Before They Were
Famous
A History Lesson
by Doug Hawley
Eddie Jones
ran a team of mules hauling grain from the
Sacramento Valley to the Bay Area in the late
1800s. He didn’t make much money, but
had a lot of time to read while driving his team
to drop off his cargo in San Francisco and other
cities in California where it was processed for
feeding the residents, particularly the vast
Chinese population which favored the staple they
had eaten in their homeland.
Although Eddie
never got out of California, he absorbed fiction
and non-fiction from far off lands. He didn’t
have much education, but thought up wild stories
of exotic lands. He even imagined travelling
through space to distant planets.
From his fantasies he wrote stories to match the
things that he had thought about. He
believed that his name didn’t sound like the
name of a writer, so he at first tried the name
of his transport company, “Eddie Rice Burros”. When
that still didn’t sound quite right, he
changed it again to the classier “Edgar Rice
Burroughs” when he finally submitted “Tarzan”
and “John Carter Of Mars.”
The Wright Brothers are well known as the
originators of heavier than air manned flight,
although some French and maybe some Russians may
disagree. It is well known that the Wrights
built bikes before airplanes. What is not
so widely known, is that between bicycles and
airplanes, the tried their hands at another
manufacturing project.
Their interest
in exotic women’s wear is not well known.
After succeeding with bicycles, the brothers
spent months in Tahiti. They were very much
taken with the sensuous clothes worn by the
native women. After returning and spending
seven months setting up their knitting mill, they
began their business between bikes and planes
– “Two Wrights Make Sarong”.
They did better with planes.
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