A Runner’s Guide to Treating Lower Back Pain the 1936 Boston Marathon, he led by a half mile. Wearing white shorts and a white singlet, with a boxer’s biceps and pecs, the stranger carried the aura of a Greek god as he made his way up the first of the four Newton Hills. His stride was smooth and loping and his concentration total, so that as he ran he seemed never to look left or right. His dark brown eyes simply fixed on the horizon.
The crowd favorite was the marathon’s defending champ, Johnny Kelley. A diminutive 28-year-old gardener from nearby West Medford, Massachusetts, Kelley was an Irish Catholic hero in a city teeming with Irish Americans. A typical news account of the era described him as a “smiling Irishman.” And when he reached the Newton Hills, he began to close on the stranger, ferociously, undertaking what was later called “one of the most furious runs through the hills in history.”
Lining the course, watching, were hundreds of thousands of spectators bundled in long coats against the April chill. Marathoning in those days was a spectacle nearly as popular as football or boxing. It wasn’t a mass participation sport, but rather a form of sadism practiced by a handful of brave—and, almost invariably, undertrained—young men. At Boston’s April classic, the multitudes placed bets on the harriers, as though they were racehorses, and then filed into the streets to watch, half-hoping that one of the 200 or so daredevils crazy enough to compete might actually die or at least faint from overexertion.
Was this stranger going to fall apart? To the fans, it seemed almost certain, and not only because he’d gone out like a ball of fire, taking the lead just 300 yards after the start. In the weeks leading up to the race, Boston’s sportswriters had scarcely mentioned Tarzan Brown, a 22-year-old Narragansett Indian and Rhode Island native. He was no slouch—eight months earlier, he’d won the 25-kilometer national championships. But still, to the scribes he was a little-known athlete from a federally unrecognized tribe denied citizenship, and an exotic. When newspapers did mention Tarzan, they often wove in allusions to “wigwams” and “squaws.”
Just past the 20-mile mark, laboring up the last Newton Hill, Kelley was so close that Tarzan could hear the Irishman’s fans bellowing at him, urging him to take over. “Each of those three hills leading up to Boston College found Kelley getting stronger each stride,” reported The Boston Post.
Unlike the spectators, Kelley knew Tarzan. New England running was a chummy society in those days that consisted of a few dozen fanatics who met up on weekends to duke it out in a medley of small cities—Manchester, New Hampshire, or Beverly, Massachusetts—on crowded streets that weren’t cleared of traffic. The community was tight. By 1936, Kelley had already been out to Tarzan’s modest home for dinner.
When Kelley caught his friend on the crest of that last hill in Newton, he gave him a pat on the back. Was this an elder’s kind gesture of support or a vaguely patronizing diss? Kelley’s biographer Frederick Lewis would translate it as, “Nice try, kid, I’ll take it from here.” But Tarzan was still contained, still focused. For a few miles the two men traded the lead. A little past the 23-mile point, Kelley began to walk “like an intoxicated man,” according to one news report, “his legs pushing out to the side.” He ultimately finished fifth, over five minutes behind the victorious Tarzan.
The following year, the Boston Globe sportswriter Jerry Nason pinpointed exactly where the Irishman’s crack-up took root: He called Newton’s last rise, a gradual but soul-sapping 88-foot climb, “Heartbreak Hill.” The name stuck, and in the imagination of many Boston Marathon aficionados, Tarzan Brown is forever up there on the crest of Heartbreak Hill, finding a bit more gas in the tank before hammering home for the W.
