“Comedies Filmed by Rolin Players”

There’s a fair amount of contradiction around the founding of the Rolin Film Company, the corporation that became the Hal Roach Studio, in 1914.

Some claims arose at the time, when Rolin needed to look more stable and well financed than it really was. Others came later as Roach burnished his legend with rags-to-riches details.

Richard Lewis Ward examined the legal papers for his History of the Hal Roach Studio. Those records show that Hal Roach, Dan Linthicum (1878–1952), and I. H. Nance incorporated the Rolin Film Company on 23 July 1914. Each man bought one share for $100 and had a seat on the board.

In August, at the first board meeting, Roach said he had the cash to pay for nineteen more shares, which would be a total of $2,000. Linthicum said he would buy more later. Nance resigned; he appears to have been involved only because the law required three incorporators. An automobile dealer named Dwight Whiting (1891–1974) enthusiastically took his place.

From the auto dealership Whiting brought along his assistant, Warren Doane (1890–1964), who was also put on the board, though he was still a junior manager at most and didn’t own stock.

Roach’s friend and fellow actor Harold Lloyd recalled in his 1928 autobiography:

Roach had an idea that there would be novelty and money in kid pictures—a conviction which he vindicated eventually with the Our Gang comedies. He hired two boys and built his first picture, a one-reel comedy, around their boisterous day at the beach. I was the adult lead—the chauffeur who chaperoned them and bore the brunt of their boyish mischief, the little dears.

If that was indeed the first Rolin movie, it has entirely vanished. As have several more movies the company made in its first year.

But the company was definitely filming. On 28 September, the Morning Tribune of Los Angeles carried an article headlined: “Comedies Filmed by Rolin Players / H. E. Roach Is Directing Work of Latest Company Entering Silent Drama.”

That article stated that the Rolin Film Company had “incorporated under the laws of California, with a capital of $10,000, all of which has been paid in.” It had “rented offices at the Los Angeles Film Corporation studio, 406 Court Street,” better known as the Bradbury Mansion.

The article went on to say that Rolin had a distribution deal with the Sawyer outfit in New York, that in the previous week Roach had directed a one-reeler called “A Barber for a Day,” and that the acting company included Harold Lloyd. The last statement was reliable.

Sawyer was in business only from May 1914 to January 1915, never getting around to issuing a Rolin film. The movie about “a correspondence school woman barber” has disappeared.

As for the money behind the company, it wasn’t close to $10,000, even if the Moving Picture World repeated that figure in June 1915. Working from company files, Craig Calman has written: “Frick, Martin & Co., an Investment Securities firm, affirmed in an October 1, 1928 document that Rolin ‘was started with a paid up capital of $7,500’,” but that number seems inflated as well. The August 1914 board meeting discussed only $6,000 of shares, and not all of those were sold.

Other sources understate the working capital, going as low as $200 or $300. The 10 Jan 1937 Los Angeles Times reported that Roach had started production with $850 in January 1914, which was months before incorporation and less than he proffered at the time. That story appears to have been shaped with hindsight to make the company’s rise look even more remarkable. 

Whatever the exact figures, by the summer of 1914 the Rolin Picture Company was renting space, buying film, and paying wages. Hal Roach, previously a movie player and occasional assistant director hustling to earn $5 per day, suddenly had a couple thousand dollars to fund his own production company.

TOMORROW: Where did that money come from?

“I suspected for a while that he had robbed a bank or something”

In 1914, Hal Roach decided to go behind the camera and make his own movies.

Roach’s fellow bit player Harold Lloyd described that transition in an article published by the Los Angeles Record in 1925, one of a series “Harold Lloyd’s Autobiography.” Eric Shanower kindly alerted me to this source.

This is how the 9 September installment begins:

Finally Hal Roach and I caught on with the “Wizard of Oz” Company. I played in animal comedies, all right. I was the animals. I played things nobody ever heard of—Gillikens and Mauchkins [sic] and Kalidahs.

One day Hal and I were sitting on a little bench in the sun, made up as Hottentots [sic]. All we had on was a lot of terrible colored grease paint and some grass skirts. And he said to me, “Some day I’m going to make a picture myself. I’m going to make a comedy. People like to laugh and there’s always room for real comedy.”

I was terribly impressed, though I couldn’t show it through my makeup. “And when I do, Harold,” he said, “you’ll be in it.”

I was. A couple weeks later he called me up and said that some distant relative of his had died and left him some money. I suspected for a while that he had robbed a bank or something, but I found out eventually that it was on the level. It was only a few hundred dollars, but it was the beginning of things for us.

That first picture cost $200 and it was exclusively exteriors.

We didn’t have any studio. Sunshine was free and plentiful, and Westlake park was big and roomy. Finally, we found a vacant house and we worked in it for a week before the owner caught us and threw us out. At last we found another old house, unfurnished, where some other little companies had offices. The only place we could afford was the main hall where everybody had to pass back and forth, but we thought it was pretty swell.

Westlake Park is now MacArthur Park, of melting-in-the-rain fame.

When Lloyd published his autobiography in book form as An American Comedy in 1928, he recounted those events more briskly:

Roach surprised me—though “surprise” is a faint word for it—one day by announcing that he had got hold of several thousand dollars with which he intended making pictures on his own. He would be the director and I could be the first brick in his company at the usual three dollars a day. A few days later he rented a corner in the Bradbury mansion as an office, with the use of a stage in the back yard, and Hal Roach was a producer.

Both versions came more than ten years after the event, and Lloyd was probably more interested in telling an entertaining story than in getting all the details and timing exact. Had Roach come into “a few hundred dollars” from “a distant relative” or “several thousand dollars” from an unstated source? The most reliable fact seems to be that Lloyd was very surprised that Roach suddenly had just enough money to set up a production company.

Legal filings and newspaper clippings from 1914 help us nail down some details.

TOMORROW: The Rolin Film Company starts rolling.

When Harold Met Hal

Harold Eugene “Hal (or sometimes Harry)” Roach was born in Elmira, New York, in 1892.

As a boy, Hal admired the local celebrity Mark Twain, and at the age of seventeen he lit out for the territories.

After prospecting in Alaska, Roach moved south. In 1912 he was working as a trucking supervisor in Los Angeles when he saw an advertisement for cowboys to appear in a motion picture.

Roach had the clothes, the riding skills, and, it turned out, more knowledge of how a roulette wheel worked than the Bison Studio’s director. A role as a croupier and the prospect of daily pay turned him into a movie actor.

Hustling for bit parts, Roach crossed paths with Harold Lloyd (1893–1971). This young actor had found work with the stock company of Oliver Morosco, producer of L. Frank Baum’s Tik-Tok Man of Oz—but he kept away from that musical play, not wanting to become a “chorus man.” Needing more work to keep himself fed, Lloyd tried motion pictures.

Soon Roach was in the orbit of the action star J. Warren Kerrigan. Lloyd was doing a lot of work for the director J. Farrell MacDonald. When MacDonald directed Kerrigan in Samson (released in spring 1914), Roach and Lloyd both appeared in the movie under Biblical beards.

The new Oz Film Manufacturing Company hired MacDonald to direct The Patchwork Girl of Oz and other adaptations of Baum’s fairy tales. In his 1928 autobiography, An American Comedy, Lloyd wrote: “I found Roach working here and he and I clowned as Hottentots and similar savages in breechclouts and bolomania, a heavy but easily removed body paint.”

Baum actually called his characters Tottenhots, basing them on the hoary European idea of the Hottentot but also giving them their own voice and moving slightly past that stereotype. As I pointed out in my article “The Troublesome Tottenhots,” published in the spring 2013 Baum Bugle, the Oz Film Manufacturing Company showed a Tottenhot serving on a jury in the Emerald City at a time when African-Americans were excluded from juries in a large part of their country.

