Doc Savage |
by Arthur C. Sippo MD, MPH
Doc Savage |
Editor's Note: Before reading Further Thoughts on the Doc Savage Chronology, the interested reader may find it useful to read The Doc Savage Chronology.
1869 - James Clarke Wilder is born as the
illegitimate son of The Duke of Holdernesse.
1884 - James is physically and mentally precocious. Because of his
illegitimacy, he is sent to America by his father to be educated. He
attends Harvard University studying both the hard sciences and business. While
in America, he meets several of his mother's relatives from Canada and the
United States. One distant cousin is Richard Henry Savage. The older
man becomes a mentor to young James and they often travel together posing as
father and son. Wilder assumed the pseudonym "Clark Savage"
during these trips.
During this time, he also became acquainted with the extended eugenics program
of the Howard Foundation, which has been documented by Robert Heinlein in his
Lazarus Long stories. The Wilder family in America was part of the program
and as both a Wilder and a descendent of the notorious William Cecil Clayton,
James Wilder qualified for participation. He was reticent about becoming
involved with them but his curiosity was piqued and he decided to study medicine
in order to better understand human longevity.
1888 - Wilder was accepted into the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In his
3rd year, he became aware of his father's serious financial problems when his
tuition was not paid. James left school and went to Canada to supervise
his father's holdings there in the hopes of reversing the family's fortunes.
1895 - James Wilder disappeared and his father, the Duke, came to Canada in order
to find him. One of the people assisting him was Ned Land. These
events are documented in Ian Cameron's novel "The Lost Ones."
The book claimed that the story occurred in 1958. This is actually an
anagram for 1895. (This book was made into a movie by Disney called
"The Island at the top of the World" which returned the story to its
actual historical setting while taking serious liberties with the events from
the book.)
During their escape from the Viking-Eskimo tribe, the native girl that Wilder
had fallen in love with died and he blamed his father for her death. A
disgruntled James Wilder went home with Ned Land to recover and met Land's
granddaughter Arronaxe Larsen, the daughter of Wolf Larsen. She was a
naturalized American citizen because her father had been an American citizen and
she had been born on American soil. It turned out that she also met the
criteria of the Howard Foundation. The two were married just prior to
Wilder's return to England.
1895-1901 - James Wilder had a knack for business and was able to turn a
significant profit from his father's Canadian enterprises. He invested
heavily in mining, fishing, whaling, and fur trading. He returned to
England triumphant in that he had saved the family fortune. He hoped that
this would lead his father to acknowledge him as his firstborn and heir.
But because of his illegitimacy the Duke could not acknowledge him in the
Victorian climate of that time. Wilder watched as his achievements became
the legacy of his half-brother who was his father's only legitimate issue.
This led to the events related in "The Adventure of the Priory
School".
1901 - James Wilder discovered a treasure off Andros Island. His son Clark
was born on the schooner Orion. Arronaxe dies during a storm.
1902 - Wilder came to the United States posing as Clark Savage. With the
help of Richard Henry Savage, he used his earnings from the treasure to
establish himself in New York as a stock investor. He also elected to
become part of the Howard Foundation program. He met and married a Howard
family socialite, Brema ______ . She had eloped a few years earlier with a
non-Howard paramour, but her parents had had the marriage annulled. Brema
would become the only mother that Clark Jr. would ever know. She would
never conceive any children herself. It seems that Clark Sr. had similar
fertility problems to those that plagued Tarzan.
1903 - Richard Henry Savage was run over by a wagon in Utica, New York on
October 3, 1903 and died in the hospital eight days later. He was 57 years
old. His dying wish was that his 'son' be reconciled with his real father.
Clark Savage engaged the services of immigrant attorney Samuel Cantor.
Cantor contacted the Duke of Holdernesse and discovered that the Duke had
already interceded with the authorities to have all the criminal charges against
his son dismissed. The Duke had been searching for his son, but the trail
had gone cold in the Caribbean. He did not know that his son's wife
was pregnant and he had been searching for a married couple, not a father and
child. The Duke had already ceded a controlling interest in one of his
Canadian mining companies to his son along with the ownership of some tracts of
land and several commercial leases for mineral rights. Included in this
was ownership of the island where the Viking-Eskimos lived. (This would
later become the site of the Fortress of Solitude.) His intention was to
give his son a reasonable income while retaining family control over the larger
portion of the Canadian holdings for his legitimate heir. Unbeknownst to
the Duke, the company holdings that he had ceded were rich in oil and Clark
became a multimillionaire virtually overnight during the oil boom in the early
1900s.
1904 - Clark Sr. returned to Johns Hopkins to finish his medical degree and did
some post-graduate training in Neurosurgery. He developed a taste for big
game hunting and traveled around the world looking for sport. On one of
his trips to Africa, he met and befriended Hareton Ironcastle, a French
adventurer.
1908 - On the ill fated trip to Siberia, Brema Savage is killed.
