April 24, 1913: The Bangville Police premieres. It is a silent film, lasting just 8 minutes, but it changes the history of movies. It launched the Keystone Kops to stardom.
Producer Mack Sennett had named them after his employers, the Keystone Studios, based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Edendale. He introduced the Kops in the 1912 film Hoffmeyer's Legacy, but The Bangville Police, directed by Henry Lehrman, became the film that got everyone to notice them.
The synopsis: A farmer (played by Nick Cogley) and his daughter (Mabel Normand, probably the biggest film star of the time, who got her start by sleeping with Sennett) are in a barn, where she wishes the cow would have a calf. Left alone in the house, she hears strangers in the barn and calls the police. She barricades herself in. Her parents return, and have to break the door down. She thinks it is the robbers. Meanwhile, a car brings the police. After misunderstandings are resolved, they find a new-born calf in the barn.
A total of 11 Keystone Kops films were made between 1912 and 1915. In 1914, A Thief Catcher included a pre-Little Tramp Charlie Chaplin as a Keystone Kop. (Normand fooled around with him, too. Then again, he was no saint, either.) This film was thought lost, and so a rumor that Chaplin had been a Kop swirled for decades, but the proof wasn't available, until a copy of the film was finally found at a Michigan antique sale in 2010.
There is no definitive list of the actors who played the Kops, as giving proper credit wasn't exactly a priority in the early film industry. The ones credited in this film were Fred Mace as the Chief, Raymond Hatton, Edgar Kennedy, Hank Mann, Ford Sterling and Al St. John.
Other actors established as having been Kops: The aforementioned Nick Cogley, Billy Gilbert, Charles Avery, Bobby Dunn, George Jeske, George "Slim" Summerville, Dan Albert, Joe Bordeaux, William Hauber, Grover Ligon, Wallace MacDonald, Chester Conklin, Rube Miller, Robert Z. Leonard, Chester M. Franklin and Arthur Tavares. (There may have been others. As I said, there is no definitive list.)
The Bangville Police led to Mace getting more mail than Santa Claus, and he let his fame go to his head. He left Keystone in 1914, but the Kops did better without him than he did without them. He came crawling back to Sennett in 1915, but it was too late: The public had moved on, and Gilbert had replaced him as the Chief. He died of a stroke in 1917, only 38 years old.
Albert died in 1919, from the worldwide Spanish Flu epidemic. Avery died in 1926, Miller in 1927, Hauber in 1929, Normand in 1930, Cogley in 1936, Dunn in 1937, Sterling in 1939, Summerville and Lehrman in 1946, Kennedy in 1948, Bordeaux in 1950, Jeske in 1951, Franklin and Tavares in 1954, Sennett in 1960, Gilbert in 1961, St. John in 1963, Ligon in 1965, Leonard in 1968; Conklin, Hatton and Mann in 1971; Chaplin in 1977, and MacDonald appears to have been the last survivor, living until 1978.
Keystone Studios went out of business in 1935, a victim of the Great Depression. But the Kops' legacy lives on. In 1955, the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello made Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops. Directing The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, Richard Lester opened the film with the band members being chased by fans around a train station, done in the style of the Kops. And poor defending in sports is often described as "Keystone Kops defending."
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April 24, 1913 was a Thursday. This was also the day the Woolworth Building opened in Lower Manhattan. It was then the tallest building in the world. I have a separate entry for that event.
These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Philadelphia Athletics, 4-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Albert "Chief" Bender outpitched Al Schulz.
* The New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-1 at the Polo Grounds.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Boston Braves, 1-0 in 12 innings at the South End Grounds in Boston.
* The Boston Red Sox beat the Washington Senators, 6-3 at National Park (later Griffith Stadium) in Washington. Tris Speaker went 0-for-2 with a walk, but had an RBI on a sacrifice fly.
* The Cleveland Naps beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-3 at Navin Field in Detroit. (It was renamed Briggs Stadium in 1938 and Tiger Stadium in 1961.) Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie, Cleveland's manager, 2nd baseman, best hitter and namesake, went 0-for-4. Ty Cobb did not play.
* The St. Louis Browns beat the Chicago White Sox, 3-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
* The Cincinnati Reds beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 10-3 at Robison Field in St. Louis.
* And the Chicago Cubs and the Pittsburgh Pirates were not scheduled.
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