Reference books from the 1970s onward say “Al Roach” performed the role of the Cowardly Lion in some of those early Oz films. That rendering of Hal Roach’s name appears in Einar Lauritzen and Gunnar Lundquist’s American Film-Index 1908–1915, a seminal reference book published in 1976, but I don’t see signs of a lion there. The costume’s mask makes it impossible to confirm who’s inside. Any early-20th-century source for this credit is welcome.

TOMORROW: The big idea.

“Mrs. Woodbury then secured a complaint against Mulligan”

Sometime in the winter of 1911, Helen G. Woodbury fired her chauffeur, F. J. Mulligan, and turned him out of her home in Los Angeles.

Early on the morning on 22 March, Mulligan returned to the house. The Los Angeles Examiner reported that he came for “some clothes which he had left there when discharged.”

Other newspapers focused on a different detail. The Los Angeles Herald said Mulligan returned “while drinking.” The Los Angeles Times said he was “partially under the influence of liquor.”

All three newspapers agreed that Mulligan behaved rudely to Woodbury. He “called her names,” “using profane and abusive language.” She “told him to keep quiet and go away.” When he didn’t, she called the police.

The Times stated:

Patrolmen West and Cornwall were sent from the University Police Station and they placed Mulligan under arrest. Mrs. Woodbury then secured a complaint against Mulligan from Deputy District-Attorney [Michael Francis] Shannon and had the case brought up in Police Court.

The charge was disturbing the peace. Presiding over the trial was police judge Henry H. Rose (shown above). Like Woodbury, he had come to Los Angeles from Wisconsin. He was soon to be the city’s mayor.

The newspapers made a point of Woodbury’s gentility. The Times headlines referred to her as “Wealthy Woman” and “Rich Resident.” She had a “fine home on Van Ness avenue,” in “the exclusive residence district.”

“Mulligan had sobered up by the time he was taken into court and he pleaded guilty,” the Times recounted. But, said the Herald, “he evidently didn’t expect as stiff a sentence” as the judge handed down: a $20 fine or twenty days in the city jail.

“Mulligan searched his pockets,” said the Times, “but found only a few dollars.” The Herald pegged the sum at “$2 and some change.” Sorrowfully, Mulligan asked to speak to Woodbury.

“She made her way to the prisoner’s rail,” the Herald stated. “A whispered conversation ensued,” reported the Times. Mulligan, per the Herald,

asked her to pay the fine. If she would, he said he would behave.

“No, no, I can’t trust you; you’ve betrayed my confidence before,” she answered.

“Try me just once more,” Mulligan pleaded. “I’ll behave and will pay you back.”

“That isn’t the question,” she replied, and then after a moment of reflection: “Promise before these officers that you will not disturb me any more and I’ll pay your fine.”

Patrolmen West and Cornwall witnessed Mulligan’s “promise to behave himself in the future and return the amount advanced as soon as he could.”

Woodbury “then handed the court clerk $20,” said the Times. Judge Rose “severely reprimanded Mulligan and told him that in the future he would better curb his appetite for liquor.”

The local newspapers played up the paradox of Woodbury paying Mulligan’s fine after he had “berated her.” The Times’s main headline was “PAYS FOR NAMES HE CALLED HER.” The Examiner said Woodbury acted “rather than see him go to jail.”

But the press didn’t praise Helen Woodbury for being merciful. Instead, they emphasized her inconsistency: “after resolutely prosecuting a charge,” she had “evidently experienced a change of heart.” The coverage seemed to hint her decision was personal, not principled.

The Herald’s article concluded, “the principals walked out of court”—together? Was this case the outcome of a lovers’ quarrel? What exactly did Mulligan shout at Woodbury? Would their future relationship go beyond him owing her $20?

This would not be the last time that Los Angeles newspapers reported on Helen G. Woodbury being caught in a mysterious dispute with a man.

TOMORROW: A cowboy from Elmira.

(The second photograph above shows Sgt. Judson S. Cornwall, killed on a police detail at a speedway in 1926. He was a patrolman in 1911, but the LA force then also included a W. A. Cornwall, so I can’t say which man responded to Mrs. Woodbury’s call. Surprisingly, there’s only one candidate for the other patrolman: Evert A. West.)

Mrs. Helen Woodbury of Los Angeles

On 10 Dec 1907, Mrs. F. E. Woodbury of Milwaukee checked into the Hayward Hotel in Los Angeles, California (shown here).

Given our present concerns about privacy, it’s eye-opening to see that 120 years ago the Los Angeles Times was reporting all the new arrivals in the city for any local to read about. (The paper also reported the names of people from LA registered at New York hotels.)

Online newspaper databases also mean I can track Helen G. Woodbury traveling halfway across the country from her husband, the mining engineer Frederick E. Woodbury. That fact gives me yet more pause.

Helen must have enjoyed southern California because a year later the 10 November Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that she had commissioned a one-story home at 1624 Van Ness Avenue (shown below).

The US Census for 1910 found Helen living in Los Angeles while Frederick continued to live in Milwaukee.

In March 1910 the Los Angeles Times listed “Mrs. Helen Woodbury” among the Angelenos checked into San Francisco hotels. In February 1911 the Los Angeles Examiner listed “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury…of Los Angeles” registered at the Casa Loma Hotel in Redlands.

In 1914, after Frederick Woodbury was killed at the Newport Mine, Milwaukee newspapers variously stated that “Mrs. Woodbury has been living in California because of her health, while Mr. Woodbury made his home in the Milwaukee club,” and Mrs. Woodbury was “spending the winter” in California.

Helen Woodbury may indeed have been spending only part of the year in California—all the newspaper mentions of her there come from the months November through March. But during these years, the name of “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury” stopped appearing in the Milwaukee papers at all.

Whether Helen initially went to California for her health, whether she was there for the whole year or merely a large part, whether Helen and Frederick had made an explicit agreement about their marriage, they definitely appear to have lived separately in the early 1910s.

TOMORROW: The drunken chauffeur.

When Helen Grant Duncan Became Mrs. F. E. Woodbury

Helen Grant Duncan was born on Michigan’s upper peninsula in 1865, the oldest of four children. Her father was superintendent of a mining company.

Helen studied music and art at Oberlin in 1881–82 and 1884–86. College friends called her Nellie.

At the end of 1887, Helen Grant Duncan married the mining engineer Frederick E. Woodbury. He was in his late twenties, having started work under his father and then spent two years as a “special student” at MIT.

The American Institute of Mining Engineers remembered Frederick this way:

He was, as a young man, intellectually keen, with a zest for life, yet generous, considerate, and of a peculiarly clean mind. The passing years with their responsibilities and trials seem to have developed the strong fiber of this man without producing anything of harshness. His character was marked by a most unusual blending of gentleness and strength.

Woodbury worked at a few mining companies over the next quarter-century, developing new methods and inventions, rising in the executive ranks.

As “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury,” wife of an engineer in the northern Michigan town of Calumet, Helen continued her artistic pursuits. In 1895, for instance, she ordered a Knabe grand piano from Detroit. The couple doesn’t appear to have ever had children.

On 24 Mar 1896, the Calumet News reported that Helen Woodbury had just “returned from an extended visit to the Alma Sanitarium.” Three weeks later, on 14 April, the same newspaper said she and a friend had taken a train to Chicago for “an advanced class on china painting.”

