A False Lead on Mrs. F. E. Woodbury

While researching the story of Hal Roach’s first marriage, I encountered a story that appeared in many American newspapers in late 1915.

The earliest example in my databases was in the 1 October Reno Gazette, shown here. Its headline then was: “She Gets Rich by Swapping / Now She Has Bank Account”.

That article showed a photograph of Helen G. Woodbury taken in Calumet, Michigan, probably in the 1890s. That picture was labeled “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury.”

The story, datelined Los Angeles, started: “‘David Harum’ has been outdone by a woman.” David Harum was a bestselling novel by Edward Noyes Westcott published in 1898, largely a character study of a sharp deal-maker. A movie adaptation had been released earlier in 1915.

According to the article, “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury” had “started to barter ‘for the fun of it,’” trading her imported gowns for a piano, a dentist’s kit, bird specimens, paintings, and eventually real estate—$22,000 worth of new property in all.

The story ended:

She is at present in charge of a hotel here, but intends soon to raise hogs and alfalfa on a southern California ranch.

Appearing in the season when Helen G. Woodbury Roach filed for divorce, the story didn’t seem out of character for a person of whims. She wasn’t “at present in charge of a hotel,” to be sure, but she was found the following year to have invested a lot of money into a restaurant and hotel. So I put this article into my research file on Hal Roach’s first wife.

To be safe, I went looking for the original Los Angeles story. And I found it—sort of.

Almost exactly the same text had appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily Herald on 20 September. The two big differences were:

• The earlier story described the trading of “Mrs. E. F. Woodbury” instead of “Mrs. F. E. Woodbury.”
• The Herald ran a different photograph of a different woman.

A little more digging, and I learned that Mrs. E. F. Woodbury was the former Joan Meta Hadenfeldt (1873–1969), second wife of Elmer Franklin Woodbury. She had sung in vaudeville, married in 1904, and was the second or third queen of the Rose Parade in Pasadena.

These Woodburys were in the hotel business. Elmer started by owning a restaurant in his home state of Maine. In 1908 “Mr. Woodbury and his charming wife” were managing the Hotel Pepper in Los Angeles, according to the Hotel Bulletin. That article said of Elmer, “As a hotel manager he is one of the greatest publicity getters whom I have ever seen.”

The 25 Feb 1909 San Francisco Call stated Woodbury had just bought the St. Mark Hotel in Oakland, adding:

For many years the new manager was connected with the Cadillac hotel of New York and the Brighton Beach hotel. He came to California three years ago and has been in charge of the Maryland and Casa Grande hotels in Pasadena.

In September 1911, the New York Times reported that Woodbury had overextended himself in buying “the Hotel Belleclaire, at Broadway and Seventy-seventh Street,” assuming its debts. He declared bankruptcy in New York but bounced back on the west coast.

On 11 Sept 1915, less than a week before Joan Woodbury appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Herald, a big advertisement in the paper’s evening edition announced that she and Elmer were opening a new “Apartment Hotel” called the Stratford. They continued to advertise in that newspaper for weeks.

Thus, it appears that a Los Angeles news story about Mrs. E. F. (Joan) Woodbury trading goods, played up to publicize her husband’s new venture, was distorted outside the city into a story about Mrs. F. E. (Helen) Woodbury. Somehow Helen’s old photo got attached. And since those latter articles appeared far from Los Angeles, neither Mrs. Woodbury saw them and asked for a correction.

Contrary to that news item, Joan Woodbury didn’t leave the hotel business to run a ranch. In fact, in 1920 Elmer purchased a twenty-year lease on the Hotel Richelieu in San Francisco. That year’s US Census listed Joan as his assistant manager.

The same census also found the household included four-year-old Joan Elmer Woodbury and her eighteen-year-old governess, Marie Sandow. Five years later, Elmer and Joan Woodbury divorced. Five years after that, Elmer married Marie as his third wife.

As for little Joan Woodbury, she started performing in motion pictures as early as The Half Breed, produced in 1922 by Oscar Morosco (formerly producer of L. Frank Baum’s stage musical The Tik Tok Man of Oz). She returned to the screen in the late 1930s and performed in many B westerns over the next decade.

