At Last an Our Gang/Wizard of Oz Crossover

In 1962, as described yesterday, Starlight Musical Theatre of San Diego held tryouts for a production of The Wizard of Oz, using music from the MGM movie.

To play the Tin Woodman the company chose a local television personality: Johnny Downs!

Downs brought decades of experience as performer, starting with acting in Our Gang comedies in the mid-1920s. In fact, he had sung and danced alongside MGM’s Tin Man, Jack Haley, in such movies as Coronado and Pigskin Parade, which also featured fourteen-year-old Judy Garland.

Downs appears in this photograph scanned from the 3 June San Diego Union with Cammy Wesson as Dorothy, Ray Wilde as the Cowardly Lion, and John Bryce as the Scarecrow.

The director was Charlie Cannon, a co-founder of Starlight Musical Theatre (San Diego Civic Light Opera Company) years before. In 1978 the San Diego Evening Tribune reported:

Cannon is most proud of his “Wizard of Oz” production in 1962 featuring Johnny Downs, a TV personality, as the tin man. “We put close to 5,000 in the bowl for that one,” he said. “We even had people sitting in the aisles, and Downs would stay after the show for an hour signing autographs.”

That number may be an exaggeration since on 10 Aug 1964 the San Diego Union reported that 3,800 people was “a record crowd” at the Starlight Bowl. However, that record was set by the 1964 production of The Wizard of Oz—the show was so popular that the company brought it back after only two years.

In the revival Johnny Downs once again played the Tin Woodman, and was often listed first in newspaper notices. Cammy Wesson, now a college student, returned as Dorothy. Ole Kittleon played the Scarecrow and Forest Gantz the Cowardly Lion.

A new director reblocked the action for that run. In an interview with a high-school classmate for the 12 Aug 1964 Coronado Eagle and Journal, Wesson described having trouble at first knowing which way to turn. She added: “Johnny Downs, who plays the Tin Woodsman [sic], has adapted very well, but he’s a professional.”

Cammy Wesson went on to careers as an elementary school teacher, realtor, and financial advisor. As a sexagenarian back in Coronado, she took up marathon running.

The Wizard of Balboa Park

The San Diego Civic Light Opera Association was founded in 1945. Its first show was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado in the Wegeforth Bowl at the San Diego Zoo.

Because of San Diego’s ideal weather, the organization staged its shows outside. It soon took on the name of the Starlight Opera.

On July 29, 1946, the San Diego Union and Daily Bee said: “If the new Starlight Opera company becomes any more popular it will have to move to Ford Bowl.” That was the amphitheater in Balboa Park built for a 1935 expo.

Indeed, the Starlight Opera Company was soon using that larger space. Around 1950 the amphitheater became known as the Starlight Bowl. (An amphitheater in Burbank was using the same name at that time, confusing matters.)

The Light Opera Association also widened its repertoire to include new, popular shows and operated under the same of Starlight Musical Theatre.

Because the amphitheater was right under the main flight path to Lindbergh Field, performers learned to freeze when a loud plane passed overhead. Starlight Musical Theatre’s old website called this “One of the most artistic innovations of productions at the Starlight Bowl.”

In 1962 the Starlight company planned a summer season of The Music Man, Can-Can, The Wizard of Oz, and Bye Bye Birdie.

About the third show the 7 Apr 1962 San Diego Evening Tribune explained:

“The Wizard of Oz,” was adapted originally for the stage by L. Frank Baum from his classic children’s story. It was first presented in 1903, starring the team of Fred Stone and David Montgomery. Their leading lady was Anna Laughlin, the mother of singer Lucy Monroe.

The version of “Wizard” which Starlight is using has been updated by Frank Gabrielson, and features the songs of Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, composed for the highly successful 1939 movie.

That adaptation had originally been commissioned by the St. Louis Municipal Opera in 1942 and is therefore known as “the MUNY Version.” As the licensor says, it “features characters and events not seen in the MGM film”—and it also leaves out several characters and events.

The 1962 San Diego Evening Tribune article was headlined “Little Munchkins Needed for Starlight ‘Wizard of Oz’,” and its main news was:

Casting for Starlight’s production of “The Wizard of Oz” will be held for three days, instead of the usual two, due to the large number of children needed in the cast. . . .

The youngsters will be used for the Wizard of Oz’s “army,” composed of one private and 24 generals. They will also be used as munchkins—the little people enslaved by the Wicked Witch of the East and freed by Dorothy. . . .

Roles open for adults include that of the Scarecrow—which also requires dancing ability; the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The leading role of Dorothy, calls for a teenage soprano with acting experience, age 18 at the maximum.

In 2010, after more than sixty straight years of productions, the San Diego Civic Light Opera Association went out of business. There’s now a Save Starlight campaign to fix up the abandoned amphitheater and stage new concerts and shows there.

TOMORROW: Crossing the streams.

How Johnny Downs Grew Up

I mentioned Our Gang cast member Johnny Downs in this posting on Elmer “Scooter” Lowry going into vaudeville.

Johnny Downs was born in 1913, son of a naval officer, and spent his first years in San Diego. After he showed interest in performing, his mother gave him a Jackie Coogan haircut and brought him to Hollywood.

In 1924 Johnny acted in a couple of the kid-gang series launched after Our Gang’s success: the Reg’lar Kids movie “An Afternoon Tee” and the Juvenile Comedy “Wildcat Willie.” Late in that year the Hal Roach Studio hired him as a day player.

At first Johnny appeared in Our Gang films as a antagonist, but with a long-term contract at $50/week (and a new haircut) he became one of the gang.

When the studio announced Johnny Downs had joined the regular cast, it said he was nine years old. (He was eleven.) He made more than twenty Our Gang movies, remaining a regular until he was thirteen.

Johnny Downs was a handsome kid with a winning smile. He was rarely at the heart of the story, but sometimes his part stood out, as when he played a rich kid wanting friends in “Buried Treasure.” In “Telling Whoppers” he was cast as the neighborhood bully tormenting all the other boys; though he threw himself into the role, Johnny was just too naturally sunny to make it work.

In late 1926 the Hal Roach contract ended. Johnny spent twelve weeks in vaudeville before returning to Hollywood. Over the next few months he portrayed the young version of the hero in a few features: the young Tom Mix in Outlaws Of Red River, the young Fred Thomson in Jesse James, the young James Murray in King Vidor’s The Crowd. He made a brief return to the Our Gang unit to play an adolescent magician sporting a fake beard in “Chicken Feed.”

