“I just didn't know how to steer it”

By the spring of 1932, two years after Buddy McDonald first acted in an Our Gang movie, there had been some big changes at the Hal Roach Studio.

The Great Depression had caught up with the movie business. At the end of 1931, Bank of America set a new condition for renewing Roach’s credit: he had to hire Henry Ginsberg to supervise production and keep down costs.

Within the Our Gang unit, long-time players Allen “Farina” Hoskins, Mary Ann Jackson, and Norman “Chubby” Chaney all aged out in mid-1931. The next March, Bobby “Wheezer” Hutchins went off to make movies elsewhere for a while. The only cast members left from Buddy’s first three films were Dorothy DeBorba and Matthew “Stymie” Beard.

There were also two important additions to the gang. In spring 1932 the studio hired Dickie Moore, already established as a child actor, to play lead in the next several films. And from Texas the irrepressible George “Spanky” McFarland had stepped into Wheezer’s baby shoes as cute little brother and absolute chaos agent.

As a younger man producer-director Bob McGowan had been a firefighter, and he’d already applied that experience to two Our Gang movies: “Fire Fighters” (1922), the second to be filmed and released, and “The Fourth Alarm!” (1926).

To start a new slate of movies for fall 1932, McGowan remade “The Fourth Alarm!” with sound as “Hook and Ladder” (YouTube; IMDB; Lucky Corner). Dickie is the fire chief. Stymie is his right-hand man. Spanky is the wise-ass baby brother who can’t be left behind because he has to take his medicine every half-hour.

In “The Fourth Alarm!” there were a dozen gang members in the fire company. “Hook and Ladder” had eight—perhaps a sign of cost-cutting. And one of those kids was Buddy McDonald.

At this point, nine-year-old Buddy was the tallest in the gang (though not the oldest). He didn’t have any significant lines or close-ups. But he was tasked with driving a makeshift fire engine through the streets of Palms, California. Indeed, that job might have been why McGowan cast him again: the movie needed a kid big enough to handle a horse.

That didn’t go great. McDonald told Our Gang historian Richard D. Bann:

I was on the back of the hook and ladder trying to drive the thing and they had to pull me off of there. Don Sandstrom had to take over. I was supposed to steer from back there [behind the camera], but it was difficult for me and also a little dangerous. Scary, too. I allowed the contraption to get away from me, and it scared us all, so the assistant director took over. I just didn't know how to steer it. The thing wasn’t meant to swing side to side; I couldn’t keep it running straight. It must have looked funny because even after Don Sandstrom took over steering, it continued swaying back and forth. This time on purpose. I was lucky I didn’t kill somebody on the city streets!

At least Buddy didn’t have to work with goats again.

That was Buddy McDonald’s last film, from Hal Roach or any other studio. He stayed in show biz, singing on the Juvenile Revue radio show, which started in 1933. His photo appeared in the 30 Aug 1933 Los Angeles Herald-Examiner as a member of the cast of the radio soap opera Molly Malone’s Family, produced by star Edith Greaves. McDonald recalled doing that job “every afternoon when I wasn’t at Hal Roach Studios.”

But late in 1933 Buddy’s parents blew up his career:

Then my parents separated and my mom grabbed we three kids—my older brother, my younger brother, and myself—and we went to Oregon. She had an aunt up there she thought would take us in. All the aunt did was point to the berry field. “Go help yourself,” was her advice. We lived in a tent, slept on the ground, picking and eating berries and fruit to live. We were fruit tramps. In time we scraped together enough money to get back to Southern California and return to our same house.

That was “About a year later.”

With the money I’d earned in pictures and radio, my parents had been able to pay off the house. In those days a nice, four bedroom house in the town of Bell was something you could have bought for around $800 to $1,200. While we had been tramping up in Oregon, my dad told us—before he left—that Hal Roach Studios called six to eight times looking for me to do more picture work. Then that finally stopped. . . .

During the Prohibition era in this country, my dad had a cafe on Florence Avenue, and he was bootlegging out the back door. When Prohibition was repealed [December 1933] he turned the place into a bar and then he got a liquor license for a second operation in Bell. Trouble was, he and my mother were their own best customers.