Separate Ways

We know what happened to movie producer Hal Roach and movie star Harold Lloyd after 1916, but what about the other people who appeared in this saga of Roach’s first marriage?

Helen G. Roach’s first husband, Frederick E. Woodbury, was initially interred in Milwaukee, but in 1916 his body was reburied in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to the 16 August New Hampshire Farmer and Weekly Union. His mother had died there when he was five, and her grave became the anchor of a family plot.

Craig Calman collected information about Daniel Linthicum, the other founding partner of the Rolin Picture Company, in 100 Years of Brodies with Hal Roach. Having worked in banking, he was president of the Linthicum Chemical Company in 1913. Five years later, he was a tractor distributor. In 1920, Linthicum returned to his home state of Arkansas, but by 1930 he was back in Long Beach, California, where he headed the Red Anchor Dock and Steamship Company until his death at age 73.

Dwight A. Whiting, the investor who got Rolin its crucial distribution deal, was the company’s operations manager, treasurer, board secretary, and financial backstop until April 1918. Then he sold his stock to Roach and moved on. Richard Lewis Ward’s History of the Hal Roach Studios stated that Roach later claimed “Pathé management had insisted on the change” but noted that no documentation supports this.

Whiting might have made his own choice to step away from the studio. He had married Rosalind Morris, and their first child was on the way in the spring of 1918. (That daughter, Nathalie, died in 2020 at the age of 102.) The Whitings might have decided he should devote his time to more solid enterprises than the movie business, and let Roach dig himself out of any further financial jams. 

Whiting listed himself as a “Rancher” in his Stanford alumni update in 1921. But the next year, the multimillion-dollar Union Oil Associates was incorporated as a holding company to keep the venerable Union Oil Company of California away from Shell Oil. Its headquarters, shown here, is now a museum of the early petroleum industry. Whiting was vice president of the holding company and remained on its board for decades.

As of 1925 Whiting was also chairman of the Bank of America, LA; president of Indemnity Mortgage Insurance; and on the board of several other corporations.

Whiting and Roach remained friendly. Calman reported that Whiting helped to sell Roach’s yacht in 1925, and the two men were in the group that established the racetrack at Santa Anita Park in 1934. Whiting and his first wife divorced in 1929; he remarried in 1931 and then again in 1960 after his second wife died.

Whiting’s assistant, Warren Doane, succeeded him as Hal Roach’s top manager from 1920 to 1931. At that point the studio’s main creditor, the Bank of America, insisted that Roach replace Doane with Henry Ginsberg, bringing a mandate to keep costs down. Doane then became a competing producer at Universal—but that’s another story.

I don’t have enough information to track Helen G. Woodbury’s chauffeur, F. J. Mulligan, or the movie actor named Hill she accused of stealing her jewelry.

After leaving the Lodge Café in Seal Beach, Jimmie Blyler continued to play piano at clubs around Los Angeles. In 1917 he had an act at the Jewel City Café with a singer named Vernon Dent (1895–1963). Soon both men were working in the movies. Dent spent the 1920s with Mack Sennett, then worked from 1935 to 1953 at Columbia, becoming a familiar face to generations of Three Stooges fans. As of 4 Apr 1918, the Venice Evening Vanguard identified Blyler as a “comedy pianist from the Triangle studio.” That year he appeared in seven Harold Lloyd shorts, so he must have been on fine terms with Hal Roach.

In his profile of Jane Blyler, Dave Lord Heath shares more information about Jimmie Blyler. In early 1916, even as the Lodge Café was opening with Helen G. Roach’s money, Jimmie was in a relationship with the dancer Jane Ott. Their child, James Blyler, Jr., was born in October. Though Heath found no record of their marriage, Jane began using Jimmie’s surname, and she too appeared in Harold Lloyd films in 1918. By the end of that year, however, Jimmie Blyler was partnered with the singer Jane Green and Jane Ott married a businessman named Robert Johnston, Jr.

Jimmie Blyler toured the country with Jane Green, marrying her in 1920. (Their publicity photo appears here.) He died while on the road in Chicago in April 1924, and his remains were buried in his home town of Des Moines.

