When Buddy McDonald Arrived in the Neighborhood

In the 1930 Our Gang short “School’s Out,” teacher Miss Crabtree calls on a boy named “Buddy O’Donnell.”

This little guy had lots of freckles, prominent ears, and an attitude. He had appeared in the two preceding Our Gang shorts: “Pups Is Pups” and “Teacher’s Pet.” In the second he was also called Buddy.

Most kids in the Our Gang movies shared names with their characters, though the studio could give them nicknames like “Buckwheat” and “Wheezer.”

Richard W. Bann and Leonard Maltin therefore went looking for a child actor named O’Donnell as they prepared their 1977 book on the Our Gang series, and then again as they revised it in 1992. But they came up empty.

In July 2001 a friend alerted Bann that an eighty-year-old California man named Bud McDonald had played Buddy. For some unknown reason, actress June Marlowe had referred to him under a slightly different name, sending researchers off on the wrong path.

Bann quickly contacted Thomas “Bud” McDonald (1922–2008), confirmed his identity by email, and interviewed him, sharing that new material on the official Laurel and Hardy website in two parts.

It’s a lively conversation, with McDonald offering vivid memories of making movies for the Hal Roach Studio, remarks on other events in his early show-biz career, and frank details about the rest of his life.

In particular, McDonald revealed some behind-the-scenes details which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere.

His first movie, “Pups Is Pups” (Lucky Corner; IMDB; Dave Lord Heath), was unusual in setting the gang’s neighborhood next to big industrial buildings, not in a residential or rural area.

That effect was achieved by shooting some scenes in urban locations but filling out other long shots with matte paintings on glass. McDonald remembered seeing that special effect come together:

We were acting out at the ranch and they’ve got a camera and a mirror and a miniature set showing a huge building, and they’re all hooked up together. I guess it was what they call a glass shot or a matte shot or something. All I know is we did our scenes without those other buildings, but when we saw the rushes, there they were up on the screen! . . . [At rushes] You looked at what you did, and the kids would kind of tease each other, playfully, saying, “Look at Chubby,” or whatever line we might fire off at the screen.

The vertically augmented shots include the Roach studio’s city intersection set, familiar from many other movies, but this time given some tall background buildings.

Even the ballroom where the kids take their pets for a dog show appears to have been jazzed up with a matte painting over the orchestra’s heads.

The regular Our Gang director, Robert F. McGowan, doesn’t seem to have used that technique in other movies. I therefore view “Pups Is Pups” as one of several shorts he made starting in the late 1920s trying out cinematic techniques: extreme close-ups, shooting up from under glass, cutting off the adults’ heads, and so on. He rarely went back to those tricks in later movies, though.

Bonedust and a Jug of Molasses

“Helping Grandma” (YouTube; IMDB; Lucky Corner) was an Our Gang comedy filmed in the summer of 1930 and released in January 1931.

Borrowing a situation from the very first movie shot for the series, titled “Our Gang,” it shows the kids helping out at a general store.

That series pilot from 1922 may not be the only source for this comedy, however.

“Helping Grandma” starts with a kid nicknamed “Bonedust,” played by Bobby Young (1917–1951; as an adult actor he went by Clifton Young).

Bonedust started to appear in the Our Gang series in 1925, sometimes in the gang and sometimes just in the neighborhood. When his character had any distinction, it was usually defined by haplessness.

Pretty soon Bobby Young grew too tall to fit in with the gang (his adult height was 6'1"). He stopped being a semi-regular in 1928. But in 1930 he came back to play occasional roles, now gawky as well as hapless, in a few talkies. Among those was “Helping Grandma.”

As this short starts, Bonedust is a customer at the store. Jackie Cooper fills a jug with molasses for him. But when it comes time to pay, Bonedust says, “Doggone it, Jack, the money’s in the jug.”

Jackie tells Bonedust, “That was an old gag when my mother was a kid. You come across with that dough or I’ll pop you in the chin!”