The McDonalds divorced. Buddy started drinking himself, then committing petty crimes. He went to a high school for “incorrigible boys,” served in the US Marines in the war, and did a stint in jail for armed robbery.

In 1953, Bud McDonald joined Alcoholics Anonymous and started living sober. He helped to raise a family and to run a trucking business. He founded programs to help addicts.

After his talk to Bann in 2001, McDonald was invited to some Los Angeles gatherings of the Sons of the Desert, the society founded to celebrate Laurel and Hardy, which had also adopted Our Gang and other Hal Roach series. Thomas “Bud” McDonald died in 2008, a couple of weeks short of turning eighty-six and more than three-quarters of a century after his last ride with Our Gang.

(This is the end of an analysis of Bann’s interview with McDonald, considered through other sources about the Our Gang movies, that started with these posts:

• When Buddy McDonald Arrived in the Neighborhood
• “Trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had”
• “They want boys like Farina”
• “One day I showed up at the studio barefoot”
• Buddy McDonald Dropped from the Gang)

Buddy McDonald Dropped from the Gang

In this posting, I posited that while working on the Our Gang comedy “School’s Out” (IMDB; Lucky Corner) in June 1930, seven-year-old Buddy McDonald showed up one day without any shoes.

Speaking in 2001 to Richard W. Bann, McDonald recalled: “my mother never noticed. She had to drive all the way back to Bell to get my shoes, and in the meantime they went and bought a new pair of shoes for me at the studio.”

I wonder if there was more fallout from that day. Buddy’s mother wasn’t always easy to get along with. He told Bann frankly:

My parents were both “lushes.” . . . My mother was a violent drunk and my father was a passive drunk. My mom could start a fight in an empty room when she was drunk. . . . My brothers and I would try to disappear if my mother was drinking, because we were scared to death of her.

There’s no hint that alcohol was involved in this particular incident, but it may have convinced the studio that the McDonalds weren’t reliable, or worth the trouble.

I suggest that because after “School’s Out,” Buddy McDonald disappeared from the gang. He didn’t appear in any of the four Our Gang movies filmed in the rest of 1930—not even “Love Business” (YouTube; IMDB; Lucky Corner) which was a sequel to “Teacher’s Pet” and “School’s Out.”

The studio had its pick of freckled boys in that period. In addition to Buddy, there were Donald Haines and Douglas Greer. In fact, all three appeared in “School’s Out” (which needed a big cast of schoolmates), and all three played boys nicknamed “Speck” in 1930–32.

At the end of 1930 Paramount hired Jackie Cooper away to star in Skippy. Donald Haines played Harley Nubbins in that film, and Buddy McDonald appeared in the background. By McDonald’s account, he also appeared in the sequel, Sooky. Jackie went on to an Oscar nomination and more starring roles as an MGM contract player. Donald returned to the Our Gang series by May 1931.

In contrast, Buddy was called in to the Hal Roach Studio only sporadically. His work consisted of:

• Sometime in late 1930, a small part in the Laurel and Hardy feature Pardon Us, later cut from the movie.
• February–March 1931, the Charley Chase short “One of the Smiths,” as discussed before.
• October 1931, the Thelma Todd–Zasu Pitts short “On the Loose” (YouTube; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath), directed by Hal Roach himself.
• November 1931, another Todd–Pitts short, “Sealskins” (IMDB; Dave Lord Heath), as an office boy.

Meanwhile, the Our Gang unit made eight movies in 1931, none with Buddy.

It‘s clear from the Bann interview that Buddy McDonald really enjoyed his days at the Roach studio. He talked about the fun of watching other movies being made. He spoke about Our Gang producer-director Bob McGowan as “a very kind, sweet old man.”

Some people at the studio seem to have paid particular attention to Buddy. He named Jack Roach, the studio chief’s brother and administrator: “I was sort of a pet of his, and got to spend time with him, even in his office.” And Oliver Hardy: “He liked me. He would swing me up and I could ride around on his shoulders.”

One possible scenario is that folks at the Roach Studio realized that Buddy McDonald was a smart, willing kid from a troubled family. McGowan, who was known for keeping parents at a distance, chose to stop casting him. But other people at the studio showed him kindness and gave him small roles. For “On the Loose,” he even got the run of the Venice Pier amusement park for a few days.

