The Hal Roach Studio’s Our Gang series was notable from the beginning in showing black and white kids playing together on a mostly equal basis. However, they didn’t go to school with each other—not for years. Many American school systems were segregated in the early 1920s, either by law or (as in Los Angeles) by a combination of real-estate covenants and administrative moves that shuttled most black, Mexican, and Asian kids into certain schools. At first the Hal Roach Studio’s school for its young actors replicated that situation, though it’s not clear if that was ever a goal. Ernie Morri ..read more

As related back here, Hal Roach and the makers of the Our Gang comedies modeled the character of Farina, played by Allen “Sunny” Hoskins, on the pickaninny stereotype. Gloria Lee writes in Our Gang: A Racial History of the Little Rascals: His hair was tied in pigtails and white ribbons. He ate watermelons, fell into vats of flour, and smoked a corncob pipe. He wore the clownlike, oversized shoes of a minstrel. . . . Farina became the vehicle of all the most hackneyed and racist sight gags. He appeared in whiteface while his white friends appeared in blackface. When he got the measles, white ..read more

Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison was the Hal Roach Studio’s first child star and the highest-paid of the original Our Gang cast. All the more remarkable since Ernie was a black kid in 1920s America. After a couple of years of those movies being increasingly successful, Ernie’s father asked for a raise. Hal Roach didn’t renew the Morrisons’ contract. In early 1924, Ernie went off to make more money in vaudeville, though he returned that summer to complete “Fast Company,” a short started the previous year but delayed by the director’s injury. Roach’s competitors appear to have seen Ernie as a ..read more

The Cultural Center of Cape Cod is hosting a summer celebration of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The executive director of the institution, Molly Demeulenaere, says: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is more than just a story; it's a timeless exploration of what it means to find and appreciate the complex emotions around the concept of home. Dorothy’s journey, alongside her wonderfully loyal and caring friends, mirrors the universal quest for belonging and self-discovery, making it a story that truly resonates across generations.” Its description of the event says: At the beating heart of this ench ..read more

In his memoir, The Keystone Kid: Tales of Early Hollywood, Coy Watson, Jr., devoted considerable space to the Mack Sennett Comedies short “Honeymoon Hardships” (1925). That section, headed “The Craziest Picture I Ever Worked On,” runs for nine pages, longer than any other in the book. About half those pages are about learning to swim, which young Coy did in order to work on that movie safely. The rest describe the filming, limited of course to the scenes Coy himself appeared in. Watson recalled two scenes in detail: a dinner party interrupted by the explosion of a water heater upstairs and ..read more

This July’s OzCon International in Pomona will be the sixtieth annual Oz fan convention on the west coast. OzCon started as the Winkie Convention, for people who lived in the western quadrant of the USA. These days, OzCon attracts people from all over. Co-director Colin Ayres is from Shropshire, I’m from New England, and one of this year’s guests is from Australia. Once again I’ve been helping to plan the program. I’ll speak briefly, moderate a panel on what stories the manuscripts of the Oz books can tell us, and help with other tasks. As the graphic above from convention co-director Jay ..read more

In the latest Baum Bugle from the International Wizard of Oz Club, Scott Cummings calls The Characters of Oz “a real treat and a fresh addition to the Oz reference shelf.” I’m flattered by the review’s praise for my essay on the Wizard himself, especially how the “insightful comment that ‘Baum built most of his characters around contradictions’ casts a valuable light on the entire volume.” I’d been looking for a place to install that comment in Oz commentary. Those paragraphs got some extra airing back here. Part of the brief for contributors to this collection was to examine the characters ..read more

“Red Eye” is a short story by Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane. It was published in Face Off and then in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, where I read it. David Baldacci, the editor of Face Off, invited established crime writers to write short stories that brought their lead characters together. In “Red Eye,” Connolly’s L.A. police detective Harry Bosch meets Lehane’s Boston private eye Patrick Kenzie. It looks like Connolly and Lehane traded sections, Connolly writing those parts told by following Bosch and Lehane those tracking Kenzie. Usually Kenzie is the narrator of the novels ..read more

This month I read two British murder mysteries, published twenty years apart, in which the culprit turned out to be the local bigwig killing someone who was blackmailing him. (I’m withholding the names of those books to protect the dénouements.) Now I’m trying to figure out if that trope suggests an ingrained suspicion of privilege, showing that the local wealthy squire is not to be trusted. Or do those books reinforce social hierarchies, since both these murderers had risen from the lower classes to their high places in society through blackmailable methods ..read more

The California Gold Rush made San Francisco a boom town. It attracted Americans from the East Coast, of course, and also people from southern China. Within a couple of decades, some Americans of northern European backgrounds began to view Chinese immigration as a problem. In particular, they pointed to violent male criminals who trafficked young women and fought men from other organizations. To label that type of criminal, newspaper editors and government officials reached back several decades. The Weekly Alta California for 5 Feb 1870 referred to a ring of Chinese immigrants as “a gang of ..read more