Since Jackie Cooper’s head didn’t come up to Bobby Young’s shoulders (as shown above), this doesn’t look like a feasible solution. But Bonedust is too ineffectual to just push his way through the little kids.

Grandma (Margaret Mann) comes over and asks “Robert” if his dime really is in the jug. Bonedust says it is. So she charges the molasses to his family and sends him off.

Jack’s not happy. “Gee whiz, Grandma! Don’t you know that guy’s gypping us?”

“I know, dear Jack,” says Grandma. “But do you remember, you got a quarter’s worth of molasses out of me that same way once.”

Jack gulps. “I was afraid you’d remember that. Well, we all have our weak moments. But that guy is permanent!”

The next scene shows Bonedust at home pouring molasses out of the jug into a pan and then retrieving his dime from the goop. So he was too hapless to lie.

That opening for “Helping Grandma” establishes Grandma’s character and the moral of the movie. But the way it presents the situation of claiming a coin was in the molasses container suggests that really was an “old gag,” a small trick that more than a few boys tried on storekeepers. And there is a notable precedent in Hollywood comedy.

Back in 1917, Buster Keaton made his first film as a supporting player for Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in “The Butcher Boy” (YouTube; IMDB). In his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Buster Keaton explained the set-up this way:

The plot called for me to buy a quarter’s worth of molasses. I had brought along a tin pail for the molasses. But after it was ladled out I discovered that I had dropped the quarter into the molasses. Roscoe, Al St. John, and myself all took turns at trying to get the quarter.

That’s not exactly how the situation plays out. Fatty pours the molasses into Buster’s porkpie hat to retrieve the coin, leading to sticky situations and messy fights. Lea Stans provided a thorough analysis of this scene at Silent-ology. In the 1950s Keaton performed variations on the same skit for television shows like You Asked for It.

But “The Butcher Boy” is the only earlier appearance of this situation I’ve been able to find. Keaton didn’t suggest that this business came from a vaudeville sketch or well-known joke. I’ve searched Google Books and Early American Newspapers for anecdotes about molasses and coins and tricky boys, and I haven’t found any.

Perhaps better research will turn up examples, but for now it looks like what Jackie Cooper called an “old gag” in 1930 was a sort of homage to a movie made in 1917, the same year Bobby “Bonedust” Young was born.

Maps and More in the Fall 2024 Baum Bugle

The latest triennial issue of the International Wizard of Oz Club’s Baum Bugle is the 200th. It’s arriving, wrapped in seasonal colors, at club members’ houses now.

I’m honored to be one of the contributors to this issue, in the midst of many Oz experts I like and admire:

• Ruth Berman on the launch of the club and its journal.
• Scott Cummings on a stage show that would have reunited L. Frank Baum with his first illustrator, the since-famous artist Maxfield Parrish.
• Peter Hanff on the work of longtime Bugle editor and art director Dick Martin, with more samples of Martin’s work from David Maxine.
• Memories of editing the Bugle in different periods from Bill Stillman, Michael Gessell, and John Fricke.

My article is about the maps of Oz and its neighbors published in Tik-Tok of Oz in 1914—how they came about and how they affected Baum’s storytelling in the novels that followed. Up until that book, Baum had never mentioned any maps. Afterwards, every book alluded to the map of Oz in one way or another.

That essay owed a lot to two studies of Oz and its representations. First, Michael O. Riley’s Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (University Press of Kansas, 1997) snapped me out of the childhood habit of thinking of Oz as a stable place that the books gradually revealed and empowered me to think of Baum making it up as he went along. To be sure, by the time I read that book I’d studied literature in college, edited books for a decade, and even published my own fiction. But old habits stick around. Now I find it more interesting to analyze the fairyland from multiple perspectives.

Starting in 2012, David Maxine has shared a series of essays about the maps of Oz through the Hungry Tiger Press blog. This analysis starts with the earliest map, made for a theatrical presentation and now lost, and has worked its way to the Oz Club’s 1960s publication of maps that incorporated locations from the whole series and other Baum books as well.

