On Tarzan Brown and the People He Ran With

Love this photo. Does the man look stunned, or what?

Born of a September 22, track star Ellison “Tarzan” Brown (1913-1975).

My recent trip back to the city of birth, Westerly, Rhode Island, reconnected me with memories of Brown, a more famous son of that town. A member of the local Narragansett tribe based in nearby Charlestown, Brown competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics (on the same team with Jesse Owens), and won the Boston Marathon twice, in 1936 and 1939. He was the second Native American to win a Boston Marathon, and the first to win it twice. He also qualified for the projected 1940 Olympics, but the event was cancelled that year, due to World War Two.

After winning the 1936 Boston Marathon, that same year Brown also won the Port Chester Marathon, and the New England Marathon, which was held the very next day. I love the message on his short below: 1936 was indeed the 300th anniversary of the founding of Providence, Rhode Island.

Brown was known as “Tarzan” since boyhood, in obvious emulation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs character. He was born the year after Jim Thorpe’s Olympic wins; Thorpe had to have been a hero to him as well. Like Thorpe, Brown had his controversies. He was widely castigated for blowing one of his races in the ’36 Olympics due to a leg cramp. He seemed to love drama and attention, which made some people love him and others hate him. He ran the 1935 Boston Marathon two days after his mother died, at a time when his family was poverty stricken due to the Great Depression, so he wore an outfit sewn together from pieces of his mother’s clothes. Near the end of the race, his shoes fell apart, so he yanked them off, threw them to the crowd and ran the last several miles in bare feet, coming in 13th. In the 1938 Boston marathon, he took a dip in a nearby pond to cool off in the middle of the race. Before the ’39 race (which he won, recall) he was spotted eating a hot dog and eating a milkshake (or as they are sometime called in Rhode Island, a cabinet. Could the hot dog have been a New York system wiener?) He retired from competitive running in 1944.

The name Tarzan obviously added to Brown’s romantic cache, but somehow he was unable to harness his athletic success to a professional career. For a living, he harvested shellfish and worked as a stonemason. He resorted to selling off his trophies, and lived in poverty. Sadly he died following a bar-room brawl when one of his antagonists backed a van over him. The murky circumstances of his death only added to his legend.

The surnames of Brown’s family members and his acquaintances are still common in the area where I grew up: Wilcox, Babcock, Stanton, Noka. I have a nephew and niece who are related to these families!

As it happens, there are two other timely reasons for posting about Tarzan Brown today:

I just learned that my old Pop Warner football coach, David Mars passed away last month. Coach Mars and his brother Rollie, who also coached with my local league, were members of the Narragansett tribe as well. Their family was close with Brown’s. Coach Mars was a really charismatic and garrulous character. All the kids adored him. He came across as squeaky clean, and though he was strict and demanding (and extremely tall), he was never mean or scary. Read a wonderfully written tribute to him here; he was really a remarkable person.

Lastly, as I type this, we are just a few weeks away from the 350th anniversary of the Great Swamp Fight, the climactic battle in the fight between the English and the Natives of New England (Fall, 1675). As I’ve written before, this battle took place in my home town. It is well worth marking, though I fear the media will pass it by like a blip as they always have.

It is convenient for mainstream American culture to sentimentalize about Native Americans as a people who are long gone. But there are descendants are still here.