In 1928 Johnny went out on a vaudeville tour with fellow Hal Roach alumni Mary Kornman and “Scooter” Lowry, as discussed here. He sang a little, danced a little, told stories, showed audiences that sunny smile. Newspapers described his persona as “The All-American Boy.” That tour lasted through August 1929.

During the early 1930s Johnny Downs worked in musical revues, including shows on Broadway. Late in 1934, now an adult, he came back to Hal Roach again for the role of Little Boy Blue in the Laurel and Hardy musical Babes in Toyland.

In 1935 Downs signed with Paramount. Over the next few years he worked steadily as a juvenile lead, headlining small pictures (The First Baby, Blonde Trouble, Bad Boy) and playing small parts in vehicles for bigger stars (Algiers, Pigskin Parade, The Kid from Brooklyn). The lead role in the drag musical comedy All-American Co-Ed brought him back to the Hal Roach Studio again. He starred in a series of shorts for Columbia and a serial for Universal.

Of course, it’s harder to be a juvenile lead when you’ve hit thirty. After World War 2, Downs went back to Broadway. Then he tried television, hosting some shows and acting in others. In 1953, turning forty, Downs settled in Coronado, the region where he’d grown up. For well over a decade he was announcer and afternoon host for a San Diego television station, and also worked in real estate.

Johnny Downs never became a big star, but he was undoubtedly a small one, and he worked in show business for almost fifty years. Of all the regular members of Hal Roach’s Rascals in the silent era, Downs enjoyed the biggest and longest adult acting career.

“Beyond a cute small-boy personality”

In late 1929, Elmer “Scooter” Lowry finished his vaudeville tour with fellow Our Gang veterans Mary Kornman and Johnny Downs. They had been on the road together for well over a year.

Then in October “Scooter” went back out, now teamed with thirteen-year-old Joe Cobb, whose long tenure at the Hal Roach Studio had ended that spring. Their act was called “Two Kids Kidding,” and it lasted into the first weeks of 1930.

For the rest of that year ten-year-old “Scooter” performed as a solo act. In 1931 he teamed up with Peggy Eames and another boy, sometimes falsely billed as an Our Gang alum; their act was called “Doin’ Tough” or “All in Fun,” and it included describing life on a movie set. By that time “Scooter” hadn’t made a film in four years.

Newspaper stories show that “Scooter” Lowry continued to perform in vaudeville through 1935.

That track record raises questions about how “Scooter” left the Hal Roach Studio in the spring of 1927. That departure happened suddenly, not only in the middle of a movie-making season but in the middle of the making of one movie, “Olympic Games.”

A younger castmate, Jean Darling, recalled many years later, “I was told Scooter left because he was rather disruptive. That’s all I know.”

Whatever disruption “Scooter” might have caused at Hal Roach didn’t stop him from headlining on stage, show after show, for at least seven more years. It didn’t stop three more prominent Our Gang performers—Mary, Johnny, and Joe—from signing up to tour with him. He could hit his marks, and he could get along with other kids.

I can imagine different scenarios to explain these circumstances. It’s possible the same energy that made “Scooter” a successful stage performer could wear out people at a movie studio while they were trying to hang lights or have business conversations. It’s possible the source of disruption wasn’t “Scooter” but his mother, pushing for more pay or more time in the spotlight.

Unfortunately for “Scooter” Lowry’s show-biz career, vaudeville was fading away in the early 1930s. Already live acts were competing for time with movies, and after sound came in, many theaters shifted to showing movies only.

On top of that, “Scooter” grew up and stopped being so cute. Reviewers were less impressed by his act than when he was eight, or maybe they just didn’t hold back. So there are notices like this, in the August 21, 1930, San Francisco Chronicle:

“Scooter” Lowry, the “tuff guy” of Our Gang comedy, makes a personal visit. The kid is clever. He has plenty of poise for such a small tad, and his dancing is really good. It is an act that makes its principal appeal to the youngsters, however. “Scooter” naturally has little to offer beyond a cute small-boy personality.

The June 6, 1931, Milwaukee Sentinel:

Scooter Lowry, one of the “Our Gang” screen comedians, heads the vaudeville bill. Scooter is the “tough guy” of Hal Roach’s kid pictures. But on the stage he impresses mothers in the audience as being a gentlemanly little fellow, and an industrious one. He tap dances well, tells proper stories and sings. His voice isn’t very big, but his smile is. An indulgent audience gave him a hand.

And ultimately the April 19, 1935, Worcester Evening Gazette:

Scooter Lowry, once a member of Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” in the movies, is on hand, taking the stage all to his little self to entertain the assemblage. Master Lowry dances a bit, sings a little, and, unfortunately, tells a joke or two.

“Scooter” turned sixteen at the end of that year, and there’s no evidence of him working in show business again.

COMING UP: Family troubles.

“A tiny 8-year-old comedian”

As discussed back here, seven-year-old Elmer Lowry lost his contract with the Hal Roach Studio in the spring of 1927. By that fall he was trying the vaudeville circuit.

Later articles suggested that “Scooter” had performed in vaudeville before going to Hollywood in early 1926, but his stage experience seems to have been limited to local shows and amateur benefits. Now he was competing at the professional level.

Older Our Gang kids had made that transition. Ernie Morrison turned to vaudeville in 1924 at age eleven after his father unsuccessfully asked Hal Roach for a raise. Two years later the studio supplied a “trailer” of clips from Ernie’s movies to introduce his act.

Mary Kornman and Mickey Daniels outgrew the movie series in 1926 at age eleven and twelve, respectively. Roach filmed them “riding a goat cart from a movie studio to a vaudeville theater,” according to the Lucky Corner website, and they went out on the stage together. When Mary had to drop out of the tour for medical reasons, another Our Gang player, nine-year-old Peggy Eames, replaced her.

Once Mary Kornman had recovered in 1927, she was free to tour, and she joined Elmer “Scooter” Lowry and his older sister Lila in an act variously titled “Acting Out” and “Crashing Into Vaudeville.” Mary and “Scooter” had overlapped on only three movies, but she had been the series’ leading lady and films he’d performed in were still being released that fall, so they could draw audiences as movie stars.