What Chari Hawkins Learned From Marathon Training of Ellison “Tarzan” Brown is more complicated, though, laced with its own pathos and heartbreak. Now, a half-century after Tarzan suffered a wrenching death in 1975—at the age of 61—it is at last getting the attention it deserves. In 2021, the Boston Marathon’s host, the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.), placed Tarzan Brown banners along the racecourse and enlisted Tarzan’s descendants to speak of his legacy at a prerace symposium. Since then, a Tarzan Brown plaque has gone up at a park in the runner’s hometown of Westerly, Rhode Island. There’s a new Tarzan trail in Westerly as well, and talk of a Tarzan statue at the Tomaquag Museum, in Exeter, Rhode Island. Meanwhile, Tarzan’s granddaughter, Anna Brown-Jackson, is now lobbying the B.A.A. and the City of Newton to erect a statue near Heartbreak Hill, not far from a three-decade-old bronze statue of Johnny Kelley, who ran the Boston Marathon 61 times (finished 58 times) before his death in 2004.
But no plaque or statue will ever capture the maelstrom that was Tarzan Brown, who lived in his own way, sometimes shining brilliantly, sometimes failing to meet expectations.
Tarzan was born in 1913, at a dark juncture in history for the Narragansett. In 1880, tribal leaders sold off the last patch of land within the state of Rhode Island on which the tribe had lived for 12,000 years and agreed, amid intratribal controversy, to dissolve the Narragansett Nation as a legal entity. The Narragansett did not become U.S. citizens until 1924, and Rhode Island did not grant them the right to vote until 1950. They were forbidden to eat in many restaurants. And they were beset by poverty—Tarzan left school at age 12 to earn money for his family. But even as he shouldered a man’s responsibility, he honed a boy’s ardor for the cartoon strip Tarzan and decided to take the jungle man’s name as his own. He liked “swinging from ropes,” Michael Ward writes in a 2006 biography, Ellison “Tarzan” Brown, “or tree branches, high diving into ponds…and, of course, running like the wind through the woodlands.”
Tarzan was beastly strong. He was able to lift a grown man by clenching the guy’s belt buckle in his teeth. In intertribal competitions, he shined in boxing and wrestling. He took pride in his mettle, and one day, when he was 11, he joined his uncle, a star marathoner named Horatio Stanton, for a training jaunt. After he hung, more or less, for 14 miles, Horatio’s trainer, a bar owner and bookie named Tippy Salimeno, knew he was in the presence of talent and soon began coaching Tarzan as well.
By the time the kid was 20, he was a contender. In 1934, on a hilly course in New Hampshire, he lost the New England marathon championships to seven-time Boston winner Clarence DeMar by just 30 seconds. At Salimeno’s Westerly bar, The Ritz, he became a tourist attraction. Bettors in fedoras and greatcoats crowded the bar as Tarzan, in training, nursed soft drinks, telling stories and jokes with larkish abandon.
As Tarzan rose, so did the Narragansett. In 1934, amid a nationwide uptick in sensitivity to Indigenous issues, the Narragansett retribalized as a nonprofit, and the following year, activist Princess Red Wing launched an ambitious monthly journal, We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back, anticipating the “sunrise of better times.” “Today,” she wrote in the inaugural issue, “is our memorial dawn, when every true hearted, red-blooded Narragansett stands together on the hilltop of hope.”
There was still so much to hope for, and for Red Wing, Tarzan was the embodiment of that hope. Movie-star handsome, he descended from the tribe’s royal sachems, or chiefs, and often posed for photos shirtless, wearing a headdress. The Dawn’s first issue carried a tender story about how Tarzan showed up at the starting line of the 1935 Boston Marathon just three days after the death of his mother, Grace, accompanied by 20 Narragansett supporters. “Her last wish being that he run,” the piece reads, “we felt that he was brave to follow out this wish.”
Tarzan ran that day wearing a singlet wrought from scraps of his mother’s finest dress and a pair of tattered high-top track shoes. The Boston Traveler pegged him as “an up-and- coming plodder,” and insinuated that he might follow 1907 Boston champ Tom Longboat, an Onondaga tribal member, to become the marathon’s second Indigenous champion. But midrace, his shoes gave Tarzan trouble. Did they fall apart or simply give him pain? The historical record is unclear, but in a valiant effort, Tarzan ran the marathon’s last few miles barefoot on hot pavement. He finished 13th that day.
