Tommy Bond

'Butch' in the 'Our Gang' films

The "Our Gang" comedies were one of the most successful series of shorts during the 1920s and 1930s. Starring a bunch of mischievous toddlers, the films were notable in featuring working-class children and for casting the boys and girls, black and white, as equals. Later, in the Fifties, they entertained a whole new generation when released to television as The Little Rascals. One of the most memorable of the team was Tommy Bond, who joined the series at the age of five as a soft-spoken peripheral member of the gang, but became a prime figure when he reappeared later as a hissable bully named "Butch".

Born Thomas Ross Bond in Dallas, Texas, in 1926, the blond, curly-haired boy was reputedly spotted by a talent scout from the Hal Roach Studios as he emerged with his mother from a local cinema. The scout told his mother that he could get the boy into films if he would travel to Los Angeles, so Bond's grandmother drove him to Hollywood (in the Depression that meant a seven-day journey over dusty roads).

"Our Gang" was the brainchild of the comedy producer Hal Roach, and from 1922 to 1944 there were 221 "Our Gang" movie shorts, the series successfully making the transition from silent to sound. Bond made his début in Spanky (1932), a showcase for chubby "Spanky" McFarland, but made a particularly strong impression the following year in Mush and Milk.

Musical numbers in the films were often highlights, and in this short the children are asked by their genial teacher, Old Cap, who despairs of teaching them geography, to put on some entertainment in the classroom instead. Bond agrees to sing, and his scowling rendition of the torch song "Just Friends (Lovers No More)", its emotional lyrics shocking his classmates, is hilarious.

Two years later, after appearing in nearly 20 of the films, Bond left the series for what was to be a temporary break. "I started out with the gang in 1932-33," Bond told the film historian Leonard Maltin,

and then my contract ran out and they didn't pick up my option. So during the interim I freelanced in shorts and features with other studios as well as Roach.

The other work included playing one of the children longing for ice cream in the Technicolor finale of the Eddie Cantor film Kid Millions (1934), the brat playing football in the apartment in the Laurel and Hardy comedy Block-Heads (1938), and two films with the comic Charley Chase, The Cracked Iceman and I'll Take Vanilla (both 1934).

It was his performance as the rascally urchin "Junior" in the last that prompted Roach to cast him in the "Our Gang" comedy Glove Taps (1937), as "Butch", a new face in the neighbourhood, who boasts that he can "lick any kid in town", but is outwitted by the gang. Though he would convincingly harass them in several shorts, Bond was good friends with the key gang members "Spanky" McFarlane and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer. "We always had a lot of fun together," he said. "The Roach studio was like a big family."

Bond's last "Our Gang" short (he was in 27 of them) was Bubbling Troubles (1940), after which he appeared in several "B" movies, his favourite of which was Robert Florey's The Man from Frisco (1944), starring Michael O'Shea and Anne Shirley, "because it was a sympathetic role and gave me the chance to play something other than a villain". His extensive radio work included the role of Randolph, the younger brother of the hyperactive teenager Judy Foster in the comedy series A Date with Judy (1941).

After serving with the US Army Air Force, he was reunited with Switzer in 1947 in The Gas House Kids Go West and The Gas House Kids in Hollywood, two films in a short-lived series made by the "poverty row" studio PRC in an attempt to emulate the success of the Dead End Kids. Bond played the boyish photographer of the Daily Planet, Jimmy Olsen, in two serials, Superman (1948) and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), and he had small roles in Tokyo Joe (1949) with Humphrey Bogart, Any Number Can Play (1949) with Clark Gable, and the musical Call Me Mister (1951) starring Betty Grable.

In 1951 Bond graduated from Los Angeles State College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre arts, and two weeks later he was working in television, becoming a property master, then stage manager and assistant director. In 1953 he married the blonde singer Pauline Goebel, the former Miss California of 1945 who was known professionally as Polly Ellis, and their marriage lasted until his death.

Several of the "Gang" members had difficulty adjusting to adulthood, and some (including Switzer and Scotty Beckett) met early and tragic ends. "I decided to get out of acting," said Bond,

because there is a lot more security on the other side of the camera. Some of the kids couldn't make that transition, though, because of lot of them had ego problems. I could never stand the thought of being inactive, and sitting by the phone waiting for an agent to call with a part, and I love the business, so I decided I'd get on the other side of it.

Though he retired in 1991, Bond continued to be a jovial guest at fan conventions, and in 1993 published an autobiography, You're Darn Right, It's Butch!

Tom Vallance