In February 1928 the Chattanooga Times–Free Press, still claiming “Scooter” as a home-town boy, reported that he had “signed a two-year contract with the Keith circuit and has left for an eighty weeks’ tour throughout the United States.” Now the team was “Scooter,” Mary, and another former gang member Johnny Downs, age fourteen, as shown above. Their headlining act, “In and Out of the Movies,” included song, dance, and celebrity impressions.

Reviewers said good things about the kids’ act, and it’s striking how many singled out “Scooter.” For example, the May 8 Arkansas Gazette:

“Scooter” Lowry is easily the smallest and most popular of the three. He is only eight years old and he is a wonder for his years. . . . He caricatures Charlie Chaplin, dances and is a natural little comedian.

The June 18 Grand Rapids Press:

One of the hits on the highly entertaining new bill at Ramona is a tiny 8-year-old comedian, Scooter Lowry, the littlest and biggest member of the trio of clever youngsters from Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” film comedies who present the headline act. The kids are clever, Scooter’s imitation of Charlie Chaplin, his tap dancing and characterization of a “tough guy” would do credit to a comedian three or four times his age. . . . [Mary and Johnny] are good entertainers, but young Scooter is a riot.

The July 23 San Francisco Chronicle:

“Scooter” Lowry…is so preternaturally old, with a wizened, withered face, one rather places him among the midgets. He is tiny and wins the greater part of the applause for the act.

The July 20 Los Angeles Evening Express:

Roach Rascal Orpheum Bill Show-Stealer

A LAD about five hands high, and not very big hands at that, who talks out of the side of his mouth like George Cohan, walks like “The Brooklyn Kid,” and hoofs like George White, is the hit of the bill at the Orpheum this week. . . .

…it was little “Scooter” Lowry, the original tough guy of Hal Roach’s famous gang of rascals, who stole the honors last night. . . . The older pair dance and sing and pantomime very cutely, but “Scooter’s” swank and swagger lift the act into a featured niche.

The August 4 Billboard magazine:

Mary Kornman, Johnny Downs and “Scooter” Lowry, billed as “Our Gang” kids, scored in a manner that would make any performer envious, altho Lowry was the whole act. It is obvious he would not have fared as well without the support of the other two, whose dancing and personality made the act stand out more strongly.

Mary, Johnny, and “Scooter” toured together at least through August 1929.

TOMORROW: Back on the road.

“Film World Opens Doors Wide”

In November 1925, the New York American announced a “Motion Picture Contest” for children. For weeks it promoted that competition with articles and pictures of the entrants.

The top prize was $1,000, a trip to Culver City, and an appearance in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie at a weekly salary of $200 with an option for a two-year contract. The judges included Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and other MGM executives.

On 4 Jan 1926, the newspaper announced the winner: “little Irene Nanette Butler, of 425 Riverside Drive,” age three. More stories about her ran over the next two days.

Later in the year little Irene appeared in The Fire Brigade along with the winner of a similar contest in California. She never made another picture.

On 13 January, however, the New York American shared an additional story with these headlines:

Film World Opens Doors Wide to “Skipper,” 5

$1,000 Check Starts Child Toward Fame

Elmer Lowery, Second Prize Winner in New York American Contest, to Go West

In fact, Elmer’s surname was spelled Lowry, his family nickname was “Skippy,” and he had turned six years old in December. But he was receiving all the benefits of the top prize, more than originally announced for the second-place winner, so who could complain?

In February, Elmer Lowry started performing before the cameras in Culver City—not at MGM but at the smaller Hal Roach Studio, in its Our Gang series. From then on he was “Scooter.”

The New York American said the boy came from Roosevelt, Long Island. But on 8 Aug 1926 the Chattanooga Times–Free Press claimed him for that city:

Chattanooga Boy in ‘Our Gang’ Comedy

Elmer (“Skippy”) Lowry, a Chattanooga boy, now in Hollywood, will appear at the Tivoli theater during the first part of the week in the latest “Our Gang” comedy, entitled “Thundering Fleas.”

“Skippy” is the son of H. D. Lowry, who is now connected with the Read house. “Skippy,” who is only 7 years old, has shown for some time an extraordinary histrionic ability that won the admiration of friends and that made him participate in several benefit shows.

While in New York with his mother, the New York American opened a contest, looking for young talent in the motion picture field. “Skippy” entered and won a prize of $1,000, securing at the same time a contract with Hal Roach as one of the cast in all the new “Our Gang” comedies.

Elmer’s father was named Willard D. Lowry, but even the local press didn’t get that right.

Elmer’s mother heading off to New York was probably a sign of trouble in the Lowry family. On 25 May 1927 the Knoxville News-Sentinel ran this United Press dispatch out of Chattanooga:

“Our Gang” Boy Hardly Needed Father’s Aid

“Yes, judge, I provided for my children as long as they needed it, but they don’t need it now,” said William D. Lowry when applying for a divorce before Judge Yarnell.

“But why don’t they need your help; they aren’t grown?” asked the court.

“Well, you see, judge, the youngest, my seven-year-old boy, Elmer Camden Lowry, belongs to the ‘Our Gang’ kids in the movies, and he makes $350 a week himself,” was Lowry’s reply.

He got the divorce from Anna Lowry on grounds of desertion.

(A briefer version appeared in that day’s Imperial Valley Press.)

Anna Lowry having taken the children off to Hollywood, Willard Lowry declared that she had left him. And he got out of child support on the grounds that Elmer was making so much money for the family—$350 a week!

In fact, Hal Roach was paying “Scooter” Lowry only $60 per week.

Even more sadly, the same month that divorce came through, the studio quietly ended its contract with “Scooter,” as I related yesterday. The movies he made in early 1927 would be released through the end of the year, but he no longer brought in a steady income.

According to IMDB, Elmer “Scooter” Lowry acted in only one more film: a small role in Chinatown Charlie, an independent production now lost in whole or in part.

COMING UP: An ex–gang member.

Elmer “Scooter” Lowry’s Short Movie Career

Elmer Lowry was born in 1919 in New York City. By the age of five he was singing and dancing on stage. His family called him “Skippy.”

According to later articles, the boy won first prize in a dance contest and came to the attention of Hal Roach.