In 1900, Frederick Woodbury moved from Calumet to Milwaukee, a larger and less remote city. Helen Woodbury became involved in the People’s Pulpit, a weekly lecture series at the Pabst Theater; she played the organ at one gathering in June 1906, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. On 26 Nov 1907, the Milwaukee Daily News reported that she would “entertain the Tuesday Musical club this evening.”

Soon, however, Helen Woodbury would leave the Midwest for Los Angeles.

TOMORROW: California.

The Death of Frederick E. Woodbury

On Wednesday, 21 Jan 1914, the mining engineer and executive Frederick E. Woodbury (b. 1862) was killed in an accident inside the Newport Mine in Ironwood, Michigan.

“Mr. Woodbury was almost instantly killed,” the Calumet News reported the next day. “He was inspecting a shaft at the Newport mine in company with General Manager E. L. Cullen and Capt. Grigg, and was in the ladderway looking up the shaft. He did not notice the skip approaching from below and was caught between the skip and the steel set.”

The Grand Rapids Press was blunt: “It is said he looked down the shaft and the descending skip cut his head in two.” (So was the skip moving up or down? Does that matter?)

The Milwaukee Journal carried the sad news on the day of the accident. It identified Woodbury as “general manager of the iron, coke, gas and turpentine interests of Ferdinand Schlesinger,” a company in that city, and went on:

Mr. Woodbury was about 50. [Born in April 1862, he was 51.] He was a mining engineer, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly with the Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. Twelve years ago he became mine manager at the Newport Mining Co. About eight years ago he was transferred to Milwaukee as consulting expert, and later made vice president of the company.

Colleagues were shocked and saddened. “He was a man of splended attainments in his profession,” said A. A. Schlesinger, an executive at Woodbury’s employer.

Woodbury left behind a widow. The Milwaukee Journal stated: “Mrs. Woodbury has been living in California because of her health, while Mr. Woodbury made his home in the Milwaukee club. They had no children.”

Woodbury’s body came back to the city on 22 January, said that day’s Milwaukee Daily News. “Arrangements for the funeral will not be made until Mrs. Woodbury arrives here from California.” Two days later the same paper said the widow had been “spending the winter” in California and was due to arrive the next day.

On 5 October, the Duluth News Tribune reported that H. J. Schlesinger and E. L. Cullen, the manager with Woodbury when he was killed, had established a scholarship in geology and mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin in his memory. The first recipient was the son of a man working in the Ironwood mines.

The photo of Woodbury above comes from a profile in Tom Stout’s Montana, Its Story and Biography (1921). That book reprinted an obituary which first appeared in the May 1914 issue of the Bulletin of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, overrunning with praise:

His character was marked by a most unusual blending of gentleness and strength. The world needs such men and his untimely loss is a great one; still he lived much and well, in the best sense, in his allotted time. He did much more both professional and personally for his generation than is given to most men to accomplish in many more years. . . .

He was a hero whose glory was not diminished by intimate association. His capacity for work was enormous and he worked untiringly. In character and achievement he was one of the great, good, noble men of our time.

Woodbury’s father had headed the Great Falls Mining Works in Montana for decades; unusually, his sister Cerula had taken over the leadership of the family company as their father aged. I suspect this article came from her rather than his widow, mentioned in only one line.

TOMORROW: The widow Woodbury.

The Real Story of How the Hal Roach Studio Began

The standard story of the founding of the Hal Roach Studio appears in Roach’s obituaries, in Richard Lewis Ward’s History of the Hal Roach Studios, and in Craig Calman’s 100 Years of Brodies with Hal Roach, among other sources.

That tale starts in 1914 when the struggling young movie actor Harold Eugene “Hal” Roach (1892–1992) came into money through an inheritance, often stated as $3,000.

Roach used that windfall to form a film production company with the businessman Dan Linthicum (1878–1952), combining the first letters of their last names to create the trademark “Rolin.”

Linthicum soon left the business, and a few years later Roach renamed the company after himself. His friend Harold Lloyd had become the studio’s star, first as Lonesome Luke and then in eyeglasses. Then came the Our Gang series, Charley Chase, and finally Laurel and Hardy. The independent Roach studio became Hollywood’s most successful and classiest supplier of comedy shorts.

That version of Roach’s story also says that in 1916 he married the actress Marguerite Nichols (1896–1941), and they had two children together. The year after Marguerite died, Hal married Lucille Prin (1913–1981), and they had four more daughters. Hal Roach’s obituaries referred to Marguerite as his “first wife.”

In fact, Marguerite was Hal’s second wife, and Hal didn’t receive an inheritance in 1914.

I started looking into this story in the spring after hearing Steve Massa speak about how Rolin got started on the “Becoming Harold Lloyd” episode of the Man in the Glasses podcast. Dave Lord Heath’s delight-filled website offers more details, as does Find a Grave, and I dug into newspapers for additional stories.

Like the great Hollywood story Citizen Kane, this tale begins with a mine.

TOMORROW: The fatal shaft.

The Facts Behind the First News Stories about an “Our Gang Curse”

My last two postings have posited that the long-lived public discussion of an “Our Gang curse” started with a couple of wire-service articles in early 1959, spurred by the deaths of Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer and Don “Fats” Law.

Carl Switzer had indeed been a star of many Our Gang shorts. He had a bad death, shot in the groin in a fight over $50 for training a hunting dog. He was only thirty-one. Yes, that can sound cursed.

But Don Law, who “died of an intestinal disorder” a couple of weeks later, was never in the Our Gang movies, much less in twenty of them as his obituary claimed. That series never had a character named “Fats.” Law’s death got nationwide attention because it came so soon after Switzer’s, and that concatenation launched the “Our Gang curse.” Yet that coverage was based on a lie.

The long May 1959 article by Rick Du Brow about the Our Gang alumni as a “pathetic group of Hollywood ‘has-beens’” rested on similar misinformation. It offered a list of five Our Gang alumni who had “died in the past seven years” alone. Two were Switzer and Law, so right away the pattern was weaker than presented.

That list of recent deaths included the actress Helen Parrish, but she was never in the Our Gang series. Parrish had been a child actress in the 1920s, appearing in one Smitty short with Donald Haines, who was later part of the gang, but that’s as close as she got.

Clifton “Bobby” Young did appear in a bunch of Our Gang shorts in the late 1920s and early 1930s before his adult acting career. He died in a fire in 1951, and thus not in “the past seven years.”

Billy “Froggy” Laughlin (not McLaughlin, as Du Brow had it) was a regular in the late Our Gang shorts from MGM. He died at age sixteen after a motor scooter crash in 1948. Again, that wasn’t in the preceding seven years. Du Brow obviously stretched for examples to produce the illusion of a trend.

Du Brow also mistakenly listed Eddie Bracken and Nanette Fabray as Our Gang alumni. He wrote that embezzler Lea Artye Folz had been in the gang; she had small roles in three shorts but more appearances in rival series and features.

Du Brow said the Rev. Ben Griffith had played Mickey McGuire in Our Gang; that was the title character in a rival series, played by Mickey Rooney and Marvin Stephens. Griffith did claim to have played that part in Our Gang as early as 1950 and as late as his 1988 autobiography, but I don’t see confirmation anywhere.

I also mentioned a Miami News article from early 1959 listing four locals as Our Gang regulars. Only one was: Shirley Jean Rickert, who made six appearances in 1931 followed by an equal number of Mickey McGuire shorts in 1933–34. Geraldine Fay and Sy Rich had no discernible link to Hollywood. Jack Ray made a fleeting appearance in one Our Gang movie in 1926, but he never played “Freckles” in the series as the Miami story said. (Ray did, however, spend most of his childhood appearing in theaters across the US, Canada, and western Europe claiming to have played “Freckles” in Our Gang. I’m still collecting information on him.)

