When actor Johnny Weissmuller, the first sound-movie Tarzan, got too old and corpulent to continue playing the loincloth-wearing Lord of the Jungle, the studio cast the boy who played his son “Boy” (the boy’s name was Boy) in the lead role in a new jungle-based film franchise called “Bomba the Jungle Boy.”
That was where the Boys were.
Boy was portrayed by young actor Johnny Sheffield, who grew up in the film jungle with Tarzan and wife Jane, and who added the chimp Cheeta to the family for chump change. But by the late 1940s-early ‘50s Boy was a strapping youth who could handle jungle evil doers and swing from trees, swim with crocodiles and befriend elephants and chimpanzees, just like Tarzan had done. Welcome to the world of Bomba, his new name.
I guess there were half a dozen or so Bomba the Jungle Boy movies, and I was watching one of them on a hospital maternity ward TV when my daughter was born. This was in the ‘70s just before the era when prospective fathers were allowed in the delivery room to accompany their wives as they laboriously produced their child.
So, after spending several hours before the big birthing moment with my wife as she endured the pains of impending delivery known as “labor,” when the water had broken and the child was about to come, the hospital staff wheeled her into the delivery room and shunted me off to wait in the TV room with a couple of other expectant fathers and Bomba the Jungle Boy on the TV screen.
This is a pretty nervous time for the expectant father but a lot easier than the role of the expectant mother. So, I leaned back in a TV room chair and watched the redoubtable Bomba do his stuff to fight jungle evils in darkest Africa or maybe on a Hollywood studio back lot — most likely the latter.
Then suddenly there was an interruption. “You are the father of a baby girl,” a smiling nurse said as she beckoned me into a nearby room where the new mother and our newborn daughter, wrapped in swaddling cloths, were waiting. I won’t go into describing that wonderful, touching moment. So many have been through it. It’s true love at first sight.
But what about Bomba the Jungle Boy? Not that I cared, but the baby’s arrival interrupted my watching it in the fathers’ TV room and despite the passage of time (try five decades) I never forgot what I was doing when I found out I was a father.
Segue now to the present, to the middle of a recent night. Sleepless around 4 a.m. (it happens), I rolled out of bed and made my way to the living room television, tuned it into Turner Classic Movies and there, at long last, was Bomba the Jungle Boy, the first time I’d seen him since the birth of our daughter.
I can’t be sure it was the same movie (there were several Bomba movies), but it brought back the memory of that day so long ago. Over the years I have often told this story — that I remember watching a Bomba the Jungle Boy movie when I first became a father. It impressed no one.
But I find it fun to revive Bomba this way. We’re a couple of generations beyond Bomba and Tarzan and that whole era when Hollywood shoveled superficial nonsense adventure into the theaters of pre-TV America, films to be picked up decades later and shown on TV in the middle of the night.
I’m not sure my daughter, the girl born to us that day, is aware of this tale. She’ll be able to read it now. She got a brother almost three years later (they still weren’t inviting fathers into the delivery room) so I repaired to the maternity ward TV room again. His arrival was less dramatic— no Bomba the Jungle Boy, no lions or tigers or bears. (What? There are no bears in Africa? Oh my.)
Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.
