The Rambo Apple

"According to author David Morrell, the apple provided the name for the hero of his novel, First Blood, which gave rise to the Rambo film franchise. The novelist's wife brought home a supply of the fruit as he was trying to come up with a suitable name for the protagonist.^[6] It is uncertain whether David Morrell's wife brought home Rambos or Summer Rambos. Summer Rambos would have been much more common, but since his wife bought the apples at a roadside stand, either is possible.

James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, sentimentalized the Rambo in his poem, The Rambo-Tree which appeared in his 1902 collection The Book of Joyous Children.^[7] The poem includes the repeating chorus:
For just two truant lads like we,When Autumn shakes the rambo-tree
There's enough for you and enough for me
It's a long, sweet way across the orchard.

A similar sentiment was expressed by "Uncle Silas" in his column for the September 1907 issue of The American Thresherman: "What has become of the good old apples we used to eat in the long ago down on the farm? The Rambo, the best apple that ever grew in an orchard, is fruit vouchsafed only in memory. [In Missouri,] no apple was ever enjoyed like the Rambo.... A boy would go farther to swipe Rambo apples, and subject his pantaloons to greater exposure from ugly dogs than he would for any other kind, and boys know on which tree the best apples grow. A drink of cider without any fixin', made of Rambo apples, will go farther down and awake the molecules of mankind in a greater degree than any other kind of cider. The world is growing wiser, but not in raising Rambo apples."

The claim that the Rambo was the favorite apple of Johnny Appleseed is false. Johnny Appleseed did not grow or sell any grafted varieties, and for the Rambo or any other variety to be perpetuated, it must be grafted. As Michael Pollan indicates in his chapter on the apple in Botany of Desire, John Chapman (1774–1845), for religious reasons related to the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg, believed grafting was an unnatural practice. Chapman was given the nickname "Appleseed" pejoratively for his highly unusual practice of planting trees from seed. The apples grown from seed are almost all small and poorly flavored, so with very rare exceptions, his trees would have been good for making hard cider only. Back when the frontier only extended as far west as the state of Indiana, that worked fine for Johnny Appleseed, since cider was a staple and the pioneers didn't have any other choice in suppliers. The apple tree in Nova, Ohio, that is more than 175 years old, can either be the last surviving apple tree that Johnny Appleseed planted or it can be a Rambo tree. It cannot be both, despite any marketing claims."