Thus, in 1959 a lot of people were telling false stories about being in Our Gang as children, possibly because of work on other series, possibly out of wishfulness. Yet Du Brow was actually in touch with Fern Carter, who knew exactly which kids she had taught. And he still got a lot of names wrong.

Bob Thomas’s earlier Associated Press article started with “the legend that the famed little rascals have been ill-fated,” but it was actually an interview with producer Hal Roach. He knocked down the idea of a jinx, saying that “176 kids” had appeared in his series, and many had “turned into happy respected citizens, including doctors and lawyers here in Los Angeles.” (Early Our Gang player Jack Davis was indeed a doctor. I can’t think of an alumnus who became a lawyer, though.)

Some newspapers therefore gave Thomas’s AP dispatch headlines like “‘Our Gang’ Normal Group of Kids—Roach” (Morris Herald-News, 17 February) and “Roach Denies Ill Fate Plagues ‘Our Gang’” (Duluth News-Tribune, 18 February). But that fact-based argument didn’t have the appeal of the “Our Gang curse.”

In his UPI story, Du Brow cited an even higher number of kids in the series—“more than 300 youngsters.” But then he ignored the consequences of that math. He wrote that four highly successful performers were “just a fraction” of the total while five deaths (which included two people with no part in the series) were representative of the larger group.

Clearly those reporters sensed that the public would lap up the idea of an “Our Gang curse.” And the longevity of that idea—bolstered, to be sure, by some sensational deaths after 1959—shows that their sense was right.

[The photo above shows Fern Carter teaching arithmetic to Pete the Pup, Allen “Farina” Hoskins, and Jean Darling during a publicity tour in 1928.]

“Possibly the most pathetic group of Hollywood ‘has-beens’”

Yesterday I quoted the February 1959 story from the the Associated Press’s Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas that began:

The recent deaths of two former members of “Our Gang”—one shot in an argument over $50—adds to the legend that the famed little rascals have been ill-fated in later life.

That article ran nationwide under headlines like “Was ‘Our Gang’ Jinxed?” (Illinois State Register, 17 February) and “‘Our Gang’ Ill-Fated in Later Life” (Sarasota Journal, 20 February).

As I wrote yesterday, that’s the first example I’ve found of the American media portraying veterans of the Our Gang comedies as prone to suffering sad adult lives.

A couple months later, Rick Du Brow of United Press International filed a longer story expanding on the same topic. When it appeared in the San Francisco News on 9 May, the headline was “Tragedy Stalks ‘Our Gang’.” Du Brow began:

Possibly the most pathetic group of Hollywood “has-beens” are the many former Our Gang child stars who flickered briefly to fame and prosperity only to come to grief as adults.

Five members of the “Gang” have died in the last seven years—some violently. . . .

Some “Our Gang” graduates, of course, have achieved success. These include Jackie Cooper, Eddie Bracken, Nanette Fabray and Johnny Downs. But they represent just a fraction of the more than 200 youngsters who made up of the most famous “gang” of all time in the last 38 years.

Having interviewed George “Spanky” McFarland back in February, as mentioned yesterday, Du Brow ran those quotes again to indicate McFarland was “having trouble.”

Darla Hood (shown above in a shot for TV Guide in 1955) was noted for her appearances in night clubs, on radio, and in TV shows, but she wasn’t included in that initial list of successful performers.

Du Brow spoke to Fern Carter, the kids’ regular teacher at the Hal Roach and MGM studios. She kept in touch with as many of her former pupils as she could. I doubt she liked how this article portrayed them as adults with troubled marriages and worse.

The article listed these five recent deaths:

• Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, shot the preceding January.
• “Helen Parrish, 35-year-old TV actress, died last February of cancer.”
• “Don Law, who played ‘Fats,’ died of an intestinal disorder at the age of 38 in Meadsville, Pa.”
• “Froggy McLaughlin…killed in a motor scooter accident several years ago near Huntington Beach, Cal.”
• “Clifton Young…died in a 1951 Los Angeles hotel fire.”

Du Brow also noted Scotty Beckett’s well publicized troubles with the law, Shirley Jean Rickert’s appearances in burlesque, and Mickey Daniels having “fled to Africa in search of a new life” (he worked in construction and mining).

One paragraph stated:

Tough guy Mickey McGuire became the Rev. Ben Griffith, a Los Angeles evangelist. And Lea Artye Folz, 38, was placed on probation three years ago after being charged with embezzling $5000 from a bank.

Did being a minister cancel out being charged with theft? Or were both activities signs of a troubled adulthood?

As mixed up as that portrayal of the Our Gang cast was, articles like Thomas’s and Du Brow’s appear to have established the idea in American culture that those kids were unusually liable to have sad adult lives and early deaths. Even today, websites address the question of an “Our Gang curse.”

But both those nationwide wire service dispatches were full of bad reporting, spun out of sensationalism, shoddy math, and lies.

TOMORROW: The facts behind the headlines.

“Death has taken a second former member of the ‘Our Gang’ movie comedy cast”

Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer died of a gunshot wound during a fight on 21 Jan 1959.

Switzer had been a big star in the Our Gang film series from 1935 to 1940, and those shorts were finding a new audience on television.

Switzer had also been fairly successful at maintaining a career as a character actor with bit parts in movies and larger parts on TV.

And of course his violent death at age thirty-one was sensational.

As a result, Switzer’s death was widely reported in American newspapers.

A couple of weeks later, on 6 February, an Associated Press dispatch out of Meadville, Pennsylvania, began:

Death has taken a second former member of the “Our Gang” movie comedy cast within the past three weeks.

Don Law, 38, who played “Fats” in some 20 of the old-time child comedy films, died here following a brief illness.

Newspapers headlined that story with variations on “2d Our Gang Star Dead” (Boston American).

That concatenation produced follow-up stories. On 8 February, the Miami News ran “‘Our Gang’ Deaths Hit Home in Miami” by Denis Sneigr. With the news of Switzer and Law as a hook, that article collected the movie-making memories of four locals: Geraldine “Sissy” Fay; Jack “Freckles” Ray; Gilda Edwards, formerly known as Shirley Jean Rickert; and Sy Rich.

George “Spanky” McFarland called up Rick Du Brow of United Press International, “spurred to comment by the death last month of his co-star” and his own wish to restart his Hollywood career. In the 15 February Memphis Commercial-Appeal, that story was headlined, “Spanky Knows Why Many Child Stars Go Bad.”

That same week, the Associated Press’s Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas filed a story that began:

The recent deaths of two former members of “Our Gang”—one shot in an argument over $50—adds to the legend that the famed little rascals have been ill-fated in later life.

As far as I can tell, this was the first public discussion of a “jinx” or “curse” on the Our Gang cast.

There was earlier reporting on child stars in general feeling “jinxed” when they tried to continue their acting careers as adults; an article in the 19 Aug 1954 Long Beach Independent actually held up Carl Switzer as a counterexample. But that’s a long way from suggesting that Our Gang veterans in particular were cursed.

Though Thomas’s article mentioned only two “ill-fated” Our Gang actors, not even by name, the idea of a jinx had legs. Soon another reporter picked up the theme.

TOMORROW: The story takes hold.

Credit Where It’s Due

I view the public discussion over fair credit for Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia in Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia from a particular perspective.

I’ve scripted indie comics, the field where Walden has made her name. I’ve written scholarly books and articles like Cleves. I’ve also worked in book publishing, so I know the considerations involved in adding more pages to a printed book or writing promotional copy about how ground-breaking a new title is.

