Doc was waiting for me where I�d left him, hidden in a quite corner of my parents� attic, still patient after twenty years as if he always knew I�d return.
As I peeled back the strip of duct tape I�d wisely applied to ensure Doc�s
safety against intruders and flipped back cardboard flaps, I was relieved to discover The
Man of Bronze looked as good as ever--reclining on a throne in his ever tattered shirt,
poised with a spear at the ready as a Viking ship 
approached or battling a
werewolf that clawed at his throat.
Where have the years gone? How have all the Sundays passed? ���
It was just yesterday, that cold February Sunday afternoon that my interest in Doc was first piqued. I�d seen him around the drug store book racks I�d begun to haunt, but I had never given him serious consideration. Not until I picked up a comic magazine called Thrilling Adventure Stories. The mag was a mixed bag, with a super hero called Tiger Man, a jungle adventure and an adaptation of Lawrence of Arabia, none of which grabbed me.
In the back, however, three pages of black and white photos announced an upcoming film.
Ron Ely--who I�d watched years earlier as Tarzan--was going to be playing Doc. In the
photos he was fighting, riding a running board in the rain, performing brain surgery and
swimming under water. Action-packed stuff, even if he did look a little odd; the golden
blond hair appeared snow white in the pictures.
While John Wayne and James Bond had thrilled audiences of the fifties and sixties, the
seventies had known no great screen hero, the minimal magazine copy announced. Now a film
weighing in with a whopping $1 million budget, produced by �the great George
Pal� and directed by Michael Anderson of Around the World in Eighty Days
� fame was going to make The Man of Bronze the silver screen sensation of the new
decade.
Well, hey, if Tarzan was going to play Doc Savage, maybe he was worth a look. I�d
been a long-time Tarzan fan.
On the next trip to the store, I found a copy of Doc Savage No. 1, The Man of Bronze,
and took my first trip to the 86th Floor. A sniper�s shot slammed through Doc�s
apartment, and his bicep split his sleeve as he extracted the bullet from the wall. Ah, so
that�s why his shirt was always torn. It was the beginning of a long relationship.
That summer, the movie rolled along at last. Movies were a matter of campaigning at my
house. My father had to be convinced we wanted to go, but I must have worked on him enough
because we ventured out another Sunday afternoon to the Paramount in downtown Alexandria,
Louisiana.
The Paramount was an old opera house, the first place they ever showed movies in
Alexandria. It was the perfect place to meet Doc Savage. Ornate friezework still decorated
walls, and box seats with velvet curtains intact jutted out along the sides. It had a
flavor of grandeur lost in more modern theaters. Like Doc it was the product of another
era.
When the drumbeats introduced Doc Savage, I was snared. Having read a couple of the
books, I knew the things the film makers had changed. I found a few disappointments. Monk
didn�t look like I thought he should, though Ham seemed accurate. And what was the
deal with Long Tom? He looked as healthy as a horse.
Despite the problems, I enjoyed the movie, and its ending cliffhanger fueled my
interest in reading more of the novels. As the Louisiana summer crept onward, I plowed
through Kenneth Robeson paperbacks in and around lawn mowing and swimming trips. A shark
was sighted in theaters as the days moved on, but I stayed with Doc, meeting John Sunlight
and getting familiar with all of the Five.
Somewhere I read Kenneth Robeson was really Lester Dent, and I identified with
descriptions of his isolated boyhood. I was an only child, given to imaginary friends of
my own. It was somewhere around that time that I discovered I wanted to tell stories as
well.
I journeyed with Doc across many pages over the next few years. Some editions I had to
mail order because none of the single-digit titles ever seemed to be at the drug store,
but I built up quite a collection.
I remember reading The Angry Ghost by kerosene lamp one bleak January when an
ice storm felled power lines. It helped cope with cabin fever. The Crimson Serpent
came along while an aunt from Arkansas was visiting. That seemed appropriate since Doc and
Renny and the gang were in Arkansas in that one, battling evil in a Depression-era fantasy
version of the state that I didn�t mind at all.
Yet somewhere after The Roar Devil I must have thought I needed to take the Apostle Paul�s advice and put away Doc books, though banishment to the attic was only at my mother�s hounding to make room for the other books I was dragging home.
Even sealed away, Doc stayed with me. I missed out on the publication of the lost novel,
barely noticed the doubles and the creation of the omnibus editions, but the magic had
become a part of me.� In college, I started writing novels of my own, private eye
tales in homage to Raymond Chandler who�d followed close on Doc and Tarzan�s
heels in sparking my imagination. Sprinkled as well in those early efforts was action
inspired by my days of reading Bronze adventures.
The mystery novels stayed in my writer�s trunk, but I moved on to work as a
journalist at a newspaper located right next door to the old Paramount. I thought of Doc
when I covered its roof collapse on another Sunday afternoon.
��� I thought of Doc again when Azarius, my first horror-thriller
was published in paperback. It wound up on some of the same racks from which I�d
purchased Doc paperbacks. I�ve been fortunate enough to publish more novels, comics
and host of short stories including one called �Does the Blood Line Run on
Time?� about an assault on an underground train. All my work owes a debt to Doc, to
the spirit and pace. I hope I�ve done him proud.
���
None of those remembrances took me back to search for Doc, however. I stumbled upon the
last omnibus and bought it because I�d always wanted to read �Up From the
Earth�s Center,� but that was a quick moment in 1990.
���
What sent me back to the attic was a recent move. After years in an apartment, my wife
and I decided to purchase a house. We started shuffling boxes and filing up the extra
space it afforded quickly, and for the first time in an eon I had a lawn to mow.
��
� As I shoved my Lawn Boy along and smelled the grass blowing past me, I was
whisked back to that summer two decades ago when I rushed to finish yard work so that I
could get back to Doc�s adventures in New York City of the thirties, the South Pole
or some phantom city.
�
On yet another Sunday afternoon, I typed the words Doc Savage into an Internet search
engine and discovered Doc is very much alive. I landed on the Doc Savage: Arch Enemy of
Evil site which offered the unfilmed screenplay that picked up the cliffhanger that had
been dangling in my mind since the Paramount days.
I visited other sites with screen scans of the Bantam covers. I knew as I recognized
the ones I own, that just as Doc had rescued so many people before, now he needed
rescuing. So I drove out to my parents house and climbed the ladder into the attic so that
I could bring Doc down and give him a spot in new my house.
He doesn�t have to live in the attic anymore. I have a spot for him downstairs. We
have some catching up to do.