Like other Oz fans, I enjoyed looking at the 1914 maps I first saw in Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz. I had the Oz Club’s maps pinned on the bulletin board in my room for years. As many other fantasy authors and publishers discovered after Baum, there’s nothing like a map to make a fairyland seem more real.

“Finding Friendships: Middle Grade Comics” Panel at MICE 2024

The Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) takes place this weekend in the Fuller Building at Boston University, 808 Commonwealth Avenue.

MICE has been in that building for the past few years, but this is the latest the show has been scheduled, in the gift-buying season.

On Saturday, 7 December, I’m going to moderate a panel discussion at MICE titled “Finding Friendships: Middle Grade Comics.”

The four panelists are, in alphabetical order with their middle-grade books:

• Johnnie Christmas, Gamerville and Swim Team.
• Debbie Fong, Next Stop.
• Emma Hunsinger, How It All Ends.
• Shaina Lu, Noodle & Bao.

One thing that struck me in reading these creators’ work is how they all came to middle-grade storytelling from different directions.

Christmas was one of Margaret Atwood’s collaborators on Angel Catbird and drew or wrote other adventure comics for adults like Tartarus and Alien 3. Fong illustrated prose books for young people, including the YA anthology Banned Together. Hunsinger was best known for her short comic “How to Draw a Horse,” published in The New Yorker. She’s also co-created a picture book, My Parents Won’t Stop Talking. Lu is an educator here in greater Boston whose projects included a community mural in Chinatown.

It’s usually easy to see connections from these artists’ earlier work to their new books. For instance, Lu’s Noodle & Bao is about gentrification in an urban neighborhood. Hunsinger’s How It All Ends and “How to Draw a Horse” both start with sharing adjoining desks in a high-school class.

I interpret this confluence as a sign of the strength of the market for middle-grade graphic novels in recent years. Agents and publishers drew in talent from all directions, and we have a wider range of stories as a result.

“You can’t throw pies in comedies anymore!”

Laurel and Hardy’s “The Battle of the Century” didn’t immediately rehabilitate the pie fight in Hollywood at the end of 1927. But here are three data points that show the trope moving back to acceptance, if never full respectability.

Sometime in the late 1920s the Weiss brothers’ Artclass company produced a short featuring young actors Bobby Nelson (1922–1978) and Albert Schaefer (1916–1942) and a pie fight. This picture was obviously made on the cheap, shot outdoors to avoid having to build sets. It shows no logic in character, plot, or basic physics.

This movie survives in a German print, in loose footage, and in the Weiss Brothers Collection at UCLA. I’m guessing at the date based on the apparent age of Bobby Nelson, between his waifish appearances in “The Doughboy” (1926), “Sunshine of Paradise Alley” (1926), and “Perils of the Jungle“ (1927) and his post-haircut westerns.

The only title I’ve found linked to this footage is “Bobby’s Pie Fight”—“Bobby’s Kuchenschlacht” in Germany and “Il combattimento di Bobby” in Italy. However, that title might have been attached when the Weiss brothers recut their 1920s films for television syndication in the series Chuckle Heads.

Unfortunately, the Weiss brothers were near the bottom of the barrel among Hollywood producers. They saved money by skipping such steps as registering copyrights and screening movies for critics. As a result, scholars can’t even say when most of their movies were released. “Bobby’s Pie Fight” has no IMDB listing, so I can’t confirm its original title or date.

Assuming that “Bobby’s Pie Fight” was the title, that shows Artclass believed that subject would attract rather than turn off its target audience. At the same time, the company made sure the pie wagon was crudely labeled “Hokum Pie Co.” to signal to adults that they knew they were slinging an old joke. This pie fight was just for the kids.

Next comes the Our Gang comedy “Shivering Shakespeare,” directed by Anthony Mack in 1929 and released in January 1930 (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner; Lord Heath).

Like several other early talking pictures in the series, this was a remix of silent films from a few years before. As in “Stage Fright” (1923), it showed the gang being dragooned into putting on a play set during Nero’s reign. As in “Uncle Tom’s Uncle” (1926), the kids in the audience pelt the kids on the stage with food.

