Brown Rice Burroughs

My father, Herman Jacoby, is now the mayor of Old England, which is purely a ceremonial position, kind of like the queen of Older England, Elizabeth II. He has an office in our city hall/youth center that looks on our biggest street and the local high school. The view actually bothers him quite a bit. As a person who was born in Old England, and will most likely die there, he hates the fact that the high school is named Gerald Jennings Municipal High School. Jennings was mayor of Albany. If my father had it his way, it would be named Herman Jacoby Municipal High School, a name he shared with his father, my grandfather.

My grandfather was named Herman by his parents because of the famous author Herman Melville. Of course, it was a mistake. My great-grandparents thought that Melville was the creator of the character, Tarzan. However, that honor belongs to Edgar Rice Burroughs. An interesting fact about Burroughs: when he got back from his 1910 vacation to Haiti, he was so tanned that people called him Brown Rice Burroughs. He thought it was a clever joke and repeated it later at several intellectual gatherings.

The person who didn't write "Tarzan": Herman Melville


Where Burroughs told people his new nickname: intellectual gatherings