PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 16
I can't recall the occasion for this particular cover,
sent to me by James Frankiewicz, known as ACE 490 of the Art Cover Exchange.
The cancellation date is lost in Maureen O'Sullivan's hair but closer examination
makes it appear to be Feb. 19, 2009.
Perhaps the creator of this cover had seen an article
about the Palm Springs Cheetah, whose name was Mike, who died a couple
of years later:
Cheetah:
Alive and Well ~ Huffington Post
Here's an article which seems to have a pretty good rundown
of all of the chimps who played Cheeta over the years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheeta
Cheetah's Scrapbook in ERBzine
http://www.erbzine.com/mag16/1697.html
The John Wayne stamp is a commemorative issued in 2004.
It's an appropriate stamp to use with a cover featuring Johnny Weissmuller
as Tarzan since John Wayne was among Weissmuller's friends. Together, they
owned the Hotel Los Flamingos in Acapulco, which they ran as a private
club for their friends. See Photo 2 of 21:
The
Duke's Private World ~ Hollywood Reporter
Photo
with Wayne and Weissmuller on Santa Catalina Island
1. Postal cover of Feb. 19, 2009, features a Cheeta with the Tarzan
family,
but perhaps not the same Cheeta which was alive and well in Palm
Springs in 2009,
as a number of chimps played the role over the years:
2. Forrest Tucker, John Wayne, Johnny Weissmuller and unidentified
man on Santa Catalina Island
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 17
On Feb. 20, 1999, the Covermonster of Elyria, Ohio, struck
again, with a cover cachet featuring Clinton Pettee’s first-ever public
portrayal of Tarzan, with the cover painting for The All-Story of October
1912. The magazine contained the story, “Tarzan of the Apes,” in its entirety.
Since ERB mistakenly placed tigers in Africa in that first yarn, it was
appropriate that the Covermonster used the Year of the Tiger stamp from
1998, adding a one-cent stamp featuring the American Kestrel to bring the
payment for the letter up to the 33-cent rate that had gone into effect
since issuance of the tiger stamp.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 18
This is one of the first postal covers I ever received
from Charlie Delgado, ACE 20, of Elyria, Ohio.It was mailed on Feb. 21,
1998,. The stamp was issued along with 14 others on a “Celebrate the Century”
sheet for events of the 1900s. It was the first in a series of 10 stamp
sheets issued over the space of a few years to honor events of the 20th
Century. This stamp, which looks a lot like Tarzan himself bashing a skull,
was to mark the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which prohibited
the interstate sale of any adulterated or misbranded food or drug. The
image on the stamp is the label from a bottle of patent medicine which
claimed to cure diseases of the bladder, liver and urinary organs.
Charlie’s cover reminds me that Tarzan does have a mailbox
and sometimes gets mail-order products, but probably not patent medicines.
And one day, there was that incident on…
THE TURTLE MAIL TRAIL
Bobonga the jungle mail carrier pulled up to the leopard
skin-covered mailbox in front of the driveway that led to the Greystoke
estate and thumbed through the mail, unaware that a great lion was in the
nearby bushes, watching him hungrily with baleful eyes.
But just then Jane came skipping merrily down the driveway
with some letters in her hand. "Oh Bobonga," she said. "I guess my timing
is good today! I have these letters to mail...and...here you are!"
Bobonga frowned. How many times a day did he hear some
variation of that phrase about "good timing"? It seemed that whenever someone
showed up at the mailbox the same time he did, they felt it necessary to
make what they believed was a clever remark about "good timing."
“Good timing, huh?”
“How's that for good timing?”
“Well, I timed that just right.”
Bobonga, just like every other mail carrier in the universe,
had heard them all.
"Thank you lady," (he managed a smile), taking her letters
and handing her the batch in his hand, along with a large package. "Looks
like your man has gotten another shipment of turtle food for your pond."
"Oh, he'll be delighted," said Jane. The last time when
we ran out we had forgotten to order more. But luckily we managed to find
some at a garage sale."
"I didn't think they had many garage sales in the jungle,"
said Bobonga.
“Well, I guess it was more of an elephant hut sale," said
Jane. "But it was kind of the same idea.”
Just then, the ear-splitting roar of the great feline
split the air.
“Oh no!" said Jane. "I just realized we forgot to order
more cat food.”
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 19
On Feb. 22, 2016, the U.S. Postal Service issued this
Global Forever stamp, which will always be good for mailing a regular-size
letter to another country despite any rate change. The images on the stamps
have varied over the years but when the moon was used a cachet featuring
“The Moon Maid” by Edgar Rice Burroughs was a natural choice. The only
question then was, which image would I use, since the book has been republished
with different art many times over the years. I chose the 1992 Ballantine
edition with Lawrence Schwinger art, because it was a bit different than
the standard “Moon Maid” cover scene, which is usually Nah-ee-lah astride
a Va-gas.