By February 1926, Elmer was filming his first Our Gang movie, “Thundering Fleas.” His nickname became “Skooter” or “Scooter.” After a few months his weekly pay rose from $50 to $60. That year “Scooter” Lowry made eight Our Gang films, plus a cameo appearance in the feature 45 Minutes From Hollywood.

“Scooter” was never the lead character, but in the gang he stood out in a couple of ways. He was athletic, somersaulting around in “Shivering Spooks.” And though he was one of the smaller boys in the gang, he was cast as the tough guy; in “Seeing the World” he offers to beat up an Italian kid for no reason at all.

The July 1927 issue of Photoplay magazine contained this anecdote:

Rare intuition belongs to “Scooter” Lowry, smallest and most acrobatic member of “Our Gang.” He was twirling and twisting on a rail near Hal Roach’s office. At the door stood Roach, talking with a business conferee. “Scooter,” with small boy impetuosity, attempted to enter the conversation.

“Go on with your gymnastics, Scooter, and let us talk business,” Roach admonished.

But “Scooter” kept on with his turns and talk.

“Keep still, ‘Scooter’! I can’t even think with all that noise.”

“Scooter” arose with dignity—

“How did I know you were trying to think?”

Roach and his friend retired to his office.

That’s a cute story, but the actual incident might have had a darker side.

By the time that article appeared, “Scooter” Lowry was no longer on the Hal Roach Studio payroll. He’d been let go in April 1927 in the middle of filming “Olympic Games,” the fifth Our Gang movie made that year. The studio paid out three weeks’ salary and sent him off.

At that time a little blonde girl named Jean Darling was becoming a series regular. Decades later, fans asked her if she remembered what happened to “Scooter.” Darling replied, “I was told Scooter left because he was rather disruptive. That’s all I know.”

Looks like it might have been a bad idea to interrupt the boss’s conversation.

TOMORROW: How it all started.

“The urchin who treads on the garden hose”

Film narrative began with the figure of a mischievous child.

The very first movies were “actualités” documenting how people, animals, or machines moved around in real life. The novelty and spectacle of seeing those actions on screen provided all the entertainment.

As one famous example, in early 1895 Louis and Auguste Lumière first exhibited their improved cinématographe with footage of workers leaving their factory. Exciting!

That summer, the brothers decided instead to stage a fictional event for their camera. The result is the oldest known movie with a plot (beginning, middle, and end) and the oldest film comedy.

The Lumières claimed to take inspiration from a prank played by their baby brother Edouard, born in 1884. If so, Edouard may have taken inspiration from comics, since cartoonists had been drawing variations on this prank since he was a baby. Antoine Sausverd rounded up examples in this article for Topfferiana. Lance Rickman discussed their cinematic influence in an article titled “Bande dessinee and the cinematograph: visual narrative in 1895.”

A journalist for the newspaper Les Allobroges published an interview about this movie with the Lumières’ former gardener Jean-François Clerc in 1949. In translation:

Suddenly, one fine summer morning, the two young men came to find me at the end of the garden where I was working, followed by that little rascal Edouard, all three carrying an extraordinary set of equipment. Louis set up the tripod, Auguste added his crank box on top, and Edouard went to get a garden hose a few steps away. Here was a dark lurking mystery in which I was to pay the price, while raising myself to the rank of the world’s leading film actor.

When everything was set up, while Louis was already holding the handle of his curious box, Auguste said to me: “François, take the jet and water in front of you, without worrying about us. Edouard, by pressing with his foot on the hose, will give you or take away water.” Things went as agreed and that’s how I watered in jerky jets, the water sometimes splashing in my face, while Louis and Auguste kept turning their famous handle, continually directing the glass eye of this box at me.

No footage of this action featuring Edouard has survived. Clerc may have misremembered his costar, or that first footage was a test of concept and the brothers came back for a more planned filming. Louis Lumière himself said in a 1948 interview:

Although my recollections are not very accurate, I think I may say that the idea of the scenario was suggested to me by a farce by my younger brother Edouard, whom we unhappily lost while an airman during the 1914-1918 war. He was then too young to play the part of the urchin who treads on the garden hose. I replaced him by a young apprentice from the carpenter’s workshop of the factory, Duval, who died after performing his duties as chief packer of the works for almost forty-two years. As regards the waterer, the part was played by our gardener M. Clerc, who is still alive after being employed at the works for forty years.

Different sources say young Duval’s first name was Daniel or Benoît.

In late 1895 the Lumières began to exhibit a 40-second movie variously titled “Le jardinier (The Gardener),” “Le jardinier et l’espiègle (The Gardener and the Mischief-Maker),” and finally “L’arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled).” That movie has a clear plot. The boy steps on the gardener’s hose. Puzzled, the gardener peers at the nozzle, The boy hops off the hose, making water squirt into the gardener’s face. The gardener chases down the prankster and spanks him. The gardener goes back to work while the chastened boy walks off (with a glance at the camera).

The next year, the brothers filmed another version in a different garden with more depth of scene. This time, the prankster was played by a 22-year-old factory employee named Léon Trotobas. In 45 seconds the action comes full circle with the gardener spraying him back. (Some writers treat this as the first version. I’m agreeing with the sequence described by Movies Silently and others.)

“L’arroseur arrosé” was such a hit that the Lumières commissioned Marcellin Auzolle to draw a poster showing an audience enjoying it—the oldest known movie poster to show part of an actual movie.

Other moviemakers like George Méliès copied “L’arroseur arrosé,” sometimes exactly, sometimes trying to top the action. The 1899 British version, “The Biter Bit,” runs more than a minute and shows the gardener chasing the prankster (another man) around a tree before spraying him. Thus film slapstick grew.

Are You Gonna?

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by WJM (William Lipton, Jeremy Yun, and Max Simas, with guest bassist Collin Simas, uploaded to YouTube on 9 May 2013)

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by The Runarounds (William Lipton, Axel Ellis, Jeremy Yun, Jesse Golliher, and Zendé Murdock, uploaded to YouTube on 10 Feb 2023)

The Runarounds was formed in 2000 for a television show that finally went out on Amazon Prime this month. The five musicians cast as slightly younger musicians for the series have been playing and writing songs together in the meantime, and they’re now touring the east coast.