I’ve worked on both sides of the nonfiction-into-comic process. For Colonial Comics: New England, I adapted historical sources into stories about Samuel Maverick, Benjamin Franklin, and Crispus Attucks. I also supplied my nonfiction writing and research for other scripters to adapt into their own stories. I’ve seen artists add immeasurably to a tale in ways that go beyond what historical research could provide.

I also know what it’s like to have the work of historical research be rendered close to invisible. Years back, I worked with producers of the History Detectives television show to figure out the mysteries behind a couple of artifacts. I was never going to be paid, but for one of those two shows there were plans to interview me on camera. In the end, my name appeared as one short line in small type as the closing credits scroll by.

On my history blog I’ve published a series of posts about James McHenry and Elizabeth Willing Powell, drawing on new archival research and analysis. In 2019, the Washington Post published Zara Anishanslin’s article about Powell. She acknowledged relying on my work for one point, apologizing that the newspaper wouldn’t allow credit by name, only by a link. And then when a Post staffer wrote another article citing Anishanslin’s, that link didn’t survive. That’s a common problem in the major news media.

A few months back, I discovered my book The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War had been turned into a novel. A novel! The author never contacted me about obtaining derivative rights. The book contains one line of acknowledgement, grateful in tone but small in type. Since this novel was self-published, I decided simply to keep quiet about it.

At the same time, I think The Road to Concord could be adapted into a nifty movie. I’ve even taken a meeting with an aspiring producer about that prospect. If that ever happens, I darn well want credit and compensation, even though the whole point of the book and its many citations was to lay out the historical facts and sources for anyone to follow.

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

On 1 July, the Comics Beat published an article about the disagreement over fair credit for Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia in Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia.

That article cites historian Cleves as saying Walden contacted her by email twice as she created her graphic novel: in August 2024 with news that Vermont Humanities had commissioned the project and in spring 2025 with a draft. Cleves’s workload prevented her from studying that material closely. She didn’t raise the question of adaptation rights. The two authors never connected for a phone or video conversation.

Although Cleves had spoken at the Henry Sheldon Museum through a Vermont Humanities grant in 2022, it doesn’t appear that either of those entities ever contacted her about the graphic novel. Nor did Drawn & Quarterly after it agreed to publish Walden’s finished work.

Given the initial understanding that Walden would draw only on documents at the museum, as I quoted yesterday, and given lack of objections from Cleves, people involved in the graphic novel might have convinced themselves that there was no need to seek a formal approval from her. But it’s clear that Walden came to rely on Cleves’s history more than originally planned. Walden and Drawn & Quarterly should have done more before publication. 

Comics Beat reports that Cleves wishes “to see Drawn & Quarterly option [her book] for adaptation and co-credit her, with appropriate compensation.”  

For now (and 1 July was a holiday in Canada), the publisher says it “stands by Tillie Walden’s research for her graphic novel” while drawing attention to her citations and praise for Cleves on the book’s website. In fact, the press says, those citations were too long to be included in the printed book. That may be right from an aesthetic or cost standpoint, but it only shows how Cleves deserves more credit in print than one laudatory line.

I suspect Drawn & Quarterly wants to protect its author from accusations of deliberate plagiarism or downgrading Cleves’s work. And to ensure Walden gets credit for the effort and creativity she put into the graphic novel, which by its nature is quite different from its source material.

Likewise, Cleves deserves credit for all the work she did in unearthing and telling Charity and Sylvia’s life stories, whether or not the graphic novel borrows specific language, which would be the strongest evidence in a copyright case.

Tillie Walden is a comics creator who has delightfully found success at a time when one can actually make a living at that work. Drawn & Quarterly is an artsy independent comics publisher based in Montréal. Rachel Hope Cleves is a respected history professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. The development of both versions of Charity and Sylvia was supported by humanities grants.

No one goes into any of those enterprises to make a lot of money. People spend years producing scholarly studies or graphic novels because they think the work is important. Yet that situation makes fair credit all the more important.

A graphic novel and a scholarly biography aren’t competing for the same sales—but the comic could promote the study, just as the study made the comic possible. So I really hope there’s a way for these projects to become mutually supporting.

“The possibility of rendering Bryant and Drake’s relationship in a graphic novel”

Looking at the history of the new Charity and Sylvia graphic novel by Tillie Walden might shed light on the brewing controversy over its debt to the older Charity and Sylvia history by Rachel Hope Cleves.

In February 2024, Seven Days reported on the upcoming project this way:

Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, the executive director of Vermont Humanities, first learned about the Weybridge couple [Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant] from [Rachel Hope] Cleves’ book. Then the senior philanthropic adviser of the Vermont Community Foundation, he awarded a grant to the [Henry] Sheldon Museum to sponsor an exhibition of the Bryant-Drake archive and a lecture by Cleves at Middlebury College.

Kaufman Ilstrup saw the possibility of rendering Bryant and Drake’s relationship in a graphic novel. He thought the story of the two 19th-century women, who lived openly as a married couple before the vocabulary existed to describe their relationship, deserved a wider audience. When [Tillie] Walden, who teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, became the state’s cartoonist laureate last year, “it was like a bolt of lightning for me, frankly,” Kaufman Ilstrup said.

He emailed Walden and asked if he could pitch her an idea.

As a marker of how Vermont a story this was, their conversation took place at the King Arthur Baking Company in Norwich.

At the end of that same month, the Middlebury Campus newspaper announced announcing the start of Walden’s residency in that town. (A Bluesky user with the handle Queerkitty spotted this article, which led me to the one above).

The Middlebury article reported:

Tillie Walden, Vermont’s renowned cartoonist laureate, will take up residency at the [Henry Sheldon] museum beginning in May in order to write a graphic novel about the couple’s life. . . .

Walden’s upcoming book will differ from the only previous narration of Bryant and Drake’s lives, “Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America,” written by Rachel Hope Cleves, a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, in 2014. While Cleves used records from places outside of Vermont and focused on the couples’ intimate relationship, Walden will exclusively rely on the Sheldon museum archives to tell the story of Bryant and Drake’s years living together in Vermont, according to Garcelon-Hart.

Walden’s project was commissioned by nonprofit arts organization Vermont Humanities and the Vermont branch of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

There’s no question, therefore, that Cleves’s history led to the graphic novel, with everyone involved aware of the earlier book. The museum’s YouTube page offer Cleves’s lecture from 2022, also supported by Vermont Humanities.

Yet the comic was supposed to be entirely independent of that history book, whether to avoid the issue of derivative rights, to highlight Vermont resources, or to provide Walden with free rein to interpret the sources at the Sheldon Museum.

However, according to Cleves, portions of the comic are based on material not in the museum collection, material she found and described in her book. Walden’s online bibliography acknowledges how she consulted Cleves’s book regardless of the initial plans in February 2024.

The news articles also show how Walden produced her Charity and Sylvia in an amazingly short time: it was just over two years from when she started the museum residency to its publication. That shows what a hard-working graphic novelist can produce with financial support. But that schedule might also have raised the pressure to follow an established narrative rather than develop a new one.

Two Takes on Charity and Sylvia

In recent years, publishers have worked with historians to adapt their scholarly studies into other types of books, more welcoming to teenagers and other regular people, and thus with potential for large and lasting sales to schools.

For example, after publishing Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge in 2017, Erica Armstrong Dunbar worked with Kathleen Van Cleve to produce a Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away, a “Young Readers Edition” published in 2019.

Marcus Rediker initiated collaborations with David Lester and Paul Buhle on graphic novels adapted from his books: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel; Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel; and Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741, a Graphic Novel.