1909 - A distraught Clark Sr. traveled to Europe to forget his recent loss while
leaving his son in the care of his teachers. While in Spain, he discovered
a lost Mayan Codex describing the location of a hidden city protected by
'dragons.' In 1903, Professor Edward Challenger had mounted an expedition
where he claimed to have found living dinosaurs in South America. Clark
Sr. wondered if the 'dragons' mentioned in the codex might also be prehistoric
monsters. He went on an expedition to find the city and its 'dragon'
guardians. This story was told in A. Hyatt Verill's novel "The Bridge
of Light" published in 1929. It is the gold from this lost city that
he bequeathed to his son Clark for his 30th birthday. There are several
mysteries about this Mayan city that are revealed in Verrill's story but are not
mentioned in "The Man of Bronze" or "The Golden Peril."
The original High Mayan culture had died out in the 1200s. A large Mayan
settlement could not have remained hidden for that long, especially with the
Conquistadors investigating every legend about hidden cities of gold. In
"The Man of Bronze" Johnny indicated that the settlement had only been
there since the 1600s. This means that it had to have been founded after
the more aggressive explorations of the Spanish were over. The Mayan
colony was a late resurgence of the Mayan lifestyle unknown to the outside
world. In Verill's story there was a centuries old sorcerer who befriended
and helped Clark Sr. He may have been the instigator of the resurgence.
The whole story of The Valley of the Vanished has yet to be told.
1911 - Clark Sr. returned to America with his beautiful Mayan wife, Itza.
She was never really a "mother" to Clark Jr. In fact he had very
little contact with her. After his father's return, Clark's education
began to include extensive Meso-American studies and he was taught several
native dialects from that region. Though he was curious about his new
stepmother, all Clark Jr. ever learned was that she was well born and of pure
Mayan stock. He was eventually able to converse with her in her own Mayan
dialect but she was evasive about her homeland and his father discouraged any
such discussions.
The elder Savage was obviously concealing something, but Clark respected his
father's privacy. Clark would always have a blind spot when it came to his
father. He would never use his deductive powers to pry into matters that
his father was trying to hide from him. He suspected that this marriage
somehow cemented a "deal" which brought his father certain monetary
advantages. What surprised him is that there was no obvious benefit that
he could discern. Clark Jr. concluded that this represented a long term
investment and put it out of his mind. His father had several of these.
Shortly after his return, Clark Sr. would form several holding companies for
overseas investments including the Hidalgo Trading Company. His son would
not be privy to any details of his father's business empire until his 21st
birthday when his father turned over control of some of these enterprises to
him. At that time, the Hidalgo Trading Company was a small private company
owned solely by Clark Sr. with most of its assets held overseas. He used
this company to purchase real estate and a variety of vehicles including small
ships and aircraft. It was supposed to remain in Clark Sr.'s possession
until Clark Jr.'s 30th birthday when (unbeknownst to the younger Savage) the
company by-laws required that he take over control.
Itza would never conceive any children by Clark Sr. and would die on the
ill-fated Maple White Land expedition later in that decade.
Clark Sr. had read the accounts of Challenger's expedition and he decided that
he would go to Maple White Land himself. He teamed up with French adventurer Hareton Ironcastle to plan an elaborate safari to bring back
specimens for study. The elephant guns used by Challenger's expedition had not
been powerful enough to kill dinosaurs and so Clark Sr. and Ironcastle designed
their own weapons. Ironcastle's was an airgun that fired an electrically
charged round that could paralyze a dinosaur from up to a mile away. Clark
Sr. worked with 2 expatriate German gunsmiths to develop a heavy bore dinosaur
rifle. It used a 50-caliber shell and had a maximum effective range of
over 2 miles. He patented the design of both the rifle and the projectiles
in America and overseas. To help finance the expedition, he planned to
sell commemorative "Dinosaur Rifles" to collectors around the world at
an exorbitant mark-up. The hunting community did not take his rifle
seriously. It was too powerful to be used even on elephants and was
considered purely a luxury collector's item.
The plans for marketing these rifles fell through when the Great War broke out
and no one was wasting money on impractical souvenirs. Only six of the
top-of-the-line weapons were ever made and these were later used on the
expedition. After the war had started, armored vehicles and tanks were
introduced onto the battlefield and both sides started looking for an effective
line-of-sight weapon to counter this threat. The Dinosaur Rifle design was
re-marketed in a cheaper mass-market version as an anti-tank rifle. The
American-made rifles were sold to both sides and several foreign companies
purchased the manufacturing rights for the weapon and its shells. Clark
Sr. made another fortune. This weapon and its designs would be used well
after World War II and were a continuing source of income for Doc. Because
of their innovative designs, both Clark Sr. and Ironcastle were inducted into
the Baltimore Gun Club. It was one of these six original Dinosaur Rifles,
NOT an elephant gun that was used at the attempted assassination of Clark Jr. in
the beginning of "The Man of Bronze." For some undisclosed
reason, Dent tried to cover this up.