In the series premiere, the characters bond over the song “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”, originally by Jet. As the cast notes in interviews, and as this pair of videos shows, most of them have had fun playing that song since they were kids.

“To do it exactly like Douglas Fairbanks”

In 1976 Robert Parrish, an Academy Award–winning film editor and less heralded film director, published his first memoir, Growing Up in Hollywood.

Parrish opened his life story with a incident about himself as a seven-year-old in Columbus, Georgia. He was born in 1916, so that would have occurred in 1923 or so.

This lively anecdote, full of evocative detail, starts with an older boy urging little Robert to fetch some curtains so the neighborhood gang can recreate Douglas Fairbanks’s famous stunt in The Black Pirate: sliding down a ship’s sail with a knife stuck into the canvas to slow himself down.

Robert found a sheet, which the gang hung from an oak branch. The older boy supplied a butcher knife. While most of the fellows slapped wooden swords at each other on the ground, they sent the seven-year-old up the tree to try the stunt first. The scene ended [SPOILER!] with a broken arm.

While he recuperated, Robert’s mother took him to her third viewing of D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. During that show, he saw a “coming-attractions trailer for Intolerance,” with a shot of director Griffith setting up the action. From then on, Parrish wrote, he was interested in who was in charge of making the movies.

In 1926, the Coca-Cola Company transferred Robert’s father to Los Angeles. He got the chance to work as a child actor in the background of some significant movies, including a couple of Our Gang shorts, Speedy, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Big Trail, and City Lights.

Performing with Fairbanks in The Iron Mask, he learned the secret of that stunt in The Black Pirate. He even got to try it with all the unseen safety effects working. Thus, as in many well-crafted narratives, the details Parrish laid out early came back to have added meaning later.

However, the dates in Parrish’s story don’t add up. The Black Pirate was released in 1926, the year when the family moved to Hollywood, and not three years before.

Intolerance was released in 1916, and Broken Blossoms in 1919. So would a first-run city theater have shown Broken Blossoms four years after its release, with a “coming-attractions trailer” for a movie that was three years older than that?

It seems clear that Parrish’s memories of early movies ran together in his head. In assembling his memoir, he cited movies that had become part of the film studies canon by the 1970s but probably weren’t what he watched in 1923.

But what about the story of trying to slide down a sheet like Douglas Fairbanks and breaking his arm? That was a more particular and memorable experience than sitting in a cinema. And yet Parrish described that stunt being inspired by a movie that didn’t exist until three years afterward. Furthermore, there’s no sword-fighting melée at that point in the The Black Pirate.

I haven’t found any review that points out that discrepancy. In his 2008 biography of Fairbanks, Jeffrey Vance quoted Parrish from his memoir and an interview without noting the age gap. The Golden Globes website silently changed little Robert’s age from seven to ten to match the release date of The Black Pirate.

I offer a different explanation. The movie that the Columbus gang were trying to emulate wasn’t The Black Pirate but Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, released in 1922 (YouTube). That movie showed Fairbanks sliding down a tall curtain—just as a whole bunch of guards run around with swords. The stunt in The Black Pirate was designed to outshine the earlier scene. And it did, both on screen and in Robert Parrish’s memory.

Marking the Many Media of Oz

Tori Calamito, host of the Oz Vlog, is doing a live online event called “Defying Gravity: The Evolution of Oz from Page to Stage to Screen” for local libraries.

The event description says:

This exclusive Zoom program offers a rare glimpse into over a century of Oz storytelling, from L. Frank Baum’s original book series to the latest Broadway productions and upcoming film. The Oz Vlog will share treasures from her extensive memorabilia collection while exploring how the Land of Oz has evolved across different media. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the 1939 MGM classic, a Broadway enthusiast who’s seen Wicked multiple times, or curious about the upcoming Wicked: For Good, this program has something magical for everyone.

Come prepared to be amazed by the depth and breadth of Oz’s influence on entertainment, and leave with a deeper appreciation for the wonderful world that has inspired some of the most popular characters of all time. This program is sponsored by The Oz Vlog who is donating her time to this event!

This event will take place on Wednesday, 30 July, starting at 7:00 Massachusetts time. Folks can register for this event through the Burlington Public Library.

In a similar vein, on Saturday, 16 August, Worldcon in Seattle will feature a panel discussion on “Oz: America’s First Multimedia Franchise,” organized and moderated by Eric Gjovaag.

That description is:

Known around the world for the famous film adaptation, The Wizard of Oz is back in everyone’s minds thanks to the current two-part Wicked movie. But Oz started life as a popular novel, which then spawned a Broadway musical, a series of other books, early silent movies, and more. Oz is a franchise that always grows and changes with the times. Learn more about the origins of The Wizard of Oz and how it has been reinterpreted on stage, television, and computers and in movies, comics, toys, games, and more from 1900 to the present day.

Panelists are A. J. Hackwith, J.R. Dawson, and Terri Ash. Eric will also moderate a panel the next day on “How The Wizard of Oz Has Shaped Science Fiction.”

Easy Cases Make Good Law?

The Washington Post and Forbes reported on how five US Supreme Court justices recused themselves on a copyright infringement case.

Four of those justices have book deals with Penguin Random House, a party in the case. There’s no obvious reason for the fifth justice’s decision, but people suspect some similar financial interest.

Some court observers saw these justices’ choice as an indication that they were paying more attention to ethical issues. Others saw danger in how many justices have income from book sales, potentially making it impossible for them to rule ethically about publishing law.

I have different thoughts. First, book income pales in comparison to the other outside income justices receive for appearing at exclusive legal conferences, especially compared to the work involved.

Furthermore, Justice Clarence Thomas has received millions of dollars in value through vacations, vehicles, and other presents for no work at all, and then repeatedly failed to disclose those gifts.

After the Thomas scandals broke, conservatives tried to build up Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book deal into a comparable brouhaha. Justices had been publishing books for years before that (Thomas among them) without attracting so much criticism.

So while I do see the potential ethical problems when judges have financial interests aligned with large media companies, I don’t think that’s at the top of the list of what needs to be fixed at the Supreme Court.

Second, I looked at the case that the five justices recused from, Baker v. Coates et al., through this PDF. A man decided that Ta-Nehisi Coates had plagiarized his self-published book and sued not only Coates but lots of other people and corporations involved in other things Coates has written: The Atlantic Monthly, Disney (as owner of Marvel Comics), Oprah Winfrey and Apple (for broadcasting an interview), and so on. 