“Uncle Tom’s Uncle” (and its direct remake, “Spanky” [1932]) showed the audience throwing vegetables. For “Shivering Shakespeare,” in contrast, the theatergoers are supplied with two booths full of pies, apparently from a fundraising bake sale. Furthermore, that audience includes both kids (rowdies led by Jack McHugh) and dignified-looking adults.

The result is a pie fight much like “The Battle of the Century”—the first in a talking picture, some scholars posit. As in that earlier Roach studio film, there’s a gradual build-up of pie-throwing, trying to make the action meaningful instead of just messy. Mack filmed some of that action in slow motion, leaving those shots with no sound. The result isn’t entirely satisfactory, but five years earlier no respected studio would have even tried such hokum.

Finally, in 1931 Educational Films released “The Lure of Hollywood,” part of the Hollywood Girls series (IMDB; YouTube). These were definitely movies about and for adults, not children.

In “The Lure of Hollywood” a mix-up leads a young studio props man to think that a movie star is hitting on his hopeful-starlet girlfriend. During the filming of a big musical number on the theme of custard pies, therefore, the props man throws a pie at the movie star. That devolves into a pie fight, the two cameras still rolling.

A studio executive bustles onto the set and shouts: “You can’t throw pies in comedies anymore! The public won’t laugh at it.” That was, of course, the standard wisdom of movie makers and critics for a decade from the late 1910s to the late 1920s.

The film’s heroines leave Los Angeles in a cheap used car, their Hollywood dreams in ruins. But then the studio staff views the rushes from that supposedly ruined scene. The screening room erupts in laughter. The same executive says: “That’s the funniest thing we’ve ever photographed. We should have gone in for that pie-throwing long ago!”

Pie-throwing thus appears restored to its status as a Hollywood gag—a classic gag, in fact. Being able to depict that turnaround was undoubtedly gratifying for the director of “The Lure of Hollywood”: credited as William Goodrich, that was actually the Keystone veteran Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

The Significance of “Playin’ Hookey”

“Playin’ Hookey,” credited to director Anthony Mack (IMDB; YouTube; The Lucky Corner; Dave Lord Heath), is not one of the more inspired Our Gang comedies. Like a number of the series’ other silent shorts, it feels like two half-developed stories with only a loose connection between them.

In the first half, Joe Cobb’s dog Pansy gets blamed for scaring chickens and destroying property. Pansy’s misbehavior is actually the fault of Joe’s little brother Wheezer, played by Bobby Hutchins. In this stretch of the series, Wheezer was an unstoppable engine of chaos.

Joe’s dad prepares to kill the dog with a shotgun. [Kids’ comedy, folks!] But Joe unloads the gun and tells Pansy to play dead. He sneaks her away and tries to find her refuge with Farina and his little sister, portrayed by Sunny and Jannie Hoskins. Jannie’s character is called Zuccini because almost all the series’ black kids got assigned food names; usually Farina’s sister was named Mango, but other exceptions were Arnica and Trellis.

Then a police chase happens nearby. All the big kids run to see. That action turns out to be a scene from a movie being filmed on the streets of Culver City. By a stroke of luck, the movie crew is looking for a dog that can play dead. Joe offers to bring Pansy to the studio for $5. His pals sneak in after him.

In fact, the gang sneaks into the All-American Studios by pretending to be dummies in a truck, the exact same way the gang got into the West Coast Studios in “Dogs of War” (1923). That short also began as one story—an elaborate parody of trench warfare—and turned into a romp through movie sets. William Gillespie appeared in both films, in the first as a harried director and in the second as a harried actor.

For the rest of “Playin’ Hookey,” the kids and dog run around the studio, disrupt scenes being filmed in a variety of genres, and tangle with actors and security guards. At one odd moment we see the Triceratops costume from Laurel and Hardy’s “Flying Elephants,” filmed in early May 1927. Indeed, that Triceratops gets more screen time in “Playin’ Hookey” than in the surviving “Flying Elephants.”