Blyler’s partner in launching the Lodge Café at Seal Beach, Dave Combs, dropped out of the Los Angeles newspapers after being arrested for allegedly embezzling from the Roach estate. The 21 Nov 1921 Albuquerque Evening Herald reported the city’s Elks Lodge had learned that Combs died that day in Santa Barbara of typhoid fever.

Seal Beach hit hard times during the World War when shortages of gasoline and tires made it difficult for people to travel to resorts. Then came Prohibition, erasing the city’s advantage over nearby Long Beach. After a few years Seal Beach’s nightlife moved off shore—that city was where you caught the launches to ride out to gambling ships anchored in the Pacific.

Marguerite Roach, Hal Roach’s second wife, appears to have stopped acting in motion pictures after her marriage. She had two children: Hal, Jr., in 1918 and Margaret in 1921. The Roaches’ marriage went through rough patches. In January 1928 the New York Times reported the couple had separated at the end of the previous year, but a week later they set out on a round-the-world tour to patch things up.

An October 1940 New York Times article stated that “Mrs. Margaret Roach,” as she now spelled her name, had filed suit for “separate maintenance,” charging Hal with “cruel and inhuman treatment.” Four months after that, the press reported that the Roaches had reached a financial settlement with Margaret receiving “$1250 a month, one-half of her husband’s interest in the Hal Roach Studios and their mansion in Beverly Hills,” according to Craig Calman. She didn’t want a divorce “because of her religion.”

Less than a month later, however, Margaret Roach died of pneumonia after a week of illness. The press spun that as a reconciliation story, saying, “Her husband knelt at her bedside. His hand held hers.”

On 31 Aug 1942, Hal Roach married his third wife, Lucille Prin (1913–1981), a secretary for ASCAP who was twenty years younger. They would have four daughters and remain together until her death.

TOMORROW: A false lead.

Interpreting the Story of Helen and Hal Roach’s Marriage

What sort of story does the marriage of Helen and Hal Roach produce?

As I traced Helen Grant Duncan Woodbury Roach’s life in Los Angeles, I kept thinking of a couple of early Laurel and Hardy movies that featured James Finalyson as an irrepressible Lothario.

In “Love ’Em and Weep” and “Sugar Daddies,” Finlayson played wealthy skirt-chasers. (He’d portrayed similar characters in earlier shorts, such as “Chasing the Chaser” and “Dizzy Daddies.”)

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, not yet a solid pair but part of a trio, had to help the man out of the predicaments his libido had gotten him into.

Imagine a gender-swapped version of that, with Helen G. Woodbury as a rich woman who’s left her husband for the sunny clime of California and can’t stop chasing young men, many of whom turn out to be after her money.

The live-in chauffeur who developed a foul mouth when he drank. The movie cowboy who dreamed of making his own films. The “awfully handsome” actor with an eye for jewelry. The pianist ready to open a big night club. And what other men did she fancy who never made the newspapers?

Helen Roach’s sudden death in 1916 raises the prospect of a different, darker scenario: a murder mystery. Which of her entanglements might have wanted her dead? And who benefited from that death?

Of course, Helen Roach’s doctor certified she suffered from bronchial pneumonia for several weeks before dying. That detail would have to change to make a whodunnit.

I’m not suggesting that the Hal Roach Studio really grew out of murder. The true origin story wasn’t that sordid, just a little seedy.

Hal Roach happened to be Helen Woodbury’s favorite in the year her husband died, leaving her free to marry—or to demand her boyfriend marry her. That was just a matter of luck, but was it good luck or bad?

Since Hal Roach never talked about this marriage publicly, we can’t say what he thought in those years. It seems pretty clear that he received the money to start Rolin in the spring of 1914 from Woodbury. But they didn’t marry until the fall. Did they both want a more committed relationship then? Was Hal hoping for more funds? It doesn’t look like he got any.

The Roaches’ marriage soured, and she filed for divorce in late 1915. She found other men to invest her time and money in. He may have found other women. And then she fell ill.

Because Helen died before that divorce became final, Hal inherited her considerable estate—a good fortune for him and his moviemaking enterprise. He didn’t start the Rolin Film Company with an inheritance, but he undoubtedly enlarged the studio with one. 

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to all the other players?

