Johnny Sheffield, who played Boy in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies and Bomba, the Jungle Boy, died on Friday. He’s not someone high on the list of actors we’ve admired, but we’ll admit to having spent many a lazy Saturday afternoon in our youth watching his pictures.

Johnny Sheffield dies at 79; played Boy in Tarzan movies
By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times

Johnny Sheffield, the former child actor who played Boy in the Tarzan movie series starring Johnny Weissmuller in the late 1930s and ’40s and later starred in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy film series, has died. He was 79.

Sheffield died Friday of a heart attack at his home in Chula Vista about four hours after he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree, said his wife, Patty.

“He was a jungle boy to the end,” she said, noting that her husband of 51 years wasn’t too high in the tree when he fell, but “sometimes he was way up there. …”

Here’s more.

Hey, young Mr. Sheffield got to spend several years being “mothered” by Maureen O’Sullivan, so playing Boy couldn’t have been all bad.