“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.