“The estate of Mrs. Helen G. Roach, deceased”

The 9 May 1916 Los Angeles Examiner had a section on page 5 headed “The Death Roll.” The last entry was:

Helen G. Roach … 50 y. … Pneumonia … May 4

California’s death certificate added that Dr. William R. Jacobs had attended Helen Roach from 16 April until she died of bronchial pneumonia. Her profession was listed as “Housewife.” Her husband was “Harry Roach.”

Evidently Helen Roach left no will because Hal Roach became the administrator, not executor, of her estate. Since she had no children, he was probably also her sole heir. That meant that once he sorted out her investments and debts, everything left would go to him.

In July, the Orange County Register reported that Roach had brought “an amicable lawsuit to determine ownership” of the Lodge Café at Seal Beach, saying his late wife had “invested $14,500” in the enterprise before she died.

Within a couple of months, pianist Jimmie Blyler was no longer being described as one of the Lodge’s proprietors. He started to perform at other clubs instead. Dave Combs’s partner was now Hal Roach.

Another lawsuit in this period involved a Lodge Café cook named Max Benkert who drove “an automobile…used by Dave Combs in the business” into a buggy, injuring three women. One of those victims sued both Benkert and the restaurant, winning $5,700 in September 1916. That December, Roach filed an appeal on behalf of his late wife’s estate.

In November, a Seal Beach proprietor sued Combs and Roach as owners of the Lodge Café, demanding $600 in back rent under a September agreement. The proprietors either paid up or prevailed since they continued to be listed as owners.

If Roach and Combs saw themselves as partners, however, that broke down by 16 July 1917 when the Orange County Register reported:

Dave Combs, manager of the Lodge Cafe at Seal Beach, was arrested last night on a charge of embezzling $343.43 from the estate of Mrs. Helen G. Roach, deceased. Combs has been a prominent figure at Seal Beach since its incorporation. Mrs. Roach, who lived in Los Angeles, was one of the incorporators of the Lodge Cafe. Since her death her estate has been in charge of Harry E. Roach, administrator.

The complaint against Combs was sworn to by L. T. Mayhew, a Los Angeles man, who is manager of the National Board of Credit. Mayhew stated this morning that another complaint would be sworn to charging Combs with disturbing the peace. Combs’ preliminary examination was set for 2 p.m., July 24.

Combs paid bail of $1,000 with one of his sureties being “J. H. Blagge, recalled mayor of Seal Beach.” But his name stopped appearing in connection with the Lodge Café.

Roach must have sold off the restaurant in the next few months because in April 1918 the Lodge reopened as the Seal Café, “Remodeled, Refurnished, and Under New Management.” (By the end of that year its new owners were enjoined for running a place of “ill repute.”)

Meanwhile, on 29 September 1916, or less than five months after his first wife died, Hal Roach married Marguerite O. Nichols (shown above). She was a 25-year-old movie actress, though the paperwork described her as 21 and she maintained an 1896 birth date to her death. Later press reports said Hal had directed Marguerite in some movies, but all her surviving credits are with other studios.

In February 1917 the couple visited Hal’s home town of Elmira. They would have two children in the next few years.

As of late 1917, the Roaches were living at 1624 Van Ness Avenue, the house that Helen G. Woodbury had commissioned for herself when she moved to Los Angeles.

That November, the probate court appointed a referee to take testimony “relative to an accounting filed by the administrator of the [Helen G. Roach] estate”—i.e., by Hal Roach. The Los Angeles Times commented, “The heirs and certain creditors of the $150,000 estate, it seems, cannot agree.” Presumably the referee settled the matter.

Despite starting divorce proceedings, Helen G. Roach had left her young husband assets equivalent to almost $4 million today. In March 1917 Hal Roach and Dwight Whiting each bought fourteen more shares of the Rolin Film Company, putting more capital into producing more movies.

From late 1916 into 1917, the Rolin Picture Company increased its production beyond Lonesome Luke one-reelers. It took a flyer on Harold Lloyd’s idea for a character who wore glasses instead of a funny mustache. It tried a new series starring Dee “Skinny” Lampton. It offered a costly contract to the clown Toto. It moved back into the Bradbury Building. That spending was almost certainly enabled by Helen G. Roach’s estate.

TOMORROW: Making sense of this tale.