COMING UP: One last ride on the fire engine.

“One day I showed up at the studio barefoot”

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, Bud McDonald shared one memory from working at the Hal Roach Studio at age seven:

We were supposed to work out at the ranch on an Our Gang. Down home, in the summer time, I went barefoot, like everyone else. . . . One day I showed up at the studio barefoot. I didn’t put any shoes on and my mother never noticed. She had to drive all the way back to Bell to get my shoes, and in the meantime they went and bought a new pair of shoes for me at the studio. They had to scuff ’em up real bad.

Movies from the 1920s confirm that it wasn’t unusual for southern California boys to go barefoot. Coy Watson, Jr., didn’t wear shoes while starring in “A Nick-of-Time Hero” (1921) or playing a newsboy in “Galloping Bungalows” (1924). Neither did some players in the earliest Century Kids comedies and later Mickey McGuire movies.

More often, however, it’s ordinary kids called in as extras or hanging around in backgrounds who are shoeless. In the Our Gang movie “Big Business” (filmed September 1923, released 1924; Lucky Corner; YouTube), every anonymous walk-on is barefoot. One special example is the early Laurel and Hardy and James Finlayson short “Sugar Daddies” (1927; YouTube; Dave Lord Heath): a little fellow in overalls is so curious about what the comedians are doing on the Venice Pier that he pads alongside them staring for twenty seconds.

The Lucky Corner website reports that Buddy McDonald’s first three Our Gang movies were filmed on this schedule:

• “Pups Is Pups” April–May 1930
• “Teacher’s Pet” May 1930
• “School’s Out” June 1930

Since McDonald referred to his shoeless arrival as happening “in the summer time,” that was most likely during the June shooting of “School’s Out.” That short was a sequel to “Teacher’s Pet,” with Jackie Cooper still mooning over teacher Miss Crabtree. Buddy was once again in the core group of school kids, though he didn’t have as many lines or close-ups as in the previous movie.

I suspect that the shoes incident affected how people at the Hal Roach Studio perceived Buddy McDonald. To begin with, he appears to have become the studio’s choice to play barefoot country boys.

Sometime later that year, Buddy and occasional Our Gang member Bobby Mallon shot a scene for the Laurel and Hardy’s first feature Pardon Us (Dave Lord Heath). That movie grew from a short subject as the studio kept adding episodes over several months, and I can’t tell when this scene was filmed.

Buddy and Bobby played two kids in overalls and straw hats, fishing and listening to Stan and Ollie discuss their criminal past. Ultimately that scene was cut from the English-language picture, but it survives in the treatment, this one publicity photo, and possibly the German print.

Buddy’s next release for Roach, filmed in February–March 1931, was the Charley Chase comedy “One of the Smiths” (YouTube; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath). He played a hillbilly kid, as shown at top. Though this character doesn’t have lines, his actions are crucial to the plot.

(McDonald also recalled a line he delivered in another Charley Chase movie, with Chase perhaps playing a druggist, but no one’s found that footage. It’s therefore possible Buddy filmed that scene before “One of the Smiths,” but I’m guessing not.)

COMING UP: Another effect of Buddy’s barefoot arrival may not have been so positive.

“They want boys like Farina”

As I wrote before, the 1930 Our Gang short “Pups Is Pups” (Lucky Corner; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath) was set in a city, with big industrial structures looming over the kids’ yard.

That setting was also reflected in the gang itself, which was more multiethnic than it had been since 1925. That was when George “Sonny Boy” Warde made the last of his nine movies playing a stereotypical Chinese kid. For “Pups Is Pups” the gang included Alan Dong in a similar role, never repeated.

Of course, like all the Our Gang films, “Pups Is Pups” included some African-American kids: Allen “Farina” Hoskins; his sister Jannie, as shown in a still from a deleted scene; and young twins Kenneth and Hugo Hill playing his little brothers. (In the next movie, Matthew Beard arrived as a little brother for Farina. At first called Hercules, he’d soon be nicknamed “Stymie.”)

“Pups Is Pups” was also the first movie for Buddy McDonald, whose 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann I’ve been studying. Having a racially integrated set of playmates was new to Buddy, but he enjoyed working with Farina and Stymie:

I really liked them, both. They were the very first black people I met. I thought nothing of it at the time. I did learn about racial prejudice, but not at Hal Roach Studios. My mother was a bigot. . . .