Earlier this month I saw an announcement of Tillie Walden’s new graphic novel Charity and Sylvia, published by Drawn & Quarterly, about a couple in Vermont in the early 1800s. I immediately connected that to Rachel Hope Cleves’s study Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press.

I wondered if Walden had adapted Cleves’s work, or fictionalized it with her blessing. When I shared news of the graphic novel with the Boston Comics Roundtable, I added a mention of Cleves’s work.

Unlike Dunbar and Rediker, Cleves isn’t credited as a coauthor of the graphic novel. In a line inside the book, an online bibliography and discussion of sources, and public talks, Walden cites Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia as a major source. But does that add up to enough acknowledgment for how much she relied on a previous author’s work?

Last night Cleves posted an open letter to readers that says in part:

I've tried to be happy that Walden's book is making their story more widely known, even if she chose to take my title and my cover design as well as my narrative and my research with only a single sentence of acknowledgement at the end of her book in her notes section. Walden's illustrations and storytelling are wonderful, as I told her when she reached out to me during the writing process. It would take nothing away from her hard work to be honest about how it is built on my hard work. But in Walden's publicity tour, she has repeatedly made the claim to have based her book on her extensive research in the archive without acknowledging that her book is, in fact, based on my book. . . .

I don't doubt that Walden spent time looking at letters at the Henry Sheldon Museum, but the story that Walden tells is not to be found there. It is a story that I pieced together from years of visits to at least twenty different archives and locations across the United States, not only in Vermont but in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Washington State, as well. . . . Many of the details of that story which appeared in my book, and re-appear in Walden's, do not come from the Henry Sheldon Museum, where she claims to have done her research. They come from the countless additional archives I visited.

The process of creating a graphic novel is akin to dramatizing a narrative for stage or screen. The script turns narration and analysis into scenes with dialogue. The art builds on descriptions or imagination. Even the most nonfictional narrative comic is a fictionalizing adaptation of its sources.

With fiction, we readily recognize how a graphic novel or dramatization is a derived work. Unless the original story has entered the public domain, the new publication requires contracting for the right to adapt the original, crediting and compensating its author. After all, the story and characters wouldn’t exist without the first author’s creativity.

With nonfiction, the law is less clear. No one has a copyright claim on historical facts. No one can call dibs on the exclusive right to line up events in chronological order. As legal experts often say, copyright doesn’t protect ideas; it protects the expression of those ideas.

In her open letter, Cleves writes: “This is not just a question of facts but of story: the story of how Charity and Sylvia built a life together…” But was that “story” created by the subjects living their lives or by the historian reconstructing those lives in a meaningful form? Is a “story” a copyrightable expression of ideas that survives even when it’s expressed in a different form?

There’s no doubt that Cleves’s research unearthed facts about Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, produced enough detail to build a compelling story, and smoothed the path for future researchers. Unlike the tale of Ona Judge or the 1741 uprising in New York, there are no other books to draw from. So what claim should Cleve have on that subject? Our copyright law protects creative work, but should it also require compensation for hard work?

TOMORROW: Historical roots.

“Expands into a fluffy cloud when microwaved”

In yesterday’s New Yorker crossword puzzle, clue 27 Down was:

Brand-name bath bar that expands into a fluffy cloud when microwaved

I’ve already stated my claim to be the first person to try microwaving bars of soap, or at least the first person to publish the eye-opening results of the process on one well-known brand, in my 1993 book Soap Science.

But I haven’t mentioned that I told that story for a short comic drawn by Dan Mazur in the Boston Comics Roundtable anthology Boundless, edited by Olivia Li, Jordan Stillman, and Neil Johnson in 2016.

That comic includes depictions of me and my dad in the 1970s and 1990s. In fact, the editors told me that the script won them over as soon as it called for pictures of me as a child. 

Ernie Morrison’s Tutor, Miss Zenobia Frierson

I first mentioned that Ernie Morrison had an individual tutor while he worked at the Hal Roach Studio back here.

At that time, I knew that tutor was a black woman. She appeared in a couple of photos that also showed Fern Carter teaching the white kids in the Our Gang movies. But I didn’t know that woman’s name.

News stories about Ernie’s departure from the studio in 1924 reveal his tutor at that time: Zenobia Frierson (her first name also rendered in newspapers as “Znobia” and “Zenovia”). Using newspapers and other information, I’ve assembled this brief profile of her.

Zenobia Evelyn Frierson was born in Texas—probably in 1897, though I’ve seen documents stating the year as 1895 and 1898. She studied at Wiley College in Marshall, a historically black college founded in 1873 by a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church. I haven’t found a yearbook or other document about her studies.

By 1924 Frierson was in Los Angeles, working as Ernie Morrison’s tutor. Under California law, he’d probably needed three hours of lessons on each working day since the fall of 1918, when he’d turned six. Given that Frierson probably graduated from college around that year, she may well not have been his first tutor. But she could have had the job in 1922–24 while Ernie was working on the Our Gang films.

After traveling with the Morrisons in 1925, Frierson returned to Los Angeles, where she married Louis Payton Allen on 15 Sept 1928. He was also from Texas, born in 1882. In the 1940 U.S. Census he was listed as a waiter on a railroad; if that had been his profession all along, he presumably traveled a lot. An October item in the California Eagle, the newspaper of Los Angeles’s black community, referred to the bride as “Mrs. Zenobia Frierson-Allen,” but she soon used only her husband’s surname.

In 1930, Zenobia Allen was living in a rented house on 49th Place in Los Angeles. Census records list her occupation as “secretary” of a “Christian organization.” She was head of a household that included her mother, Marjorie Blye, and a young roomer, Helen Boyd, but no children. Louis P. Allen wasn’t listed as living with them. Interestingly, the actress Louise Beavers and her family lived nearby.

In that decade Zenobia Allen appeared regularly in the Eagle as part of African-American social events. She helped to organize Wiley alumni gatherings. She signed a protest against hiring discrimination at the telephone company. In 1935 she started to work for the Angelus Funeral Home as a “receptionist”—though of course being the first person to speak to grieving families was a position with great responsibility. The photo above dates from 1934 or before.

By 1940, the Allens’ marriage had definitely broken up. Louis was living with a new wife, Inez. She was a manicurist while he worked for a railroad. He died that October.

After World War 2, Zenobia E. Allen gained national visibility as a “supreme epistoleus” of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. In that role she traveled the country and corresponded with Mary MacLeod Bethune.

In 1955, after twenty years at the funeral home, Zenobia Allen moved to work at a local savings and loan. That fall she married Claude A. Jolly, a real estate and investment broker, with her mother looking on. The Los Angeles Tribune reported:

Romance of the popular and attractive Greekletter figure and the prominent businessman came as a surprise to the local community at large, where they are well known…

Unfortunately, Claude Jolly died in August 1957, less than two years later.

Zenobia Jolly continued to appear at AKA sorority events over the next few years, but she appears to have retired by the 1960s—probably comfortably, given her second husband’s wealth. Zenobia E. Jolly still owned real estate when she died in October 1982.

I haven’t found any mention of Zenobia Allen Jolly discussing how one of her first jobs was to tutor and travel with the young entertainer Ernie Morrison. She appears in print simply as a pillar of Los Angeles’s African-American community at mid-century. If she hadn’t had such a rare name, her connection with show business would be invisible.

“The following routine hardly constitutes a ‘vacation’”

In March 1924, for the first time in more than six years, eleven-year-old Ernie Morrison didn’t have a movie to make.

He had no call time the Hal Roach Studio. He wouldn’t spend hours with the other kids he’d worked and played with for the past two years. (Ernie had his own tutor, so at least he wasn’t also cut off from Fern Carter’s studio classroom.)