“Owners of the Lodge Cafe and Hotel at Seal Beach”

In October 1915, developers incorporated the northwestern corner of Orange County, California—an area previously known as Motuucheyngna, Anaheim Landing, and Bayside—as the city of Seal Beach.

The new city council authorized liquor sales to make this area more attractive than Long Beach, the dry town just to the north. Investors began to build restaurants, night clubs, and an amusement park called the Joy Zone.

The 9 June 1916 Orange County Register told readers:

By far the largest building in the business section [of Seal Beach] is that housing the Lodge Cafe and Dancing Cabaret, owned and managed by Dave Combs and Jimmy [sic] Blyler, who have a reputation all their own as amusement kings. Their building is two stories, has a frontage of fifty feet and a depth of 100. Long before you reach Seal Beach you see the “Cafe” signs erected on the top of the Lodge. . . .

The lower floor contains the main cafe and dancing floor. It is open for daily matinee dancing, and continues, with added attractions, until late in the evening. . . . Just behind the main Cafe is the Grill room. It is open all day.

The second floor was a hotel, mostly rented out as apartments with housecleaning and meal services.

Of the two proprietors, David N. Combs had experience in the hospitality business. He had managed the Fashion Café in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for several years. Combs had an eventful 1913: he offered the café for sale in January, his wife Lottie died in late February, he unveiled the Hotel Combs in Albuquerque in April, he married Marie T. Riley of Texas in July, he signed over the hotel to the bank in September, and he started a restaurant in Pasadena in October.

Jimmie Blyler (1885–1924) had been born in Des Moines. He became a professional pianist in his late teens, traveling around the west. According to a 1911 profile in his home town newspaper, he survived the Iroquois theater fire in Chicago (1903) and the great earthquake in San Francisco (1906). Blyler and his partner Fred Brown were featured in the 1911 edition of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies and wrote many of its songs. While waiting for the Lodge Café to open, Blyler played at the nearby Jewel City Café.

(On 22 June 1916, Dean N. Fifield’s “What’s Going On” column in the Los Angeles Times said that Blyler also “played quarterback on a big Middlewestern university team several years ago.” The Des Moines Register profile said nothing about that, and I think its reporters would know.)

When Combs and Blyler’s Lodge Café opened in April 1916, there was another, silent partner: Helen G. Roach. She reportedly invested $14,500 in the enterprise. That was far more than it appears she ever gave her young husband, Hal Roach, to start his movie production company.

And then Mrs. Roach died.

TOMORROW: How an unhappy marriage ended.

“She accused her companion of the theft”

Yesterday I quoted two news stories from 29 Jan 1916 on Helen G. Roach’s complaint that a man had stolen her jewels.

That day’s Los Angeles Daily Herald recounted the lady’s “remarkable story” with dramatic detail: “Mrs. Roache [sic] first rushed into the home of Judge [Johnson W.] Summerfield in an hysterical condition and weepingly begged the justice to issue a warrant for the arrest of the man, who she said, was named Hill.”

She didn’t recall that man’s first name, only that he was an actor.

Later this article noted that “Mrs. Roache…first reported the robbery to the police under the name of Mrs. Woodbury,” the surname of her previous husband.

The Daily Herald story continued:

Calming Mrs. Roache enough to secure her story, Judge Summerfield was told that Hill, whom Mrs. Roache described as “awfully handsome,” persuaded her to go to the beach in an automobile with him. They dined at the beach, she said, and then they started home. . . .

As they neared Mrs. Roache’s house Mr. Hill told her that he was very ill, according to the woman’s story. She took him into her house and instructed her two colored servants to put him to bed in an apartment which was connected with her own boudoir by a small dressing room.

Shortly after he had been taken up stairs, Mrs. Roache told Judge Summerfield, she heard a noise on the second floor and went up. She entered her room and discovered that her diamond rings, a pearl necklace and other jewelry aggregating $5000 were gone, and also the actor.

Soon, however, Helen Roach was telling the authorities this mysterious man had drugged her. The Daily Herald simply mentioned that accusation without any further detail, but the Los Angeles Times for 30 January related that tale:

She first went to Judge Summerfield and told him that her friend was a motion-picture actor and that she was sure he had drugged her just before starting home from the beach in his machine. On the way home, she declared, she was seized with a fainting spell and had to be helped into her home at No. 1623 [sic] Van Ness avenue.