Eventually, the action shifts to a set in a kitchen filled with custard pies and buns, the latter for some reason being filled with gunpowder. Charlie Hall plays a comedian made up to look as much like Chaplin as possible without risking a lawsuit. There’s a line of cops in old-fashioned helmets and long coats, looking nothing like the police officers earlier in this film. In short, we’ve entered a travesty of the Keystone Studio as it was more than a decade before.

The kids run onto that set. They see the comedian being chased by a knife-wielding chef. The gang’s current freckled boy—skinny, bespectacled Jay R. Smith—picks up a pie and throws it at the chef. Soon the other kids are tossing pies, as well as those exploding buns. Chaos ensues, but not hilarity.

Critics might quibble that this isn’t a full pie fight since nobody throws anything back at the kids. But the action does include the usual detail of pastry flying wild and hitting people not part of the initial conflict. Among the adults struck with pies are those Keystone-style cops, an actress played by Dorothy Coburn, and her hairdresser played by Edith Fortier (usually on set as the Hoskinses’s aunt and chaperone).

Eventually the studio security team led by Tiny Sandford catches the gang and literally throws them out of the studio. We never learn what will happen to Pansy. That concern was back in the first half of the movie, after all.

“Playin’ Hookey” isn’t a very interesting film. Even the backstage look at the Roach lot is unrevealing since the set-ups are so artificial; “Dogs of War” shows more. But “Playin’ Hookey” is significant as an example of a pie fight shortly before Laurel and Hardy’s lauded “Battle of the Century,” reflecting how the studio viewed that trope (IMDB; YouTube).

But wait! you say. “The Battle of the Century” is a 1927 film. “Playin’ Hookey” is listed as from 1928.

Quite true, I reply. But “Playin’ Hookey” was made in the summer of 1927 while “The Battle of the Century” went into production on 5 October. (For a complex discussion of when “Playin’ Hookey” was made, see its page at the Lucky Corner. For equivalent information about “The Battle of the Century,” see Dave Lord Heath’s page.)

MGM released “The Battle of the Century” on the very last day of 1927. Roach’s previous distributor, Pathé, had the rights to “Playin’ Hookey,” and it held that picture back until the first day of 1928. As a result, its significance has been masked.

“The Battle of the Century” starts as a boxing movie, inspired by the Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey fight of 22 Sept 1927. In talking about where to go from there, someone on the writing staff suggested a pie fight.

The Hal Roach Studio was small and friendly. Hall, Coburn, Sandford, and other players in the Our Gang picture also acted in Laurel and Hardy movies that summer. Stan Laurel and his fellow writers had to have known about the making of “Playin’ Hookey.”

That picture reflected the dominant industry thinking about pie fights at the time: they were hokum, a relic of the previous decade, entertaining only for kids. A couple of years later, Laurel told Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times that simply throwing pies “really had passed out with Keystone”—exactly as depicted in the Our Gang film.

Looking for something new, Laurel rethought the trope. “We made every one of the pies count,” he said. The scene wasn’t just messy chaos. It was messy chaos that built up gradually from character interactions. “The Battle of the Century” was a hit, and it resurrected the pie fight as nostalgic fun.

COMING UP: A changed Hollywood.

“Real honest to goodness…pie slinging contests”

Mass pie-tossing definitely returned to American movies in 1927, and not just in Laurel and Hardy’s “Battle of the Century,” released in December.

The surviving examples appeared first in a particular type of movie: the kid gang comedy. That makes sense because the core viewers of those movies were so young they weren’t:

• tired of the Keystone-style comedy of the previous decade, given that they had probably never seen those films.
• influenced by what the press deemed properly funny for modern audiences.

In May 1927, the Bray Studios registered a short called “The Big Pie Raid,” directed by Stan De Lay (IMDB; YouTube; clearer extract on YouTube). This was part of the McDougall Alley series, running from 1926 to 1928—an obvious imitation of the Our Gang comedies, but with even more blatant racism.