Farina was the only one I stayed in touch with. We were pretty good friends. I talked to Al Hoskins around the year he died. He was back and forth between Oakland and Los Angeles. He’d been down and out too. He seemed to have nothing left either from his days in the Gang, other than memories. But it didn’t defeat his optimism. What a nice man.

In that interview, McDonald drew Bann’s attention to a part of Farina’s costuming imposed to make him fit the prevailing stereotype of black kids:

watch the films with Farina. He had another pair of shoes on inside those big shoes he wore to make his feet look extra large.

The 1925 promotional film “Our Gang at Home” makes the difference obvious. That movie is included in Ben Model’s Silent Comedy Watch Party, episode 88. Watch from 45:30 to 46:10, when little Farina briefly gets to wear only his own shoes.

“Pups Is Pups” played off American racial attitudes in another way that Bann’s interview didn’t address. Early in the movie, Farina reads an advertisement seeking “colored boys” to be pages at a dog and pet show. Jackie proposes the whole gang seek jobs as pages, but Chubby says, “They want boys like Farina.” There’s no explanation of what that means, but probably no explanation was necessary. Farina heads downtown to earn good money, promising that once he lands the job he’ll get the gang prizes for their pets.

As I mentioned above, one publicity photo shows a scene that never made it into the final cut. Apparently the original script showed all the other neighborhood kids of Farina’s age in blackface, presumably to apply for page jobs. That group includes (from left) Jackie, Chubby, Mary Ann, Buddy McDonald, and Alan Dong.

Bann didn’t ask McDonald about being made up for this scene or how it played out, and McDonald didn’t bring it up. But I have to think it was a unusual, memorable experience for a new actor.

The book Hollywood Speaks quoted Hal Roach this way: “I’d say fifty percent of written comedy won’t play. Things sound funny on paper, but when you get on the set, they may not be funny.” The studio relied on improvisation, and many planned or even performed scenes were never released.

In this case, the original plan for “Pups Is Pups” must not have played. Director Robert McGowan pulled back into familiar territory of kids and animals pushing into a dignified adult setting. (Chaos and hilarity ensued, of course.)

(NEXT: “One Day I showed up at the studio barefoot.”)

“Trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had”

As recounted back here, Buddy McDonald joined the Our Gang troupe in 1930 at the age of seven.

He lived in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell. Now in the heart of Los Angeles County, that city was only three years old back in 1930. It had a population just under 8,000, though that was enough to justify its own local newspaper.

Culver City, home of the Hal Roach Studio and MGM, was twenty-eight miles away.

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, McDonald explained that his journey into the movies started with being “the champion speller for the Los Angeles city schools for my grade.” His parents, “drunk on a Sunday night,” sent a newspaper clipping about this feat to the company that made the Our Gang movies.

I think they mailed it to Hal Roach on a Monday, and on Wednesday the studio called our next door neighbor—because we didn't have a phone. They wanted me out there that Thursday.

So the next day, after school, we went all the way over to Washington Boulevard in Culver City to find this place, Hal Roach Studios. It was quite a drive on the roads in those days. We saw Bob McGowan, and Hal Roach. They sort of interviewed me. But very low key. I didn’t quite know what this was about and what my parents were doing with me. . . .

Looking back on it, they were trying to figure out what kind of a kid they had. What could I do? They talked with me, I had to make a few faces, sing a song, recite a poem; they filmed it. They developed the test, almost immediately. Took practically no time. They determined I was photogenic, and told me to report back to the studio the next day, Friday, to begin work on my first picture

Many of the first long-lasting Our Gang cast came from the Hal Roach Studio community: Ernie Morrison, already under contract; Mary Kornman, daughter of a still photographer; her friend and neighbor, Mickey Daniels, who was also a nephew of Harold Lloyd’s former leading lady Bebe Daniels; Jack Davis, younger brother of Lloyd’s current leading lady and then wife.

By the early 1930s, the studio was taking on kids with show-biz experience. Jackie Cooper’s mother was in vaudeville. Mary Ann Jackson, Harry Spear, Donald Haines, and Kendall McComas were regulars in other film series before joining Roach. 

