The Facts Behind the First News Stories about an “Our Gang Curse”
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.]
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