“We have already paid $10,000 on a policy”

On 26 May 1914, the Milwaukee newspapers reported a new development in the story of Frederick E. Woodbury, the mining executive killed in January.

The most detailed article was in the Milwaukee Journal:

ASSIGNMENTS HALT THE PAYMENT OF INSURANCE.

Helen G. Woodbury, administratrix of the estate of Frederick Woodbury, sues the New England Mutual Life Insurance Co. to collect seven life insurance policies aggregating $40,000. She avers that Frederick Woodbury died Jan. 21, 1914, and the company refused to pay.

“The fact of the matter is that we have the money here now, ready to settle the claims, providing the question of the legality of certain assignments made by Mr. Woodbury is definitely cleared up,” says A. L. Saltzstein. “We have no record of these assignments. The original sum was $50,000, and we have already paid $10,000 on a policy that was entirely clear.”

I haven’t found anything further in the newspapers. It’s possible that court filings could offer more information about that dispute and how it was resolved.

Likewise, the county probate court might have more information on Frederick Woodbury’s estate and heirs. The fact that his widow was appointed administratrix instead of executrix indicates there was no will. That further suggests all or most of the estate would have gone to her as his legal wife.

That news story tells us that by May 1914 Helen G. Woodbury had received at least $10,000 after the sudden death of her husband, with the prospect of considerably more.

Some of that money, it appears, went into the founding of the Rolin Picture Company in Los Angeles.

We can make that link because, on 19 October, Helen Woodbury married Hal Roach.

TOMORROW: A marriage in movieland.

(The photo above, courtesy of the Tufts Digital Library, shows the Boston headquarters of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company at the start of the 20th century. It’s been replaced by another building that opened in 1941.)

“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.]