The filing includes pages and pages of side-by-side comparisons between Coates’s writing and the plaintiff’s—which show very little similarity. Unlike some plagiarism claims that make the news with obvious parallels, such as Pete Hegseth’s senior thesis, this one reveals no smoking guns. It doesn’t even offer water pistols.

A lower court dismissed that claim with prejudice—i.e., totally swatted it away. An appeals court upheld that decision. The Supreme Court’s inaction cements that result, but I think it’s extremely unlikely the court would have accepted this case anyway. The justices probably wanted nothing to do with it.

“Seeing all those curls lying on the floor”

Frances Hodgson Burnett finished Little Lord Fauntleroy with young Cedric still wearing the same clothes and hairstyle as when he started.

For boys who disliked that book’s fashions, however, the moment a lad could have his “love-locks” cut became a rite of passage. It was akin to transitioning from skirts to breeches, and later from breeches to long pants. It signaled not only growing older but also moving away from maternal influence.

The slapstick comedian Moe Howard described such a moment in his memoir, Moe Howard and the Three Stooges, published posthumously in 1977. Born in 1897 as Moses Horwitz, he recalled having ringlets as a boy in elementary school:

My school career began in September 1903, when I was six. Whenever I attended school—which in later years wasn’t very often—I was constantly fighting. I fought on my way to school, in school, and on my way home. As I said before, my hair had grown very long, and every school day I would awaken a half hour before everyone else so my mother could wind finger curls through my hair; they reached almost to my shoulders. There were about twenty of them in all, and they resembled a bunch of cigars stuck on my head. Knowing that it was my mother’s greatest delight to spend that half hour arranging my curls, I didn’t complain. But soon it became the battle of my school career.

After recounting lots of fights over how “girly” he looked, Howard recalled meeting a couple of boys who befriended him anyway—but still didn’t like the hairstyle.

I gazed into Donald’s mirror and saw my curls hanging down, a good ten inches long. I glanced over at Donald and Rusty, two normal-looking young boys. I looked in the mirror again, and then something on Don’s dresser caught my eye. A shiny object with black enamel handles. I looked at myself again, trying to create one last impression.

I grabbed the scissors and, with my eyes closed, began to circle my head, clipping curls all the way around. I didn’t dare to look at the floor to see what had fallen. When I finished, I dropped the scissors, afraid to look at myself. Tears quietly flowed down my cheeks.

When I finally opened my eyes, I found Rusty and Don pointing at me and laughing hysterically. I couldn’t resist looking into the mirror. I choked up. There wasn’t a laugh in me. There in the mirror I caught sight of the haircut that was to make me famous in the 1920s. I laughed, then I cried, and I shuddered seeing all those curls lying on the floor and realizing that I had destroyed one of my mother’s few pleasures. . . .

My brother Shemp spotted me first. He let out a war whoop. “Take a look at your son with the fright wig. He thinks it’s Halloween, and what do you know, it’s not a wig; it’s a brand-new haircut.” Then Mother, Irving, and Jack came in. They stared speechless for a moment. Then Mother looked at me. I looked at her and the tears welled up in my eyes, then the tears welled up in hers. She said softly, “Thank God you did it. I didn’t have the courage.”

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel offers a semi-fictional treatment of the same transition. The autobiographical novel by and about a boy born in 1900 in North Carolina says:

Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it.

And a few years and many pages later:

He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls.

TV Tropes lists many female examples of the Important Haircut in recent books, movies, and other entertainment. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, that passage was just as important for many boys.

“The Fauntleroy period had set in”

The hairstyle and costume popularized by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as illustrated by Reginald B. Birch, didn’t remain fashionable for very long.

But it remained vivid in the memory of Americans who lived through the 1880s and ’90s. Indeed, that look for boys became an icon of the Gilded Age.

For instance, Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) published The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. This passage, looking back on life in Indianapolis three decades before, describes Georgie Minafer as a boy:

…the Fauntleroy period had set in, and Georgie’s mother had so poor an eye for appropriate things, where Georgie was concerned, that she dressed him according to the doctrine of that school in boy decoration. Not only did he wear a silk sash, and silk stockings, and a broad lace collar, with his little black velvet suit: he had long brown curls, and often came home with burrs in them.

Except upon the surface (which was not his own work, but his mother’s) Georgie bore no vivid resemblance to the fabulous little Cedric. The storied boy’s famous “Lean on me, grandfather,” would have been difficult to imagine upon the lips of Georgie. A month after his ninth birthday anniversary, when the Major gave him his pony, he had already become acquainted with the toughest boys in various distant parts of the town, and had convinced them that the toughness of a rich little boy with long curls might be considered in many respects superior to their own. . . .

Thus, on a summer afternoon, a strange boy, sitting bored upon the gate-post of the Reverend Malloch Smith, beheld George Amberson Minafer rapidly approaching on his white pony, and was impelled by bitterness to shout: “Shoot the ole jackass! Look at the girly curls! Say, bub, where’d you steal your mother’s ole sash!”

“Your sister stole it for me!” Georgie instantly replied, checking the pony. “She stole it off our clo’es-line an’ gave it to me.”

“You go get your hair cut!” said the stranger hotly. “Yah! I haven’t got any sister!”

“I know you haven’t at home,” Georgie responded. “I mean the one that’s in jail.”

When Orson Welles adapted Tarkington’s novel into a movie, his script kept that deathless dialogue exactly. It also specified that that scene took place in 1885, thus slightly before Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel appeared. Bobby Cooper played young Georgie, as shown above.

Tarkington created another portrait of childhood in Penrod and its sequels, but he set those books a generation later, and none of the boys has Fauntleroy curls.

The Little Lord’s “Love-Locks”

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy started to appear in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1885, then came out in book form in 1886. It was illustrated by Reginald B. Birch.

Cedric, the title character, was defined by a distinctive look:

Mary…was proud of his graceful, strong little body and his pretty manners, and especially proud of the bright curly hair which waved over his forehead and fell in charming love-locks on his shoulders. She was willing to work early and late to help his mamma make his small suits and keep them in order.