How to Master the 5k his prodigious energy and trained hard, knocking out several 17-mile jaunts, and maybe even a 26-miler, in the six or eight weeks leading up to a marathon. Other times, he did almost no running prerace. Talking with reporters, he insinuated that chopping firewood was an excellent training tactic.
In 1936, Tarzan’s Boston victory ensured him a berth on the Olympic Marathon team. But when he traveled to Berlin to compete on Adolf Hitler’s home turf, he was likely undertrained. At first, 15 miles in, he was running fourth—and vying to make history. Earlier in the Games, the Black American sprinter Jesse Owens had laid bare the fallacy of Hitler’s rhetoric about Aryan superiority by capturing four gold medals. Could Tarzan win and drive home the same point? No. Near the 17-mile point, he seized up with a leg cramp and was disqualified when a spectator gave him a massage.
In the wake of his Olympic failure, Tarzan decided to redeem himself. In October 1936, he pulled off a historical feat: He ran—and won—two marathons in a single weekend. On Saturday, in Port Chester, New York, he eked out a 30-second victory over one of the world’s best harriers, Pat Dengis, a Welsh émigré and steelworker. Then he took the overnight train north to Manchester, New Hampshire, and nipped the local favorite, George Durgin, by 26 seconds.
Five days after the Manchester win, Tarzan underwent surgery for a hernia. The recovery took a toll on his running, but he was still the proud fighter he’d been as a kid, climbing trees, engaging in fisticuffs, and—after he finished 30th at Boston in 1937 and in 3:38, more than an hour off his PR, a year after that—he whipped himself into the best shape of his life. On the morning of the 1939 Boston Marathon, he woke up sure he’d prevail. “I don’t see why I have to go to Hopkinton,” he thought to himself, according to one news report. “The way I feel, they could give me the prize right here and now.”
It was chilly that day, and the racecourse was shrouded in rain. Tarzan hung back at first and only took the lead in the Newton Hills, where he passed Walter Young, a Canadian who was nonplussed. “Let him go,” Young soon said to another runner, “He’ll only last 20 miles.”
Young didn’t know who he was up against. Tarzan romped on to a victory that was, in the eyes of the press, a thing of beauty. He ran, The Providence Evening Bulletin would report, with “eyes glued to the pavement, jaw set… If he looked up at any time from the glistening ribbon of asphalt, we didn’t see it. He ran a superb race and fought off all inroads of pain and discomfort with Spartan fortitude.” By the time he finished, in 2:28:51, he’d lopped over two minutes off the course record.
Tarzan’s niece, Myra Brown, now 93, remembers her uncle as “ a comical man” and “overly friendly. He’d just walk up to anybody and jump on their shoulder and say, ‘Hey!’
“He was always coming to our house looking for something to eat,” Myra says. “To my mother, he’d shout, ‘You got any johnnycakes, Sis?’ Sometimes we’d go run a couple of miles, Tarzan and me. I was just a little kid, but I’d get way ahead of him, and then he’d pass me and stick his tongue out and go, ‘Na-na-na-na!’ That was Uncle Tarzan, always laughing and tee-heeing and being silly.”
But even as Tarzan shined, he struggled. In the days after his 1939 triumph, a story leapt from the newspapers: The champion was destitute. Even though he was a world-class athlete, he could not find a job. So, being the father of two young children, he used his momentary fame to beg the public for work. “I’m a jack-of-all-trades,” he told one journalist. “I’d like a road job with the state,” he told a Rhode Island reporter.
Tarzan did indeed get a road job, and one vintage photo captures him standing atop a mountain of sand, shoveling. But he wasn’t born to live within the confines of the white man’s world, and his wife, Ethel Brown, probably summed him up best when she suggested that Tarzan spent his life channeling a pre-colonial era of Indigenous autonomy and freedom. “Ellison was living 300 years too late,” she said. “If he felt like swimming, he swam. If he felt like working, he worked. If he felt like picking flowers, he picked flowers. There was never a dull moment living with Ellison.”
