an additional 100 natives. Today lie lives in a line nine - roomed house with his family. His native laborers are paid the highest wages in French Africa, Ile builds French -type houses for thein and recently gave thein a cinema—built after a particularly good clay's shark fishing when his nine boats caught no fewer than 417 sharks. u Front the staff manager', office: "Have you any references'" "Yes, but they're like any photographs— itone of them does me justice.' IDEA! IF14V LOSES 1'r WE ,ANY AmoRt.. * �` O.IG.iITTda, YquHIDE ITTNIS 'I'IMiI. Saw Funny E Of Every1 Mark TNvain died 40 years ago on April 21. There have been many humorous ivri'ters since then, but Marls Twain is still the greatest of them all. He evolved a new humour — the comic twist to a sentence that brought to light an unsuspected funny angle. He was frequently cheated by people lie trusted; lost all of his money in wildcat schemes; but he never lost his sense of humour. He was on a trip abroad when a fellow traveller showed him a min- iature of his sister, and Mark Twain -.-his real name of Samuel Clemens—fintnediately fell in love with her, He -vent back with the brother, met the girl, and without any of the usual preliminaries, he started courting her. Olivia was not at all sure that she liked this shock -headed man with the queer clothes and uncon- ventional inanners, but he grew on her and she eventually capitulated. They were married in 1870 and from then until she died fn 3904, she was his other half, spiritually, mentally and physically. She helped him to work to a method and be- came absolutely indispensable to him. Mark Twain could see fun in everything. Once, when his wife was i11 in bed, he pinned a note to a tree in the garden which read, "Notice to birds. Please don't sing too loudly—lady sleeping".'t Then at the bottom he added a postscript, "Baritones conic back later." When he became editor and part owner of "The Buffalo Express;" he wrote in his first editorial, "I shall not often meddle with politics because we have a political editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not write any poetry unless I con- ceive a spite against the subscrib- ers." His quiet humour is illustrated in this extract from "Innocese Abroad." "Here and there on the front of the roadside inns we found huge coarse frescoes of suffering martyrs. It could not have dimin- ished their sufferings to be so un- couthly represented." When he went to England, the people took him to their hearts and crowds followed him from hall to hall. Everywhere .he spoke, the place was packed to capacity. He would walk on to the plat- form with a pained expression on his face and begin by saying he was deeply hurt, that he was not a thief and that it was all a mistake, By this time the audience would be wondering what on earth he was talking about. Then he would tell them that when he first reached London, the first thing he saw was a newspaper placard: "Mark Twain arrives in London." And under- neath, on the same sheet, "Ascot Cup Stolen." '0 d e , ing . . He enjoyed entertaining people "t 'aiid" when he became famous and the money was rolling in, he enter- tained lavishly. He was very keen oil any kind of invention and be- cause he never lost his bc•yish in- nocence, he was taken in by all sorts of people on the make. The final result was bankruptcy. When Americans heard that hey was brankrupt, they wereshocked, and there was talk of a national subscription, Many of his creditors waived their claims. Marls Twain might have been art innocent dupe, but he was also stulr- born and he refused both the na- tional subscription and the waived claims of his creditors. He would pay every penny in full. He wrote feverishly, and the world gained "Tom Sawyer Abroad," "1'he American Claim- ant," "Puddin' I -lead Wilson," and an historical novel published under the nom de plume, called "The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." He undertook long lecture tours and by almost ruining his health managed to clear his debts and leave enough to keep him collifor- tably for the rest of his life. For fiine years he was a happy man,, but when, in 1904, his wife :died, his wish to write died too. Then he was honored with the honorary 'degree of Doctor of Lit- erature at Oxford University and. he was so pleased that for a, short time the old Mark Twain revived. On Christmas Eve, 1909, his fav- orite daughter had a seizure and died immediately. The old man never recovered from the shock. He lived until April the following year and became rather eccentric. When people remonstrated with him, he told them that when Hal- ley's Comet reappeared they would have no trouble for he would be dead. And, strangely enough, his prophecy was true. When Halley's Comet did appear, he died. IT STILL PAYS! A traveller seeking advertise - merits for a country newspaper called on the village grocer. "Nothing doing," he ,,vas told. "Been established 80 vears and never advertised." As he turned to leave, the traveller said: "Excuse me, but -chat is that building on the hill?" "Oh, that," said the grocer, "is the village church." "Been there long?" asked the traveller. "Yes," said the grocer, "300 years." "Well," replied the traveller, "they still ring the bell." In Tulsa, Okla., sheriff's deputics watched' a drunken pig lurch down the street. They follopwed it straight to the drain pipe of a still. Art Without Arms—Arnulf 13rich Stcgniatm. crippled lid' paralysis, puts the finishing touches to a crayon drawing at his art publishing office in Deisenhofen, Germany. Now 38, Steg- mann was paraly7cd at the age of two and never regained the tine of his arms. He taught himself to draw by holding a pencil in his mouth, and now employs other handicapped pot , soles in his art first, which lie shares with an amputee partuer. ..... By Arthur Pointer .....