There her colored servants assisted her to bed and it was only early this morning, on regaining consciousness, that she discovered her loss. She accused her companion of the theft.

That is, of course, a different story.

Back to the Daily Herald: The judge (shown above) issued a warrant for Hill’s arrest and sent deputy sheriffs Cleveland, Moodie, and Cooper to find him.

At the Hotel Percival, however, where Hill lives, he was not to be found. The officers visited a number of cafes, but failed to locate Hill. It was discovered that he had cashed a check last last night in one of the cafes, but no one knew where he had gone after that.

The man was still unlocated on 30 January. If anyone has leads on a handsome movie actor named Hill in 1916, they would be welcome.

TOMORROW: A new enterprise.

Divorcing, Dating, and Drugged?

At the end of January 1915, the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Tribune reported that Bonnie Bounce, the pet of “Mrs. Hal Roach,” had won prizes at the city’s annual dog show.

On 4 Oct 1915, however, the Santa Barbara Daily News reported that “Helen G. Woodbury” of Los Angeles had checked into the city’s Arlington Hotel.

(I’m still creeped out at how the way daily newspapers used to print ordinary people’s comings and goings, yet grateful about how those records let me track someone’s travels over than a century later.)

Evidently Hal Roach’s wife went back to using her previous name in the middle of that year.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that the 7 Dec 1915 Los Angeles Examiner’s page 7 list of “Divorce Suits Filed” included:

Roach, Helen G. vs. Harry E.

Whatever the reality of Hal Roach and Helen G. Woodbury’s relationship, it was coming apart after less than fourteen months of marriage.

In early 1916 Los Angeles newspapers reported for the second time about Helen G. Woodbury Roach bringing charges against a man under eyebrow-raising circumstances. Dave Lord Heath discusses this event on his webpage about Helen Roach, and I’ve found some more information.

The 29 January Los Angeles Evening Post-Record’s story read:

$2600 THEFT

Jewels to the value of $2600 were stolen from the home of Mrs. Helen G. Roach, 1624 Van Ness av., last night, according to reports received today at the sheriff’s office.

Mrs. Roach discovered the loss shortly after returning from an evening’s entertainment with a friend.

What sort of “friend”? Well, as husband and wife the Roaches were on a break.

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was a little more sensational:

Says Drugged, Robbed of Gems Worth $5000

Intimating that she had been drugged while at the beach and that while in a helpless condition she had been robbed of diamonds worth $5000, Mrs. Helen Roache [sic] of 1624 Van Ness Avenue, today asked the sheriff’s office to arrest a man named Hill.

Mrs. Roache said she accompanied the man to a beach resort yesterday and that they dined there. She said she believed she had been robbed later in the evening. She knew the man only as “Mr. Hill,” she said. Deputies are searching for the man.

TOMORROW: Two takes on a very bad date.

“We better stick at comedies and make good ones”

The Pathé company, founded in 1896 as Société Pathé Frères, was a giant in early cinema. In the first decade of the twentieth century, it was the largest producer of film equipment and films in the world.

Pathé established the system of renting prints to exhibitors instead of selling them. It invented the newsreel, distributed on its own non-flammable film stock for faster shipping through regular mail. It owned a large chain of cinemas in Europe.

In 1914 Pathé wanted a bigger presence in the US market. Its executives were already frustrated with its main American distributor, and then the World War stifled production, distribution, and attendance in Europe.

Pathé opened new studios in New Jersey. It produced the hit Perils of Pauline serial. And it invited small producers to submit their short films for distribution by its new subsidiary, Pathé Exchange.

In early 1915, Dwight Whiting traveled to the East Coast to present Pathé managers with a dozen films that the new Rolin Picture Company had made the previous year. Rolin had already seen two prospective new distributors fail before any of its movies got to theaters. The corporation was nearly dormant. Founder Hal Roach had taken a directing job at Essanay, and the acting company had dispersed.