The stamp on the cover was postmarked Feb. 22, 2016,
on the first day of issue, at the post office where the stamp was purchased.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 20
When the Postal Service issued a stamp to commemorate
the 150th anniversary of the statehood of Nebraska, I thought of the two
ERB characters who hail from the small town of Beatrice, Nebraska. Barney
Custer was featured in two novelettes, “The Mad King” and its sequel, “Barney
Custer of Beatrice,” and his sister, Victoria Custer, took center stage
in ERB’s time-travel romance, “The Eternal Lover.” I used images of old
covers from the stories’ first appearances in All-Story Weekly as images
for first-day covers. The Barney Custer cover features the official first-day-of-issue
cancellation and the Victoria Custer has a first-day cancel from a post
office near me.
The Barney cover also features the 3-cent stamp issued
in 1954 for the Territorial Centennial of Nebraska.
The Nebraska stamp was issued March 1, 2017.
1. Nebraska Statehood was commemorated on its 150th anniversary
with this U.S. Postal Service stamp. The envelope celebrates Barney Custer
of Beatrice, Nebraska, featured in two novelettes, "The Mad King" and "Barney
Custer of Beatrice." The official first-day-of-issue cancellation is from
Lincoln, Nebraska. Also on the envelope is a 1954 stamp commemorating the
100th anniversary of Nebraska's establishmenet as a U.S. Territory.
2. The first-day cancellation was obtained from a local post office.
This is known in the hobby as a "UO" -- an "unofficial office" cancellation.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 21
The Covermonster in Elyria, Ohio, used four Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen
O’Sullivan images on this cover and then applied his embossing technique
to give each photo a bit of a sheen. Postmark is via handstamp from the
Elyria post office on March 7, 2005. The Covermonster sometimes makes custom
address labels for the mail he sends to his correspondents. This one includes
a scene from the Filmation television series, “Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.”
Postage includes a 32-cent stamp of the Gamarasaurus (no relation to Gamera
of film fame) from the 1997 World of Dinosaurs stamp sheet, along with
an older, 5-cent stamp honoring John Muir, “Father of the National Parks.”
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 23
Here’s two Tarzan-themed covers with special pictorial
cancellations for March 11.
One is a cover I made to tie in with a special cancellation
offered by the Rockford, Illinois, Stamp Club on March 11, 2006, 13 years
ago today. The stamp club decided to celebrate Jane, a juvenile Tyrannosaurus
Rex who was born and died in Montana. Jane was dug up and reassembled and
displayed at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford.
Naturally, Jane ties in with Tarzan, so I used an image
from the cover of DC’s “Tarzan” comic No. 256, which contains the story
“The Final Quest,” tagged as “Adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Epic Novel…Tarzan
the Untamed.” It’s “adapted, all right, with Oldwick, Bertha, Tarzan…and
Jane…all ending up in a lost city, with dinosaur-like monsters to boot!
Art is by Rudy Florese.
The stamps are a 32-cent Stegosaurus from the 1997 “World
of Dinosaurs” sheet issued by the U.S. Postal Service, and a “Gibson Girls”
stamp from the U.S. Postal Service commemorative sheet featuring stamps
with images of the 1900s. The “Gibson girls” were art by Charles Dana Gibson,
who created them over a 20-year period at the turn of the century. Gibson
Girls were considered by many to be the first national standard for feminine
beauty. They personified limited independence, personal fulfillment, and
beauty.
- - - - -
In 2005 the Covermonster of Elyria, Ohio, sent me one from
the Garfield Perry Stamp Expo in Cleveland, The cachet was an image of
one of the four Blackthorne Tarzan comic collections, this one featuring
two stories by Burne Hogarth. The four paperbacks, each close to the dimensions
of a standard comic book, featured black and white reproductions of older
Tarzan strips. In addition to two Hogarth volumes, there were volumes for
writer-artist Russ Manning and the writer-artist team of Archie Goodwin
and Mike Grell.
The stamp is one of 10 featured on a sheet of Northeast
Deciduous Forest stamps issued by the U.S. postal Service on March 3 of
2005, just in time for use with the special cancellation authorized for
the stamp show.
Once again, The Covermonster used a mailing label he made
on his computer using art from the Tarzan Filmation television series.
1. The Rockford, Illinois, Stamp Club obtained a special postal
cancellation for March 11, 2006, in honor of Jane,
a juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex, whose bones were on display in the
Burpee Museum of Natural History.
