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.