The Pathé screening committee watched Rolin’s films and didn’t like them. According to Richard Lewis Ward’s History of the Hal Roach Studios, the company’s gatekeepers “completely dismissed the three dramas and complained that the nine comedies were crude and vulgar, full of censorable material,” “imitations and not very good ones,” poorly photographed and directed.

Whiting nonetheless convinced Pathé to accept one one-reel short for distribution: “Just Nuts.” In 1916 Roach described this movie as a “last attempt” made “With capital down to the zero point.” It featured Harold Lloyd as “Willie Work,” a blatant imitation of Charlie Chaplin, harassing people in a park. Roach admitted, “There was no story and no rhyme or reason to it.” Here’s a sample.

As quoted by Craig Calman in 100 Years of Brodies with Hal Roach, Whiting wrote to Roach from New York in March 1915 with what he’d learned from Pathé: “They seem to like the wrong party getting hit, so stick in a lot of it. [They] Say you work up to climax then fall down. Take more time and figure it out better at first and we will show them.” A few days later Whiting passed on more feedback from Pathé: “your work amateurish in all ways but we better stick at comedies and make good ones.”

Whiting then added, “I have faith in your ability. Go to it.” Whiting would have the title of production manager under Roach as studio president, but those aren’t the words of an employee to his boss. They’re the words of an investor, or a patron. Whiting was giving Roach the go-ahead to spend more money—his money.

In March 1915 Hal Roach went back to running Rolin. There was still no solid distribution—he would make more movies on spec for Pathé to evaluate in hopes that it would offer a contract. But with Whiting’s support he had the resources to resume filming.

Roach leased studio space in Edendale from the Norbig company. Pathé thought three Rolin actors had shown potential, but Roach could hire back only one: Harold Lloyd. With his father’s help, Lloyd designed a less obvious Chaplin imitation eventually dubbed “Lonesome Luke.”

In October 1915, Pathé Exchange looked at the first Lonesome Luke one-reelers and offered Rolin a distribution deal—though it would still reject any movies not up to its standards.

At last Rolin had audiences for its productions and money coming in. Whiting could offer the older films to minor distributors on fire-sale terms (and even then most of them didn’t sell).

Meanwhile, Hal Roach’s marriage to Helen G. Woodbury was on the rocks.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

(Lonesome Luke’s Lively Life by Steve Massa, published in 2025, is the first study and probably the last word on the comedy series that established Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach in the movie business.)

The Fortunes of Dwight Whiting

Helen G. Woodbury’s financial support helped Hal Roach to set up the Rolin Film Company, but it didn’t keep the new enterprise going.

In 1915 Rolin was rescued by the work and the money of board member and production manager Dwight A. Whiting (1891–1974).

For background on Whiting, I’m indebted to the articles of Janet Whitcomb, chronicler of Lake Forest, California.

Dwight A. Whiting grew up in a wealthy Los Angeles family. His father, also named Dwight, had come out from Massachusetts and founded the town of Del Toro, which became Lake Forest. The patriarch was known for planting eucalyptus trees. He met his wife Emily at the Hotel del Coronado, where L. Frank Baum later spent some winters during his period of celebrity and wealth.

In the spring of 1907, when Dwight was fifteen years old, his father died suddenly. In this article Whitcomb quotes from a death notice in the 1 May 1907 Los Angeles Times:

Death resulted from injuries received on a Santa Fe train while Mr. and Mrs. Whiting were returning from Los Angeles from the El Toro ranch with a party of friends. Mr. Whiting was walking down the aisle of the car when the train gave a lurch and he was thrown against the corner of one of the seats, the impact causing internal hemorrhages. The accident at first was not considered a serious one, and a day or so after it occurred the injured man was able to make a trip to Santa Barbara, but while there he became much worse and returned to his home, where he soon died.

The same news story said the older man had left instructions about his son’s future: the boy “is to receive an education in this country especially fitting him as a specialist in forestry, and then is to receive a special course in the University of Leipzig, Germany.” In fact, the son attended Stanford University from 1910 to 1912.

Dwight Whiting came of age in 1912 and probably gained control of his inheritance then. There’s no sign that he went into forestry. Instead, two years later he was running an automobile dealership. In later life he was involved in ranching, banking, insurance, and oil. But in 1914 and 1915 Whiting was interested in the Rolin Film Company.