The Library of Congress filing for “The Big Pie Raid” summarized its plot like this:

The two gangs are having it out on the football field. The winning team has been promised a party by one of the girl spectators. Oatmeal, a little colored lad, wins the day for his side and the result is that the team goes down to enjoy the blowout. After much ice cream and cake and speech making they adjourn to the lawn to play games.

The losers of the football game however are on the job and attack the party with mud pies. Real honest to goodness mud pie slinging contests ensue with the victors of the morning coming out victorious but not until all the pies of a bakery wagon had been used and not until Oatmeal had come to the rescue with his little friend Farina [sic—Fatima], that gasser of animals, the skunk.

At around the twelve-minute mark, a wagon helpfully labeled PIES loses a wheel near the kids’ mud fight. That leads to a “Real honest to goodness” pie fight, with combatants and one spectator hit. Since Bray named the movie after that part of the scenario, the studio clearly saw the pie fight as an attraction for its target audience.

The typographical error inserting the name Farina into the synopsis of “The Big Pie Raid” shows how much the makers of this series had the Our Gang movies on their minds. McDougall Alley featured a little black child called Oatmeal, played by Hannah Washington. Just as the character of Farina was variously identified as a girl or a boy in early years, “The Big Pie Raid” presents Oatmeal as a boy so that he can play in the football game.

Even though Oatmeal is the hero of both the football game and the subsequent fight, he and his Chinese-stereotype friend Free-Gin have to be snuck into the older white kids’ party. One difference between this movie and the typical Our Gang shorts is that the McDougall Alley kids are more bourgeois than their rivals rather than poorer.

In December 1927, Fox released “Wild Puppies,” directed by Clyde Carruth (IMDB; YouTube; Library of Congress shot list). Like “The Big Pie Raid,” this short comedy moves from a football game to a gang fight that parodies trench warfare. However, its special effects are more elaborate and amusing. While most of the missiles are vegetable, ultimately fat boy Albert Schaefer throws pies down onto three members of the rival gang. The climactic bits show the bad guys trying to escape a lion, scenes that actor Coy Watson, Jr., wrote about in The Keystone Kid.

In both “The Big Pie Raid” and “Wild Puppies,” the leader of the rival gang, and the person whose face takes the most mess, was Jack McHugh. He’d been the center of an earlier kid gang series from Century before being upstaged by Malcolm Sebastian as “Big Boy,” his little brother.

McHugh would make one appearance in an Our Gang film: “Shivering Shakespeare” (1930). Once again, he played a rival gang leader who starts a pie fight. It seems to have been a specialty.

COMING UP: But that wasn’t the first pie-throwing in an Our Gang movie.

“Extracted from a pie slinging episode”

In 1916 Charlie Chaplin released a movie called “Behind the Screen,” in which his character worked in the props department of a movie studio (IMDB; YouTube).

At the time Chaplin was under contract with Mutual, having moved on from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. In this movie he made fun of one of Keystone’s trademarks, the thrown pie, with a scene labeled “The comedy department rehearsing a new idea.”

That involved a Keystone-style cop throwing pies incompetently, then Chaplin throwing a lot of pies at big Eric Campbell while ducking most of the pies thrown back at him. It went well beyond what surviving Keystone movies show, leaving that studio with no new territory to explore.

If Chaplin wanted to convey that pie-throwing was now old hat, some critics were already ahead of him on that score. The Moving Picture World review of “Behind the Screen” said:

There is throughout a distinct vein of vulgarity which is unnecessary, even in slapstick comedy. A great deal of comedy is intended to be extracted from a pie slinging episode which occurs during the rehearsal of a couple of scenes in a moving picture studio.