The end of Ernie’s $250 per working week salary would no doubt affect the Morrison family finances, but not immediately. His father, Joseph, who had run a market before entering show business, evidently invested some of those earnings in what the 17 September New York Evening Journal called “a string of ice cream parlors and frocery [sic] stores in Los Angeles.” In addition, the 18 December Savannah Tribune indicated he owned the Four Brown Candy Factory. The African-American press treated Joseph Morrison as a admirable entrepreneur.

It’s notable that the Morrison family and the Hal Roach Studio didn’t cut ties. Joseph continued to play black men in the movies, performing opposite Gene “Pineapple” Jackson and Allen “Farina” Hoskins in “Circus Fever.” Ernie’s little sister Dorothy Morrison appeared as Farina’s girlfriend in “The Love Bug,” with Joseph along as her father. In 1925 she would make “Isn’t Life Terrible?” with Charley Chase.

In late June, Ernie himself returned to Our Gang unit for a week (at his previous salary) to finish shooting “Fast Company,” a short begun over a year before. (Harold Lloyd’s young brother-in-law, Jack Davis, returned from military school for the same shoot.) That movie proved to be the coda to Ernie’s long Rolin/Hal Roach Studio career, but decades later he still had good things to say about Roach.

An item in the 24 May Colton Daily Courier revealed how Ernie was spending most of his days:

Sunshine Sammy, world famous little comedian and formerly featured player in Hal E. Roach’s “Our Gang” comedies, has a complaint to enter. . . . his father, Joseph Morrison, well known candy manufacturer, promised Sammy a good long vacation. Sammy, in his aforesaid complaint, says the following routine hardly constitutes a ‘vacation’—“Three to four hours a day study under his special teacher, Miss Zenovia [sic] Frierson. One hour violin lesson each day from James B. Warren. Miscellaneous and incidental other hours spent in perfecting himself in fencing, boxing, wrestling and in his ‘spare’ moments he composed a wonderful waltz, “Sunshine Sammy is a Good Old Scout.”

The same newspaper had reported on that waltz back on 3 May, saying “hundred of congratulatory messages” had come for Ernie. That article added:

The fact that he has become a composer of the first rank is only incidental with Sammy’s plans and he will soon spring a surprise on his friends, that will prove momentous in amusement circles.

COMING UP: Big plans.

“They are trying to get along without Ernest Morrison”

As I wrote back here, almost all the other kid-gang comedy movies produced in the wake of Our Gang’s success included at least one African-American kid in the cast.

People viewed Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison and Allen “Farina” Hoskins as vital to the series’ success.

On 4 July 1924 the California Eagle, published for Los Angeles’s African-American community, reported:

The kid situation seems to be worrying that powers that be at the Hal Roach Studio. They are trying to get along without Ernest Morrison (Sunshine Sammy) but the big question is will the exhibitors accept “Our Gang” comedies without Sammy or a Race star other than Farina.

It is rumored that two of the “Our Gang” Series that were made without Ernest were returned from the Eastern exchange marked N.G.

“N.G.” was the standard Hollywood label for bad shots to be discarded.

In fact, Hal Roach had quickly sought out a replacement for Ernie Morrison. In April 1924 the studio brought on Flemon Miller, a black boy about the same age, to appear in “The Sun Down Limited” and “Every Man for Himself.” The Pathé Exchange would distribute those pictures in the fall, but Flemon wouldn’t make much impression on the screen.

The California Eagle went on to drop some inside information:

The Dramatic League booking office received a hurry up call for Eugene Jackson and Eugene has gone to work there and his director is McGowan who directs the “Our Gang” series.

Eugene Jackson (1916–2001) had already acted in a few films, including the feature Penrod and Sam and “An Afternoon Tee” in the rival Reg’lar Kids series (a short which was Johnny Downs’s break into the movies).

The newspaper’s next item noted that another black child actor, James “Bubbles” Berry (1915–1969, shown above), was available after making eight pictures for the Century studio. Those movies, such as “Speed Boys,” were also imitations of Our Gang. But “Bubbles” was made up with white lipstick for a minstrel-show effect, something the Roach studio never did to Ernie Morrison.

The Eagle’s deduction about Gene Jackson was correct: he joined the Our Gang unit at the end of June and made six movies through early 1925. In his 1999 autobiography, Jackson described his beginning this way:

I met with Mr. Roach, and he liked my natural acting ability. I did some impromptu acting, and he said I had an open freshness with a million dollar smile. He conversed with me for a short while, and I signed immediately for a three-year contract. He coined the name “Pineapple” for me in the series, which has been a permanent part of my show business name.

As for Ernie Morrison, Jackson remembered living around the corner from him. Ernie was four years older and busier, so Gene admired him from a distance:

Sammy was such a big star. He was an established star. When he arrived home, the entire neighborhood would could out to see him. He had a great big limousine a mile long.

But now that Ernie had left the Hal Roach Studio, what would he do?

TOMORROW: Training in ’24.

“‘Our Gang’ comedies will be as a ship without a rudder without Sammy”

In the early 1920s, Ernie Morrison was almost certainly the most prominent African-American actor in Hollywood, the only one to appear regularly in movies marketed to mainstream audiences.

What’s more, whether as sidekick to Hal Roach’s adult male comedians or as a leading member of Our Gang, Ernie didn’t really fit inside the dominant culture’s racial stereotypes (despite the studio and the press’s best efforts).

While he often played scamps, Ernie the real-life hard-working actor was also a role model. His June 1922 trading card assured children, “In between his motion-picture work he studies hard at his lessons, and a very great future is predicted for this clever youngster.”

Naturally, Ernie Morrison held special significance for African-Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois’s short-lived magazine for black children, The Brownies’ Book, featured the boy twice while he was still working with Snub Pollard. In 1923 Du Bois visited the Hal Roach Studio with other members of the NAACP. The June issue of that organization’s magazine, The Crisis, included the photo above.

Ernie, clowning with a broken bass fiddle, was surrounded by:

• Dr. Vada Somerville (1885–1972), co-founder of the NAACP’s Los Angeles chapter, first black woman to be licensed as a dentist in California.
• Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963).
• Anita Thompson (1901–1980), star of By Right of Birth from the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and actress in other films.
• Beatrice Thompson (1874–1938), executive secretary of the LA chapter and the actress’s mother.
• Pearl W. Hinds Roberts (1892–1984), pipe organist with a degree from the Oberlin Conservatory, wife of a California assemblyman.

On 28 Feb 1924, around the time Joseph Morrison and Hal Roach broke off negotiations over a contract renewal, the Omaha World-Herald reported that the local NAACP chapter had sponsored a free showing of “one of ‘Sunshine’ Sammy’s photoplays” for more than 200 black children to raise funds to support an anti-lynching bill.

Given Ernie’s profile, the end of his contract with Roach was a big deal for African-American moviegoers. The most detailed reports about that change appeared in the black press. The New York Age article cited here was the first to report salary numbers. On 18 July 1924, the Afro-American of Baltimore ran this item:

SUNSHINE SAMMY LEAVES HAL ROACH

The Hal Roach Studio seems hard put to it these days. Ernest Morrison, nationally known as “Sunshine Sammy” has left the lot.

Mr. Morrison, Sammy’s father, refuses to give any information other than to say that Ernest will be featured in his own company. The “Our Gang” comedies will be as a ship without a rudder without Sammy.

The Morrisons’ contract had ended four months before, but the studio was about to run out of the Our Gang movies Ernie had made early in the year. And audiences viewed black kids as an essential part of the gang.

COMING UP: Keeping busy in 1924.

“Ended an eight-year engagement with Hal Roach”

Ernie Morrison starred in the Our Gang films regularly for more than two years, from January 1922 to March 1924.