In this article, Whitcomb quotes from a 1989 newspaper clipping (which I can’t find elsewhere) based on an interview with Hal Roach—who wasn’t always exact when telling stories about events over half a century earlier. Roach said that as a trucker he was once “unloading logs at a ranch owned by Dwight Whiting” and thought it was “an ideal shooting area for cowboy films.” He said of Whiting:

He loaned me the $200 to produce my first film, a 30-minute western, and let me shoot it all on his property.

As Whitcomb notes, Roach didn’t recall accurate information about Whiting and Del Toro. This “cowboy film” can’t be identified. Was it indeed Roach’s first film? Was the $200 a loan or an investment, and was it actually $200? Details aside, Roach’s basic memory was that Dwight Whiting was an early backer of his moviemaking enterprise.

Whiting’s mother had remarried in 1911, and he and his brother worked to keep her hefty inheritance out of the hands of her new husband by setting up trusts and corporations. An IRS ruling about those entities contains the information that in 1917 Dwight Whiting was worth about $176,000. That was the equivalent of more than $4 million today. Whiting didn’t need his job at the Rolin Film Company. The company needed him.

Indeed, Richard Lewis Ward’s History of the Hal Roach Studios says that in its first few years “the company was chronically short of general operating funds, necessitating frequent requests for advances from Pathé and occasional excursions into Dwight Whiting’s personal resources.”

The same study quotes Whiting’s assistant manager Warren Doane writing to H. M. “Beanie” Walker (then a freelancer) about late payment in early 1918, “Should worst come to worst, Mr. Whiting will come to bat again and liquidate all that is against the Company”—i.e., pay off the bills from his personal funds.

But first, Whiting needed to find Rolin a distributor, any distributor.

TOMORROW: A pathetic situation.

(In the absence of any photograph of Dwight Whiting, I’m illustrating this post with a photo of 542 Lorraine Boulevard in LA. As explained here, this house was commissioned by Dwight’s younger brother George in 1920. After George’s marriage broke up, he sold it to Dwight in 1925. Then Dwight’s first marriage broke up, and he sold it in 1931.)

The Rolin Film Company Seed Money and When It Ran Out

On 21 Oct 1914 the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Morning Tribune, and Los Angeles Evening Express all reported that a marriage license had just been issued to Harry E. Roach and Helen G. Woodbury.

City records say the marriage took place on 19 October.

The marriage certificate and newspapers described Roach as aged 22 and working in motion pictures.

The documents also said Woodbury was 37. Helen was in fact 47 years old.

The couple were reported to be living in Helen’s home on Van Ness Avenue.

We thus have this timeline:

• 14 Jan 1914: Frederick Woodbury died suddenly in a mine accident.
• 26 May: Frederick’s widow Helen Woodbury, having received $10,000 in life insurance money, was suing for more.
• 23 July: Hal Roach co-founded the Rolin Film Company, stunning his friend Harold Lloyd by having about $2,000 to invest.
• 21 October: Helen Woodbury and Hal Roach married.

Also in that period, on 24 September a “wealthy society woman…walked into the side” of Helen Woodbury’s automobile outside the Mason Opera House (shown above). The Oakland Tribune reported that the woman had suffered “a severe concussion” but was expected to recover. So it was a busy time for Helen.

By the first half of 1915, however, Rolin was coming apart. The company had made several short films, mostly comedies, but couldn’t sell them to any distributor. Its most promising leads, Sawyer and United Film Service, both went out of business that year.

Harold Lloyd got sick of the low wages and went to act for Mack Sennett instead, starting in April. Rolin’s other lead performers also signed elsewhere.

One of the company co-founders, Daniel Linthicum, backed away without investing the additional money he had promised.

The company’s lease on space in the Bradbury Mansion lapsed.

Even Hal Roach himself put Rolin on the back burner, joining the Essanay company as a director. He spent his lunch hours talking about how to make movies with that studio’s star, Charlie Chaplin. As of 21 May 1915, the Los Angeles Record was quoting praise for its “Movie Edition” from “Harry Roach, Director, Essanay Film Mfg. Co.”

TOMORROW: The turnaround.

“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 headlined “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.

ADDENDUM: A false lead on Helen Woodbury.

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.]