Bonedust and a Jug of Molasses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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