1919-1934 Clark Jr. would attend the Harvard, MIT, Miskatonic, and Johns Hopkins
Universities. According to P. J. Farmer, Doc would receive his medical
degree from Hopkins in 1926. He would meet the educational requirements
for a total of ten doctoral degrees and be awarded one honorary degree:
MD (Medicine, Hopkins)
JD (Law, Harvard) - Admitted to NY Bar in 1931
PsyD (Psychology, Miskatonic)
PhD (Physical Chemistry, Hopkins)
ScD (Engineering, MIT)
DBA (Business Administration, Harvard)
DPH (Public Health, Hopkins)
DMA (Muscicology, Harvard)
EdD (Education/Linguistics, Miskatonic)
DSci (Geology/Paleontology, Miskatonic)
LHD (Doctorate of Humane Letters, Miskatonic) - Honorary
During this same time period, Clark Jr. was awarded further professional degrees
after a
short course of study in these fields:
DO (Osteopathic Medicine, Kirksville)
DC (Chiropractic, Palmer College of Chiropractic)
DDS (Dentistry, Harvard)
{Clark Jr. also did post graduate training in Neurology and Neurosurgery at
Harvard and Miskatonic.}
Between 1934 and 1965, he would earn further doctoral degrees:
ThD (Theology, Harvard)
PhD (Philosophy, Notre Dame)
LLD (International Law, Georgetown)
DLitt (English Literature, Oxford)
PhD (World History, Cambridge)
PhD (Physics, Princeton IAS)
PhD (MesoAmerican Archaeology, Harvard)
PhD (Biochemistry, Columbia)
PhD (Comparative Biology, Yale)
DCA (Culinary Arts, NYU) - A personal goal Clark Jr. set for himself.
1922 - Clark Sr. was named to the chair in Neurosurgery at Miskatonic Medical
School. It was here that he did the groundbreaking work on human brain
mapping that would allow him to modify memory and behavior. In
Miskatonic's Psychology Department, Professor Folger Crofton proposed a radical
new treatment protocol for criminal behavior involving intensive psychotherapy,
operant conditioning, and the use of psychoactive drugs. His peers
rejected this therapeutic approach as "tampering with nature" and he
was pressured into leaving the university. Clark Sr. recognized that he
and Dr. Crofton had similar ideas and commitments. When Crofton left
Miskatonic in 1924, Clark Sr. recruited him on a project to rid the world of
criminal behavior. They built the Folger Crofton Sanitarium in Rye, New
York, which specialized in the treatment of the criminally insane.
Secretly, the sanitarium was also used to rehabilitate criminals using Dr.
Crofton's revolutionary techniques and to screen candidates for neurosurgical
treatments. Selected candidates were treated surgically by Clark Sr. with
surprising success.
In 1928, construction began on a larger facility in upstate New York, which was
to be called Holdernesse College. This would include a neurosurgical
hospital, a large rehabilitation facility, and educational resources for
re-training the "graduates" to earn an honest living. Candidates
were first screened at the sanitarium to see if they were good subjects for the
rehab program at Holdernesse. Those who were not selected were either
treated at the sanitarium and released, referred to other treatment facilities,
or handed over to the authorities. Dr. Crofton supervised both the initial
selection process and the rehabilitation efforts at the College. He was
the master psychologist mentioned in "The Land of Terror" as running
Doc's criminal treatment program.
Eventually, Holdernesse College would become a vocational school and provide
associate degrees in various disciplines. It would also be the initial
training ground for orienting the employees of Doc Savage's far flung
organization. Selected "graduates" of the College's special
rehabilitation program would become the backbone of the International Detective
Agency, which eventually supported Doc and his men in the field.
In 1930 the College became fully operational and Clark Sr. was named as its
first dean. Money was tight around this time because of the stock market
crash and Clark Sr. had a cash flow problem. He was simultaneously
building the Empire State Building and Holdernesse College. He was forced
to borrow $250,000 from some New York mobsters in order to keep the college
project on track. This was documented in the Millennium Comics series.
Clark Sr. had a mansion built on the college grounds that he named Wilder Hall
where he lived. By this time he had hired a personal valet, Matthews, who
would attend him until his death in 1931. After that, Matthews would
travel to New York City and run a secret three-story apartment in the Empire
State Building for Clark Jr. as documented in the Marvel Comic series.
This was where Doc actually lived while in New York City. It was not
contiguous with the headquarters we know from Dent's books, but was connected to
it by a secret elevator. The apartment was sufficiently large to
accommodate Doc and his men along with several guests if need be.
There were several other facilities in the ESB owned by Doc. The occupancy
of the building rarely reached 30% in that first decade and there was plenty of
room to hide offices throughout the building. We know that Doc had
underground garages and offices on the first 5 floors which dealt with security,
correspondence, government liaison, information gathering, and other mundane
activities. He also rented at least the floors above and below the
headquarters to keep people from spying on him. We can assume that these
floors were honeycombed with secret passages and storage areas.
The headquarters floor was not the 86th floor since one elevator ride from the
ground floor could reach it. Elevators even today can only ascend 80
floors because of the weight restraints placed on their support cables.
Most likely, the 86th floor was an anagram for the 68th floor. This would
place the headquarters in the large central portion of the ESB with a cross
sectional area of 15,950 square feet. It would also be 4 stories down from
the ledge on the 72nd floor. This location would help to explain why the
sniper from "The Man of Bronze" was able to see into the headquarters
from a perch on the Chrysler building.