This cover celebrates the "other Jane," the one who is the mate
of Tarzan of the Apes.
2. The Garfield Perry Stamp Club of Ohio had a Mexican-themed special
cancellation for its stamp show March 11, 2005.
The Covermonster made an envelope with an image of a Blackthorne
collection of Tarzan newspaper strips.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 24
The Covermonster of Elyria, Ohio, is always looking around
for Tarzan images to put on covers for me, and I am much appreciative.
Here are two of his efforts, both mailed on March 14, the top one having
been sent in 2009 and the bottom one two years later.
He printed both images on in black and white and then
used markers to color them.
The top cover has a fully-grown Disney Tarzan and the
bottom one has the youthful version.
The stamps on the top cover include a 10-cent stamp issued
in 1968 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Air Mail Service.
Last year, the Postal Service issued two Forever Stamps to commemorate
the 100th anniversary of Air Mail.
The other stamp is from the 1997 World of Dinosaurs sheet,
this one featuring the Ceratosaurus, which looks a lot like a T-Rex in
this closeup. It was a medium-size theropod and its bones are hard to find,
with the most complete skeleton being discovered in Garden Park, Colorado.
If The Covermonster had reversed the placement of the stamps, the airmail
plane would have been flying into the mouth of Ceratosaurus, but as it
is the pilot is making a getaway.
The Mowgli-Baloo stamp is from the Art of Disney-Imagination
four-design sheet issued in 2008. It was the fifth and last sheet issued
in the Disney series. The other three stamps on this particular sheet were
from “Sleeping Beauty,” “101 Dalmatians” and “Steamboat Willie.”
Each of the five stamp sheets featured one Mickey Mouse
stamp plus three other Disney characters. This fourth stamp on the 2008
sheet was the “Jungle Book stamp, which was about the closest the U.S.
Postal Service came to a Tarzan-like scene before 2012, when the USPS issued
the Edgar Rice Burroughs-Tarzan stamp in response to a suggestion five
years earlier by “XTarzan” Denny Miller.
This was mailed on March 14, 2011, when the first-class
rate was 44 cents so The Covermonster made up the extra two cents by designing
the cover on a vintage franked Postal Service envelope with a two-cent
postage imprint.
The Denny Miller-ERB Stamp connection:
http://www.erbzine.com/mag43/4395.html
1. Disney's Tarzan posed for this illustration on a postal cover
made by The Covermonster of Elyria and mailed March 14, 2009.
Stamps are 50th anniversary U.S. Air Mail, with the pilot flying
his craft out of range of the Ceratosaurus,
2. Young Tarzan, tantor and Terk are matched with stamps of Mowgli
and Baloo and George Washington
for a March 14, 2011, cover mailed by The Covermonster. The Disney
stamp was issued in 2008.
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:
No. 25
The art cover is by Zuetta of Port Neches, Texas, who
mailed it to me March 16, 1998. Zuetta used watercolors for this dinosaur
and background and added a 1997 World of Dinosaurs stamp featuring the
Camptosaurus, a prehistoric creature known for its loveof camping
out.
The “World of Dinosaurs” stamp sheet featured two large
landscapes full of the beasts with individual perforations for each stamp.
Zuetta include the “selvage” portion next to this particular stamp
A lot of fans probably have envelopes like the one shown
from ERB since they show up on ebay from time to time. This one was mailed
by ERB to a woman in Lowville, N.Y., on March 16, 1929 and bears a postmark
from the Reseda, Calif., post office, the name of the community before
it became Tarzana. One year and nine months after mailing this, ERB Inc.
would be sending out postcards notifying people that its new address was
“Tarzana, California.”
Lowville is south of Dadville, several miles east of
Lake Ontario – so now you know. Those were the good ol’ days when you didn’t
need to include your box number as part of the address because the mail
carrier knew where everyone on Route #4 lived.
The stamp is a commemorative celebrating the International
Civil Aeronautics Conference of December, 1928. ERB was interested in aviation
and, five years after using this stamp, he took flying lessons and bought
a plane, which he had for just a short time since his son Hulbert crashed
it two days later.
1. The 1997 “World of Dinosaurs” stamp sheet featured
15 individual 32-cent stamps of creatures one would not necessarily
wish to meet in the wild.
2. Zuetta got out her marker pens and water colors and
created this dinosaur to match the stamp on a 1998 “Welcome to the
Jungle” cover.
3. This 90-year-old letter mailed by ERB was postmarked Reseda,
Calif.
Before two years would go by, the post office was renamed Tarzana.