But McDonald was just a kid from LA County. “I lived in Bell, and it was such a small community, I was the one and only person who had anything to do with the movies. It made me famous, at least there! If I sneezed, it was news. In Bell, that is.”

Buddy’s first movie was “Pups Is Pups,” filmed in April. His character was just a neighborhood kid with a pet goat, and the goat got better camera angles. I don’t think he had any lines. “They handed me a toothbrush and told me to brush the goat’s teeth,” McDonald recalled. “I was scared to death of that god-damned goat. I had never been around a goat, and it really frightened me.”

Presumably director Robert McGowan wanted to start Buddy slowly. But he learned fast. In his second movie, “Teacher’s Pet,” Buddy not only had lines, he was one of star Jackie Cooper’s three main friends, alongside established players Farina and Chubby. The studio managers didn’t give Buddy an elaborate costume or have him pose in publicity photos like the long-time cast, but clearly they saw potential in him.

(NEXT: “They want boys like Farina.”)

Profit and Loss

Last week the New York Times published book editor Gerald Howard’s essay reminiscing about editorial tasks in the early 1980s:

I had the idea that we should reissue two early novels by the fine writer Alice Adams. In order to clear the sum of money necessary to do so, I had to generate, by myself, calculator and production cost sheets in hand, a profit-and-loss statement, or P. & L., which would then be signed off on by various departments. My last hurdle in executing this modest financial transaction of maybe $7,500 was to secure the initials of our chief financial officer. A numbers guy. Not much of a reader.

Like all publishing P. & L.’s, ours factored in typesetting, cover art and printing costs, marketing, overhead, the cost of money and the revenue from projected sales and subsidiary rights to spit out a percentage figure on the bottom line that indicated the likely return on investment. (When I first was confronted with one of these forms, I thought, so that’s what a “bottom line” is. Interesting.) We were theoretically required at that time to have our P. & L.’s yield a return of at least 8 percent, and I had become adept in ways to make or exceed that number. You could shave on the cover art. You could shave on marketing and advertising. You could basically lie about projected sales and hope no one called you on it. The techniques I had developed in college to make my ham-handed chem lab experiments yield the proper results found a practical new use.

So there I was in our C.F.O.’s office with a P. & L. that just eked out a 7 percent return. He looked at that piece of paper dubiously. He looked at me dubiously. I made some weak noises about literary excellence, backlist sales, commitment to authors. He continued to look at me dubiously. Then, with that wry and sad expression with which financial people have regarded liberal arts people since at least the invention of movable type and perhaps even written language, he signed off on my shortfallen P. & L. and said to me, “You know, we could make more money by just putting this advance into a certificate of deposit.”

I produced the properly crestfallen face because I knew he was right. Inflation was rampant and C.D.’s were paying 10 percent per annum or more. What a drag I was on the corporation. But I grabbed the P. & L. before he could have second thoughts, thanked him and backed out of his office.

Note, however, that the CFO did sign off on the investment.

I interviewed for a job with Gerry Howard a couple of years after this must have taken place. One of my first tasks on the editorial job I did get was running a P&L on one of the two desktop computers the Editorial Department then owned. I guess I should be pleased I wasn’t doing the calculations by hand.

Mrs. Baum Speaks to the Press

From the 24 Oct 1914 Duluth News Tribune:

Mrs. L. Frank Baum of Hollywood, Cal., who has been the guest of her sister, Mrs. H. L. Gage, left yesterday for various points before returning to her home. In itself, the announcement seems a simple one, but Mrs. Baum is none other than the wife of the well-known writer of children’s stories, one of which, “The Patchwork Girl of Oz,” has just been shown as a motion picture at the Rex. “The Wizard of Oz” is the most famous of Baum’s books.

“I have enjoyed my short stay in Duluth,” Mrs. Baum said yesterday, just before her departure, “but I would not live anywhere except in California. I am a New Yorker bred and born. Formerly Mr. Baum and I made the trip back and forth every year or so, but when our boys grew older we decided to make our permanent home in California, and now I feel that I could not be happy anywhere else. I left three chrysanthemum plants just beginning to bloom when I came away, and I must see how they are progressing. Besides, I want to see Mr. Baum.