Soon Hollywood filmmakers were assuring people they had moved beyond pie-throwing. The comedian Lloyd Hamilton wrote in an essay in Motography in 1918:

There is not one phase in the production of motion picture comedies today that isn’t a great improvement over the fun film of the past. Of course everyone has his opinion as to the cause of the great improvement. The biggest reason is the public or fans themselves. They have become tired of the old hokum comedy, the poor sets, hideous make-ups and other stuff such as throwing pies. A year or two an audience would scream if someone was hit in the face with a pie–but today the kids are the only ones who seem to enjoy it…

In addition to quoting that essay, Silentology also showed an advertisement for a 1918 Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran movie that promised “No pie throwing.”

Over the next several years, many newspapers and magazines used “pie throwing” or “pie fight” as a synecdoche for all old-fashioned comic gags that sophisticated modern moviegoers would surely shun.

This despite the fact that there had been few to no fights with pies (as opposed to a pastry thrown singly) in movies aside from “Behind the Screen.” Like “bra burning,” the “pie fight” went straight from one isolated example to cliché without ever actually having been common.

The silent movie musician and scholar Ben Modell has written:

The confusing thing about the custard pie equivalent of a snowball fight is that it appears nowhere in silent movies except in this short [“Behind the Screen”] and in [Laurel and Hardy’s] “Battle of the Century” (1927). There are individual pies thrown in Keystone films, but no pie fights. Are all the pie fights in films from the Nickelodeon era…and are all lost films?

In fact, at least a couple of Hollywood pie fights appeared shortly before “Battle of the Century,” one filmed at the same Hal Roach Studio. How did they slip past critical opprobrium? The answer lies in that Lloyd Hamilton quotation above.

TOMORROW: “the kids are the only ones who seem to enjoy it.”

Integrating Our Gang’s Schools

The Hal Roach Studio’s Our Gang series was notable from the beginning in showing black and white kids playing together on a mostly equal basis.

However, they didn’t go to school with each other—not for years.

Many American school systems were segregated in the early 1920s, either by law or (as in Los Angeles) by a combination of real-estate covenants and administrative moves that shuttled most black, Mexican, and Asian kids into certain schools.

At first the Hal Roach Studio’s school for its young actors replicated that situation, though it’s not clear if that was ever a goal. Ernie Morrison had been under contract for years when the series started, and he had a private tutor. Judging by photos like the one above from 1923, that tutor was a black woman.

In September 1922, having become responsible for educating more kids, Hal Roach hired Fern Carter (1893–1961) to run a school within the studio. She’s the woman standing in this publicity photo next to director Robert McGowan. She remained the teacher for the series’ main cast for more than twenty years.

Ernie Morrison continued to study with his tutor, however. It’s possible that race had no bearing on that arrangement. He and his father might have preferred that individual attention. It’s also quite conceivable that race was a factor. The Morrisons might have wanted to preserve that woman’s job, for instance, while the studio or other kids’ parents couldn’t imagine hiring her to teach the whole group. Or segregated schooling might simply have seemed like the norm. 

In those same early years, almost all of the Our Gang shorts were about children outside of school. Titles like “Saturday Morning,” “July Days,” and “Sunday Calm” reflect the focus on kids having free time to get into trouble. Physical comedy worked better when the cast wasn’t stuck to their desks.

Every so often, however, a movie showed the gang in a classroom. “Boys to Board” (1923) was set at a small boarding school, orphans preferred. “Lodge Night” (1923) showed little Joe Cobb as the new kid in a one-room school before shifting to other locations. Eventually all of “Commencement Day” (1924) took place in and around such a school.

And in all three of those movies, Ernie Morrison’s character isn’t in class with the white kids. He—and his little sibling Farina—still play with the white boys. In “Lodge Night” all the boys are part of a club spoofing the KKK. In “Commencement Day” Ernie has set up a merry-go-round near the school, charging kids some of their lunch for a ride.

In “Boys to Board” Ernie runs a delivery service, bringing Joe to the boarding school. That puts him in the position to rescue the white boys, so his outsider status actually makes him a hero. But it also appears that Ernie’s character doesn’t go to school at all.

As a result, those movies didn’t challenge audiences of the time with the sight of black and white kids in a classroom together. For some Americans, of course, that would have seemed normal, or at least unremarkable. But other white viewers might have objected.