“’Ristycratic, is it?” she would say. “Faith, an’ I’d loike to see the choild on Fifth Avey-NOO as looks loike him an’ shteps out as handsome as himself. An’ ivvery man, woman, and choild lookin’ afther him in his bit of a black velvet skirt made out of the misthress’s ould gownd; an’ his little head up, an’ his curly hair flyin’ an' shinin’. It’s loike a young lord he looks.”

Soon the name “Fauntleroy” was applied to the outfit Birch pictured. “Short tailored jacket, knee-length trousers, rather frilly shirt, wide collar with rounded corners, or large loose bow” is how Merriam Webster defines the adjective “Fauntleroy” now.

The long “love-locks on his shoulders” were just as much part of this look for upper-class boys. Indeed, within three years after Burnett’s story appearing, Harper’s Young People published an anecdote about “Little Rex, who is six years old, and has a pretty head of ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ curls.”

Soon there was a backlash. By 1893 the University of North Carolina Magazine started a positive review of Burnett’s new story collection with a nod to “the little Chapel Hill boy who wanted to cut off Lord Fauntleroy's curls and roll him in the dirt until he made of him a real boy.”

Pulled into the World of AI Language Models

The Atlantic Monthly just published a searchable listing of works uploaded to the LibGen collection of pirated writing.

I found two things I wrote in that database: my book The Road to Concord and a book review published in the New England Quarterly.

The LibGen collection is based on material that was digitally published in some protected format, such behind a journal’s paywall or under some a form of DRM.

That means my first book, never published in electronic form, wasn’t there. It also means the database lacks everything I’ve written for the web, including this blog, the Boston 1775 blog, many articles, and a 600-page National Park Service study, even though (or because) those texts aren’t protected at all.

LibGen is a shadowy operation, apparently centered in Russia, though it receives material from all over the world. In December, a consortium of global publishers sued and shut down access to many LibGen domains. A US court also ordered LibGen to pay $30 million, but there’s no identified owner or manager to hold personally responsible.

In his article accompanying the Atlantic database, Alex Reisner reported on how the Meta corporation used all or part of that database to train its AI language model. The company decided that legal options would take, well, money and time.

Back in 2023 Reisner reported on a smaller pirated collection of 180,000 books called Books3 used by multiple companies for the same purpose. In fact, piracy appears to be so embedded in AI language programs that last year KL3M announced it was “the first Legal Large Language Model.”

As the Authors Guild reports:

Legal action is already underway against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using pirated books. If your book was used by Meta, you’re automatically included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action in Northern California without needing to take any immediate action. The court is first deciding whether Meta broke copyright laws, with a decision expected this summer, before officially certifying everyone as a class.

So I guess I’m involved in that lawsuit.

It seems clear to me that the LibGen operation breaks publishers’ legal licenses, in some cases to the detriment of royalty-earning authors. The downloading of that material by Meta and other corporations looks unethical, but I don’t know if any laws have been written that would make that act illegal.

Raskin Returns, the Sequel

As Publishers Weekly points out, there’s poetic irony in two previously unknown literary projects surfacing from the literary estate of Ellen Raskin, author of The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) and The Westing Game.

The industry organ reports:

International Literary Properties—a global company that invests in and manages literary estates—has acquired Raskin’s estate and, along with it, two previously unpublished manuscripts by the late author, including a sequel to her Newbery Award–winning mystery, The Westing Game. . . .

John Silbersack of the Bent Agency took on the role of Raskin’s literary agent nearly two decades ago, when Ellen’s daughter Susan Moore and son-in-law John first approached him to represent the estate. . . . Silbersack shared that at the time of Raskin’s death in 1984, “she had been working on—and had very nearly completed—a marvelous new story, very much in the vein of The Westing Game, titled A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese.

“Ellen’s practice was to rewrite and re-edit each prior chapter on the completion of a new chapter, so the earliest sections of the book were pored over time and again, while the very final chapters were more sketched out.” In an example of life imitating art, he said, “Ellen’s daughter, Susan, devoted herself to ‘solving’ the mystery and tying up all the loose ends, and the manuscript awaits a final polish and a worthy collaborator to bring it to a finale, which is at the top of our to-do list.”

Of the second book, a Westing Game sequel, he said, “Crafting a follow-up to one of the most beloved titles of all time is no small task. In conjunction with ILP, we’re currently in the process of bringing in another iconic middle grade author to work with us on this eagerly anticipated literary event. Watch this space!”

So in fact Ellen Raskin left two unfinished manuscripts, both needing considerable work by others to complete. A “global company” in now investing in those projects, seeking “a worthy collaborator” and “another iconic middle grade author” to make her notes publishable.

If Raskin told us anything, however, it’s to look beyond the surface. Back in 2012, Betsy Bird dug up a report from Publishers Weekly in 2007:

Stephanie Owens Lurie and Mark McVeigh at Dutton have acquired five books by Newbery Award–winner and The Westing Game author Ellen Raskin in a major six-figure deal negotiated by Alex Glass and John Silbersack at Trident on behalf of the Raskin estate. The books include two new puzzle mystery novels: The Westing Quest, a sequel to The Westing Game, and A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese, a never-before-seen manuscript nearly completed at the author’s death in 1984.

Bird then noted, “Years go by and not a peep is made about these books again.” Dutton reissued other Raskin titles in 2011. In the same year, the company announced A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese, issuing a brief blurb and an ISBN (9780525422914). But then that was pulled back.

The internet working as it does, lots of book websites (GoodReads, StoryGraph, Google Books, BooksWagon, etc.) sucked up the data attached to that ISBN and produced pages for A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese. So it already has the online profile of an out-of-print book when it’s never seen print at all.

Who Stepped into Buddy McDonald’s Shoes?

This is a footnote to my remarks on the short show-business career of Buddy McDonald.

I posited that because one day Buddy showed up for work from the small town of Bell, California, with no shoes, he became the Hal Roach Studios’ choice to play country boys.

In early 1935, a year and a half after the studio lost touch with Buddy, the Switzer family arrived at the Hal Roach Studios from little Paris, Illinois. Their sons, Harold and Carl Switzer, performed a musical act in the company café. Their number fit right into the current Our Gang short, “Beginner’s Luck” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner).

Harold’s face went blank when he focused on playing his mandolin. That led to the studio nickname “Deadpan” and very little to do in the movies, but he appeared as a background player and occasional stunt double for years.