“He wants to see me, too, I am sure,” she continued with a pretty laugh. “You know our ‘Baby’ has married recently, and that leaves us alone. We are more dependent on each other’s society than we were before. Then there is my club work. I think the salvation of a woman when her children have married and gone out into the world is plenty of work. Club work in California is both delightful and exacting, and Mr. Baum has his writing. So we are both provided for.”

Mrs. Baum will go first to Chicago to see a son, leaving about Wednesday for Joliet to see another son. Then she will return to her beloved Hollywood. She said yesterday that the motion picture scenes of “The Patchwork Girl of Oz” were taken in and around Hollywood.

This article is headlined “‘Oz’ Author’s Wife Ends Visit Here; Believes in Work.”

I found it in a search of a newspaper database for the phrase “patchwork girl.” Most of the articles related to the 1914 movie, not Baum’s novel. They were generally positive. Several, it was interesting to see, referred to the movie as adapted from Baum’s “extravaganza,” which was the term for a stage show like the popular 1902-03 Wizard of Oz, but there had been no stage version of The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

How Picture Books (and Life) Used to Be

Courtesy of the Albert Whitman blog, a page from Time to Eat: A Picture Book of Foods, by Mame Dentler and Frank Fenner, Jr., published in 1945:

Looking Back on American Virtue

Today’s New York Times offers Janet Maslin’s review of The Death of American Virtue, a history of the Clinton impeachment debacle by Duquesne Law School professor Ken Gormley.

The review calls the book “tough, labyrinthine,” and sometimes in its detail “impressive but not entirely necessary. . . . But by and large Mr. Gormley has packed his narrative with intense, overdue and definitive testimony about the still-surprising investigation of Mr. Clinton’s activities spearheaded by Kenneth W. Starr.”

I edited Ken’s previous big book, Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation, which also offered a very detailed account of an impeachment—in that case, of Richard Nixon for abusing the powers of the presidency. The Watergate controversy was the first national news I remember paying attention to, and I was honored to work on that book and meet Cox.

Somewhere back then Ken told me about his idea for this new book, and I was skeptical. Not of the importance of delving into how a failed development in Arkansas became a constitutional crisis that ended in offers of free plastic surgery. Rather, I thought it was too soon: sources might not be ready to talk, and the public certainly wasn’t ready to read more about the controversy.

But that was ten years ago, before the Supreme Court assigned George W. Bush the presidency, before the terrorist attack on New York, before the Iraq War and Guantànamo prison. Now we can even feel nostalgia for the days when Congressional Republicans wanted to impeach the President for lying about an affair.

You remember those defenders of American virtue: Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Bob Livingston, Rep. Henry Hyde, Rep. Bob Barr, Rep. John Ensign, Rep. Mark Sanford, Rep. Joe Scarborough, Rep. Dan Burton, Rep. Vito Fossella, Rep. Helen Chenoweth, Rep. Bill Thomas, Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. Larry Craig, Sen. John McCain,…

The Original Balloon Boy

Yesterday I quoted an 1898 article in St. Nicholas magazine, describing an accidental balloon ascension that the author said had happened in Oakland, California, forty years before. An aeronaut asked a young boy to help weigh down his balloon, and suddenly it broke loose and floated away, carrying the boy with it.

I went looking on Google Books for more information, half expecting to find nothing at all. Instead, I discovered a rather different story. The event truly occurred in 1853—only a short time after the California Gold Rush began. It was reported in such local newspapers as the Alta Californian. The news was then picked up by national magazines like Bizarre, for Fireside and Wayside. [I couldn’t make that title up if I tried.] I’m relying on the account from the 12 Nov 1853 issue of The Friend, a Quaker magazine.

The St. Nick article gave no name or age for the boy, but described him as a small, barefoot newspaper carrier. In fact, he was named Joseph “Ready” Gates, he was sixteen years old, he sold oranges, and he was wearing shoes but no socks. And as for an accidental launch, The Friend says:

It appears the balloon was to go up from near San Francisco, but at the appointed time for starting, being but partially inflated, it was found, after several trials insufficient to bear up a man of ordinary weight. The car was then taken off, and a small board placed across the hoop, from which the car had been suspended, and tied fast. Several persons, supposing the balloon would go but a short distance, asked to be permitted to take a ride.