During those years, Allen “Sunny” Hoskins was too young to go to school, and so was his character Farina. But eventually he grew up. In “Seeing the World” (1927), Farina is conspicuous among the students under teacher James Finlayson.

From then on, whenever audiences saw Our Gang in a classroom, that school was integrated. Starting in the early 1930s, more stories took place in school, and Farina, Stymie, Buckwheat, and other black kids (one even played by Dorothy Dandridge) were always on an equal basis with the white kids.

Likewise, behind the scenes Sunny Hoskins and his successors attended Fern Carter’s classes alongside their white cast mates. In fact, Carter described Sunny as her brightest student. And he, like most of the Our Gang alumni, recalled her fondly.

Falling for Farina

As related back here, Hal Roach and the makers of the Our Gang comedies modeled the character of Farina, played by Allen “Sunny” Hoskins, on the pickaninny stereotype.

Gloria Lee writes in Our Gang: A Racial History of the Little Rascals:

His hair was tied in pigtails and white ribbons. He ate watermelons, fell into vats of flour, and smoked a corncob pipe. He wore the clownlike, oversized shoes of a minstrel. . . .

Farina became the vehicle of all the most hackneyed and racist sight gags. He appeared in whiteface while his white friends appeared in blackface. When he got the measles, white spots were painted on his face instead of black ones. He clutched voodoo amulets and was terrified of ghosts. He was called “Shine” while Mickey was called “Freckles” or “Speck” and Joe Cobb was called “Fatty.”

But something strange started to happen. Despite his genesis in the flattest of stereotypes, Farina started to become—how else to put it?—human. He went through the minstrel motions, but even the narrowness of his scripted roles couldn’t suppress his outsized personality. The public fell in love with him.

Just as rival studios needed an equivalent of Ernie Morrison in their kid gangs, many also had a younger black child in this stereotypical form. In the McDougall Alley Kids and Buster Brown series that counterpart was a girl named “Oatmeal,” played by Hannah Washington.

One manifestation of public interest the character, and of recognizing that a real child played the role, was the demand to know if Farina was a boy or a girl. For a while the movies were ambiguous, as were newspaper stories. Roach milked the question, playing coy in press releases.

Eventually, however, the studio acknowledged that “Sunny” Hoskins and the character of Farina were little boys. The costume changed to have pants, but it retained a couple of the pickaninny traits. Sunny wore one pair of shoes inside another because Farina had flat oversized feet. He kept his hair long enough for pigtails for years. Farina continued to suffer a disproportionate amount of mess and rough treatment.

From 1925 to 1931 Farina was the series’ main black character. In several films he was clearly the lead: “Your Own Back Yard,” “One Wild Ride” (1925), “Monkey Business” (1926), “Love My Dog,” “Chicken Feed” (1927), “Spook-Spoofing,” “The Smile Wins” (1928), “Election Day,” “Fast Freight” (1929). In some movies Sunny’s sister Jannie played Farina’s little sister, often called Mango.

Sunny made the transition to talkies while some other Our Gang kids struggled. Lee notes that one issue in that shift was that he’d been born in Boston and grown up in Los Angeles, so he didn’t speak in the broad “Southern” dialect the intertitles had assigned to Farina. It looks like he figured out how to deliver those lines for the microphones not quite as broadly but still with enough rural character to please the public.

Ultimately, Sunny Hoskins outlasted a second generation of fellow players. His seniority in the series matched his line deliveries, which projected a long-suffering personality. Having started as a toddler, he ended up appearing in more Our Gang movies than any other actor.

This series of postings started by noting the roots of the Farina persona in the character of Topsy in stage productions and parodies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Farina actually played Topsy in the 1926 short “Uncle Tom’s Uncle,” when the gang put on their own version of the show. Pudgy Joe Cobb portrayed the title character in blackface, his mom repeatedly telling him to wash his face and do his chores. That reflected the ongoing influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel on American culture.