The only other movies he made during that time were cameo appearances with the gang in other Hal Roach Studio comedies. He was too valuable to be an adult comic’s sidekick anymore.

Ernie had started at the studio at $100 per week, plus $30 for his father, Joseph Morrison, who played occasional roles for black men. (In the Our Gang series Joseph often played Ernie’s father, though in “Lodge Night” and “Circus Fever” he appeared prominently in other roles.)

By 1924 Ernie was making $250 per week, plus $50 for his father, according to Rob Demoss’s Lucky Corner website. That was the studio’s most expensive contract for an Our Gang member; freckle-faced Mickey Daniels also earned $250 per week, but with no added payment to a parent.

In early 2024, Joseph Morrison asked Hal Roach to increase his son’s pay. According to an article in the 31 Jan 1925 New York Age (published for the city’s African-American community), Joseph asked for Ernie to earn $300 a week.

That article also said that would have been a $75 raise for Ernie, which doesn’t add up. But perhaps Joseph also asked for his own weekly rate to rise by $25, which would be $75 more overall. In any event, it wasn’t an outlandish request.

Hal Roach said no. Roach’s employees liked the collaborative culture and working conditions he established, but he could be ruthless in negotiating salaries, even with his biggest stars.

“Quits Roach,” headlined the 1 Mar 1924 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News over a photo of Ernie smiling; “the child will not sign for another engagement because of financial differences.”

The 16 March Detroit News told readers: “‘Sunshine Sammy’…has ended an eight-year engagement with Hal Roach.” He’d been at the studio for less than five years, but Roach sometimes wrote his contracts to include options into the future.

The 23 March Omaha Morning Bee said: “the cute negro boy screener, has quite [sic] Hal Roach, due to a difference in salary demand on a new contract and may essay a trip into vaudeville.”

Those items appeared in long columns of other news from Hollywood, but other journalists had more to say.

COMING UP: Sunshine Sammy and the black press.

Ernie Morrison before Our Gang

Ernie Morrison was born in late 1912 in New Orleans. About six months later his father, Joseph, moved the family to Los Angeles, where he ran a grocery store.

In 1916, Joseph Morrison later told the New York Age, he “overheard some directors inquiring as to where they could find a clever little youngster.” Another source says the moviemakers were looking for a “little colored boy.” Ernie fit both descriptions. Joseph took his son to the studio.

By age four, Ernie was a regular in the Baby Marie Osborne comedies. The studio behind those films, Diando, even tried to create a new series around Ernie in 1918, using his father’s nickname “Sunshine Sammy.” But the Pathé Exchange didn’t pick up those short movies for distribution.

In August 1919, Harold Lloyd, the only consistently successful comedy star at the Rolin Studio, was badly injured by a prop bomb during a photo shoot. Rolin’s head, Hal Roach, scrambled both to help his friend recover and to find new material to release.

Lloyd’s usual sidekick, the Australian comedian Snub Pollard, was promoted to a lead. In the short “Call for Mr. Caveman,” filmed in September 1919, his supporting cast included a little black boy played by Ernie Morrison.

Roach saw how well Ernie performed. Indeed, his lively personality still comes through on the screen. Envisioning a new series (which, Robert Demoss reports at the Lucky Corner, he unfortunately referred to as “‘coon’ pictures”), Roach signed Ernie to a two-year contract, as shown above. That made the six-year-old the first African-American actor with a long-term movie deal.

However, Pathé still wasn’t interested in a “Sunshine Sammy” series—“not on the basis of racism,” writes Richard Lewis Ward in A History of the Hal Roach Studios, but because the company head felt “‘kid pictures’ were box office poison.”

Instead, Ernie performed as Snub Pollard’s regular sidekick from 1919 to 1921. After Lloyd recovered, Ernie appeared in a few of his films, too, most delightfully in “Get Out and Get Under.” During that time, Rolin was renamed as the Hal Roach Studio.

Roach saw that Ernie Morrison was gaining a fan base. He renewed the contract and assigned the boy to boost the studio’s lesser comedians, such as Eddie Boland and Paul Parrott (brother of Charley Chase and later director for Laurel and Hardy). Ernie was also loaned out for the Neilan adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod with Wesley Barry.

In mid-1921, Hal Roach once again put “Sunshine Sammy” at the center of a picture. In an advertisement to cinema owners (shown here), the studio declared:

Millions have laughed at him, exhibitors have commented upon his popularity with their audiences,…full of pep, a “pip” of a “feeder” to the comedy stars he supported

Now he is starred in one two-reel comedy, made the way Hal Roach knows how to make ’em

Hot Dog! This one isn’t a gamble, it’s just sure to please!

The rest of that ad copy uses broad dialect and racial slurs. The movie itself was titled “The Pickaninny,” though Ernie never fit into that stereotype of a black child. Roach thus offered the Morrisons more opportunity than they would find elsewhere but still played into the racism of the time.

Pathé released that “Sunshine Sammy” comedy in December 1921. It didn’t do well enough to launch a new series. Ernie continued to appear in supporting roles. But he was popular enough to be featured on a Boys’ Cinema trading card in June 1922, posing in top hat and tails with a short biography on the back; most of the other “Famous Heroes” in this series were grown men, all of them white.

Meanwhile, in January 1922 Ernie had started performing in a new series of shorts at the Roach studio—not in support of an adult male comedian, but alongside other child actors and animals. Those “kid pictures” would make him an even bigger star.

COMING UP: After the gang.

Assessing the Ultimate Oz Universe for the Baum Bugle

The spring 2026 issue of The Baum Bugle contains my review of The Lost Lands, the first volume of the Ultimate Oz Universe graphic retelling of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

There’s a big team behind this comic, some of them having worked for years to develop this version of Oz for various media. But the main creators of what we see on the book’s pages are the writers Cullen Blum and Larry King and the artist Mike Deodato, Jr.

My bottom line is that The Lost Lands is interesting to sample as an alternate version of Oz and often visually striking, but sadly not as original as it presents itself.

Firstly, there have been many “dark” adaptations of the Oz books in comics form over the years. The Ultimate Oz Universe is far from the first to recast Dorothy as a teenager, the Tin Woodman as a robot, the Scarecrow as truly scary, and so on.

Second, this graphic novel is a streamlined retelling of The Marvelous Land of Oz. Nothing wrong with that, but the project also draws without acknowledgment on work still under copyright, including later books and the syncretic maps created by James E. Haff and Dick Martin for the Oz Club.

Third, Deodato’s art is notable not only for its dramatic hyperrealism and solid comic-page design but its inconsistency on the details. I spent two paragraphs listing examples, such as:

Over one action sequence, Glinda’s sleeves grow from being short and off-the-shoulder to long and puffy. Mrs. Yoop’s shoes have straps in one panel but not the next. On a single spread, the Cowardly Lion’s belt takes on three separate designs.

Based on such discrepancies, other comics artists have accused Deodato of using AI imagery. He’s denied doing that. (Using AI should have been disclosed during the book’s Kickstarter campaign.) I don’t have hard evidence on that question, so I wrote simply about sloppiness in the visual details.

The overall lack of originality limits how compelling this volume can be. Fans of the Oz books already know the twist at the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz. Seeing the same basic story play out with a teen-aged Tip, a bipedal Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger, and other changes doesn’t make it a different story.

Other articles in thus Bugle issue cover the release of Wicked: For Good, a detailed analysis of the art of John R. Neill, a tour of the Hotel del Coronado, and a look at the Australian textile artist Raquel Caballero’s Ozzy work (showcased with eight pages of color), as well as many other reviews.