In contrast, Carl Switzer had an expressive face (with no front teeth then) and an irrepressible personality. He got all the brothers’ lines and closeups in “Beginner’s Luck.” To secure him, the company offered both Switzers a long-term contract.

The studio reportedly debated what Carl’s character should be called, choosing “Alfalfa” over “Hayseed.” Either way, he was the gang’s new country boy.

At first Alfalfa dressed as a cowboy, wearing chaps and denim. (Only when he went to church in “Little Sinner” did he wear the undersized suit that later became his standard costume.)

Carl Switzer also played other roles that would once have gone to Buddy McDonald. In 1933 Charley Chase had made a comedy about visiting hillbilly country named “One of the Smiths,” with Buddy as a young hick.

Two years later, Chase returned to that rural setting in “Southern Exposure” (IMDB; YouTube). The script called for a little kid to deliver a telegram on muleback, and that became Carl Switzer’s second movie appearance.

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, Buddy McDonald recalled working with Chase:

He was a funny, funny man. His humor was droll. In one of the pictures, my line was, “Help! I swallowed twenty-five cents!”

He said, “You mean you swallowed a quarter?”

I said, “No, it was two dimes and a nickel.” I think he was playing a druggist.

That exchange doesn’t appear in any Chase short that I’ve found, so it may have ended up on the cutting room floor.

However, that routine does show up in the 1936 feature Kelly the Second, with Chase second-billed as a pharmacist. And the part of the jingly little boy was played by Carl Switzer.

The scene appears in this fan’s video, starting about 3:35 in. The jokes work, though they’re surprisingly scatalogical for the Hays Code.

The Strangeness of “Wiggle Your Ears”

“Wiggle Your Ears” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner) was a weird entry in the Our Gang series.

The storyline was not only adult, it was bleak.

Mary is infatuated with Harry because he can wiggle his ears. He treats her like dirt, making her crack his nuts and mend his pants. One line of Harry’s dialogue is even, “You got any money today, woman?”

Joe craves Mary’s attention, but he can’t wiggle his ears.

Pretty blonde Jean comes along. She also likes Harry’s ears, and Harry likes her. He doesn’t just toss Mary aside; he has her buy ice cream for him and Jean and then push them in his go-cart. Mary blubbers her woes through a donut. Farina advises her to doll herself up as a flapper.

Mary paints her cheeks and rolls down her stockings. But that “vamping” doesn’t work. Harry just takes her ring so he can marry Jean (shown in Mary’s imagination).

Meanwhile, Wheezer grudgingly helps his older brother Joe fake the feat of wiggling his ears with tape and string. (This was in fact how the Hal Roach Studios did the ear-wiggling trick.)

Mary becomes Joe’s girl, though that relationship is based on a lie. Harry’s ears get cramped as Jean makes him carry her doll and push her in the go-cart. The End.

Underscoring that bleak plot is how Robert F. McGowan shot nearly the whole movie in tight close-ups. So we get a clear view not only of the boys’ wiggling ears, but of Wheezer’s raspberries, Jean’s eye-batting, Harry’s underpants, and even a fly landing on Mary’s cheek. The result is almost Expressionist in its intensity.

In their book on the series, Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann wrote that “Wiggle Your Ears” is “an amusing but absolutely bizarre two-reeler.” The story spoofs adult relationships. There’s even an odd moment when Harry seems to be in orgasmic ecstasy while being licked by a cat. But as the kid actors play the situation straight, the close-up shots convey their emotions stronger than the parody.

At this time, several years into the Our Gang series, Bob McGowan was trying out unusual filmmaking techniques in various shorts. “Yale vs. Harvard” included lots of shots upward through glass. “The Spanking Age” cut all the adults’ heads out of the frame. “Cat, Dog & Co.” features a surreal dream sequence with giant chickens. “Wiggle Your Ears” is one of that set.

Some of those Our Gang pictures are lost. They weren’t released by Pathé, which produced additional 16mm prints for markets outside of cinemas. They didn’t have sound like the later MGM releases which got reproduced for television. And a fire at MGM in 1965 destroyed a lot of negatives. Thus, we can’t actually see how weird some of those late silent movies were. But we can see “Wiggle Your Ears.”

McGowan might have simply been in the mood to try something different. And a peek behind the scenes offers another reason for why “Wiggle Your Ears” was made as it was.

At the end of 1928, Hal Roach Studios was under pressure to finish all the shorts it had promised to MGM for the spring season before the place shut down for five weeks.

At the Laurel and Hardy unit, “Liberty” had taken more time than expected, so in one month they rushed through both “That’s My Wife” and “Big Business.” The former has a well-worn premise that hinges on pleasing a rich uncle (Our Gang’s “Baby Clothes” was one precursor). The latter took inspiration from the Christmas season and needed very little plot at all. 

For the Our Gang unit, the solution was overlapping productions, as recorded at the Lucky Corner website. Bob McGowan shot “Wiggle Your Ears” on a short schedule from 4 to 12 December. His nephew and namesake Robert A. McGowan, working as Anthony Mack, shot the very different movie “Fast Freight” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner) from 10 to 27 December.

By using a small cast, barely-glimpsed settings, and few group shots in “Wiggle Your Ears,” Bob McGowan could work with just two or three actors at a time, leaving others free to start their scenes for “Fast Freight.”

Thus, Allen “Sunny” Hoskins as Farina performed only two short scenes in “Wiggle Your Ears.” (As a black boy, he’s left out of the romantic maneuvers.) Pete the Pup appeared in only one. Neither filmed the final scene with the rest of the gang.

But Farina and Pete had extended scenes together riding the rails in “Fast Freight,” with no other cast members in sight. So while most of Our Gang were working with Bob McGowan on the streets of Culver City, Farina and Pete were probably off with Anthony Mack at the railyard.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

From Katherine Rundell’s essay “Why Children’s Books?” in the London Review of Books:

It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world. Children have very little control over what or when they eat, and evolution has given them a sweet tooth far stronger than an adult’s to ensure they consume enough calories during growth spurts – of course their longings are colossal. Fictional food provokes real hunger: it makes the story into a bodily thing. Food is a way to open the door to the space in which the capacity for imaginative and intellectual freedom is built: you lure them in with real appetites.

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages.

And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?

“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.