“Ready” Gates was among those asking to go up, handing his orange basket to a friend. The aeronaut told him “to pull the valve-rope when he wanted to come down.” But “Ready” was a sixteen-year-old with friends watching him—so what happened next isn’t a big surprise. The newspaper report:

He took hold of it [the valve-rope], and appeared to be either making it fast or pulling at it with a view to decend [sic], when some of the boys cried out to him to go on. He then let it go and gradually rose, moving rapidly along in a south-easterly direction. . . .

A few moments after the balloon had parted company with the earth, and when at the distance of half a mile, one of young Gates’s companions shunted to him to know if he “would not have an overcoat?” The crowd around enjoyed the joke heartily, little thinking that the brave boy would, in less than half an hour, be shivering with intense cold. We may remark, that he was very lightly clad.

The balloon flew southeasterly “across an arm of the Bay south of Oakland, and rising as it proceeded to a great height, until it was concealed from view by some light clouds.”

A later issue of the Californian apparently had to complete the story, reporting that Gates returned to Oakland “in the Sacramento boat, safe except a sprain in his ankle. He landed in Suisan Valley, fifteen miles from Benicia, and five miles from any house.”

“Ready” stated that the valve-rope had broken. At great effort, he had climbed up the ropes to the balloon with his penknife and cut at the fabric of the balloon, “careful not to make the hole too large.” The newspaper marveled:

To climb the cords was a labour of extreme difficulty, for they were only about a quarter of an inch in thickness, and the distance from the hoop to a point practicable for cutting was about twelve feet. But few persons could perform the feat of climbing such cord near the earth, and much less three miles above, for that was about the height to which he ascended.

He saw not a little danger, but his voyage will become famous, and his name will be spoken from Europe to Australia.

Though the name of Joseph “Ready” Gates’s name didn’t appear in the St. Nick article, there is a book about him now: Dorothy Kupcha Leland’s The Balloon Boy of San Francisco, from a small press. He was also part of the inspiration for Liza Ketchum’s Newsgirl. So I suppose that’s famous enough.

A Boy in a Runaway Balloon

In 1898, St. Nicholas magazine published a story by Idah Meacham Strobridge called “An Unwilling Balloonist.” I came across it while researching potential inspirations for L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written the following year and published in 1900.

The picture at the right, from Syracuse Then and Now, shows an even more likely inspiration: a balloon launch in Baum’s home town of Syracuse, New York, in 1871, when he was fifteen.

For some reason, the St. Nick story seems like appropriate material now. I’ll start quoting in the middle:

The balloon, though it tugged at the guy ropes, showed there was still too great a weight. The aeronaut got out in despair. How much weight would the balloon carry? He looked for some one lighter than himself. A slim, half grown youth took his place. That was better; but even he was not light enough. Looking around for some one still lighter, the aeronaut saw a barefooted newsboy, wearing only a thin cotton shirt, a pair of trousers reaching to the knee, and a broken straw hat.

“Here, Bub,” said he, “quick! Sit in this hoop a minute, will you, and let me see if the balloon will raise your weight?”

The little fellow laid down his bundle of papers, placing beside them a basket of peanuts that he carried. Then he seated himself on the slender curving ring. Steadying himself within the frail circle by holding with both hands to the two sides, he sat there with his legs dangling below him, feeling quite important in being chosen. He was sure the other boys were envying him even this approach to an ascent in a balloon.

Yes; there was sufficient gas to hold up the boy’s weight. That was something; but it would not yet bear the weight of a man. Something must be done. An ascent must be made to satisfy the grumbling crowd. Some alterations must be made so that the aeronaut himself could go up as he had advertised.

They loosened some of the ropes as he directed, and then—

No one ever seemed to know how it happened, but with a bound the balloon somehow wrested itself from its moorings, and shot upward, bearing aloft the barefooted little newsboy, sitting in the swinging hoop!

Google Books has the whole story.

Strobridge claimed to describe an event that had actually happened in Oakland, California, more than forty years earlier. However, she offered no specific dates or names that would make it easy to confirm what she wrote. I suspected it might be a legend. But then I went back to Google Books.

TOMORROW: The real story of a runaway balloon.