By 1941, he’d left his highway post to scratch out a living cutting firewood. In the years that followed, he drifted. At times, without forewarning, he’d leave home for two or three days—to walk through the woods or hitchhike to visit his adoring relatives. He learned stonemasonry, a trade practiced by many Narragansetts, but he couldn’t always find work, so he also cleared brush and dug wells.
When Tarzan was in his late 20s, running began to fade into the background in favor of drinking. His granddaughter, Melonie Brown, remembers how he treated the ramshackle shed in the family backyard as his personal refuge: “He’d keep his souvenirs in there,” she says, “and his old bottle of Boone’s Farm wine.” Sometimes, with friends, he’d push large rocks out into the roadway, then sit nearby, drinking. When motorists showed up, Tarzan’s crew charged them a toll before moving the rock. More than once, at the bars around Westerly, Tarzan chewed a beer glass, the shards bloodying his mouth, to win a free round.
It’s impossible to know what was going through Tarzan’s mind as he drank. There’s almost no written record of how he felt, and his survivors can only speculate on his late-life difficulties. His granddaughter Anna believes that trauma had just piled up on him. “He had three older brothers,” she says, “and they all died violent deaths”—one drowned, one was shot, one was stabbed. Meanwhile, she says, he lived through a time that was “tough on people of color, especially Native Americans. He went through so much. His life, it was like Heartbreak Hill. There were so many ups and downs. There were good times and bad times.”
The difficulties of being Narragansett only made Tarzan more proud of his roots. He always told Anna, “You are a Narragansett, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.” In the 1970s, he often took Anna oystering, cutting across seaside lawns to the water, following ancient routes plied by his ancestors. When the police came, to tell him he’d crossed private property, he’d turn genially to the trespassed homeowner and say, “Would you like some oysters?”
The man lived on the edge, glimpsing physical exhaustion and poverty, unbridled joy and extreme sorrow. For such people, even commonplace moments can be tinged with risk.
On the evening of August 22, 1975, Tarzan was at home, doing yardwork, when his 35-year-old nephew, Russell Spears, swung by and convinced him to join him for a drink. Spears is now dead, but Spears’s cousin, Myra Brown, says that before he passed in the early 2000s, he summed up what happened when he and Tarzan found themselves at a Westerly bar called The Wreck that night, at closing time, enmeshed in a racially charged argument with three young men from Connecticut. “I was running my mouth with people walking along beside me,” Russell allegedly confessed to Myra, “and Tarzan was talking to everybody too.” In sharp tones. “Tarzan was mouthy,” Myra says. “He didn’t take too much sass from anybody.” And his new acquaintances didn’t like his mouth, according to Myra. “They thought he had no business setting them straight,” Myra says, “because he was of a different race.”
The bar closed. The argument spilled into the parking lot, where the Connecticut crew climbed into a van. Philip K. Edwards was at the wheel. Backing up, the 26-year-old ran Tarzan over—intentionally, a prosecutor would later allege. The runner lay on the pavement, critically wounded.
An ambulance came. Byron Brown, Tarzan’s nephew and then a young police officer on the Westerly force, got a call. When he reached the hospital, Russell was standing over the bed, arms crossed. Byron speculates that his cousin was “protecting Tarzan: He didn’t want the doctors to hurt him.”
Seven months later the world would give Narragansetts like Russell yet another reason to be guarded and skeptical of white people. Edwards would be handed the lightest of penalties—two years of unsupervised probation—after wriggling free of three felony charges.
Now, in the hospital, Tarzan was dying. Desperately, Byron pressed the doctors to revive him. It was too late. “By the time I convinced them to put that defibrillator on his chest,” Byron says, “he was going. He was already gone.”
Tarzan Brown’s mighty lungs had powered him past Johnny Kelley on the downslope of Heartbreak Hill, then on again to glory in Boston three years later. They’d carried him along as he lived defiantly, removed from mainstream American society, and as he shared his singular restless warmth with his large, adoring family. But now those lungs had drawn their last breath.
