August 17, 1934: “Treasure Island” Premieres

Wallace Beery (left) and Jackie Cooper

August 17, 1934: The film Treasure Island premieres, based on the 1883 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. It stars Jackie Cooper (then 11 years old, a child star long before he was Perry White in the Chris Reeve Superman movies or a M*A*S*H director), Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery as Long John Silver.

The story is set in the mid-18th Century. Jim Hawkins (Cooper) and his mother (Dorothy Peterson) run the Admiral Benbow, a tavern near Bristol, in the West Country of England. One dark and stormy night, during a birthday celebration, the mysterious Billy Bones (Barrymore) arrives, and drunkenly talks about treasure. Soon after, Bones is visited by Black Dog (Charles McNaughton), then Pew (William V. Mong), and drops dead, leaving a chest, which he bragged contained gold and jewels.

Instead of money, Jim finds a map that his friend Dr. Livesey (Otto Kruger) realizes will lead them to the famous Flint treasure. Squire Trelawney (Nigel Bruce, later to play Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes films) raises money for a voyage to the treasure island, and they set sail on the Hispaniola, commanded by Captain Alexander Smollett (Lewis Stone). Also on board is the one-legged Long John Silver (Wallace Beery) and his cronies. Even though Bones had warned Jim about a sailor with one leg, he and Silver become friends.

During the voyage, several fatal "accidents" happen to sailors who disapprove of Silver and his cohorts. Then, the night before landing on the island, Jim overhears Silver plotting to take the treasure and kill Smollett's men. Jim goes ashore with the men, and encounters an old hermit named Ben Gunn (Chic Sale), who tells him that he has found Flint's treasure.

Smollett and his loyal men flee to Flint's stockade on the island for safety. Silver's men then attack the stockade when Smollett refuses to give them the treasure map. While the situation looks hopeless, Jim secretly goes back to the Hispaniola at night, sails it to a safe location and shoots one of the pirates in self-defense. When he returns to the stockade, Silver's men are there, and Silver tells them that a treaty has been signed. The pirates want to kill Jim, but Silver protects him. Dr. Livesey comes for Jim, but the boy refuses to break his word to Silver not to run away.

The next day, the pirates search for the treasure hold, but, when they find it, it is empty. When some of the pirates mutiny against Silver, Livesey and Gunn join him in the fight. Smollett then sails home with the treasure, which Gunn had hidden in his cave, and with Silver as his prisoner. Silver tells Jim a horror story of a slow death by hanging due to his one leg, causing Jim to be unable to stand by and let his friend be hanged, and he frees Silver. As he sails away, Silver promises to hunt treasure with Jim again some day, as "Honest John" Silver.

So many of the clichés we developed about pirates come from this film: The big hat, the peg leg, the parrot on the shoulder, the exclamation "Arrrrgh!" and the calling of friends "Matey," the burying of treasure in chests on deserted desert islands, usually in the South Pacific, and the marking of the locations of such treasures on a map with an X. However, the pirate exclamation "Shiver me timbers!" meaning, "May my ship's timbers break," appeared in the original novel, and maybe have been around long before that.

A lot of our pop-culture clichés came from the films of the early Thirties, which is why people were shocked when later Tarzans had better vocabularies than Johnny Weissmuller's, and when Gary Oldman didn't look like Bela Lugosi's take on the vampire Count in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Treasure Island would be remade in color in 1950, with Robert Newton as Long John Silver. He popularized the pirate exclamation "Blow me down!" meaning, "May the wind blow me down." As a native of Shaftesbury, in Dorset, his West Country accent became the familiar "pirate accent," although the most famous real-life pirate, Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, was also from the West Country, which Newton, who played him in a movie, likely knew.

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August 17, 1934 was a Friday. Ron Henry, the left back on Tottenham Hotspur's "Double"-winning side of 1961, was born. And these baseball games were played:

* A doubleheader was split at Yankee Stadium. The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-0 in the opener. Lefty Gomez pitched an 8-hit shutout. Tony Lazzeri hit a home run. The Tigers won the nightcap, 2-0. Lynwood "Schoolboy" Rowe pitched a 3-hit shutout, striking out 11, outpitching Jimmie DeShong. Over the 2 games, Babe Ruth went 1-for-5, Lou Gehrig went 1-for-7 with an RBI, Hank Greenberg went 1-for-8, and Marv Owen went 4-for-7.

* The New York Giants swept a doubleheader from the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-3 and 8-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Carl Hubbell went the distance in the 2nd game. Over the 2 games, Giants player-manager Bill Terry went 6-for-10 with an RBI, Mel Ott went 6-for-9 with a home run in each game, a walk and 6 RBIs, Paul Waner went 2-for-8, and Lloyd Waner went 2-for-6 with 2 walks and 2 RBIs.

* A doubleheader was split at Fenway Park in Boston. The Boston Red Sox won the 1st game, 6-0. Wes Ferrell pitched a 2-hit shutout, outpitching Bobo Newsom. The St. Louis Browns won the 2nd game, 5-2.

* A doubleheader was split at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox in the 1st game, 9-8. This was a wild game: Each team scored 2 runs in the 7th inning, 2 in the 8th, and 1 in the 9th. Ed Coleman hit 3 home runs and had 5 RBIs. Edwin "Dib" Williams doubled Bill Dietrich home with the winning run in the bottom of the 10th. Dietrich was also the winning pitcher, in relief of Al Benton. George Earnshaw went the distance for the A's. 

The White Sox won the 2nd game, 3-2. Ted Lyons went the distance for the win. Over the 2 games, Jimmie Foxx went 1-for-7 with a home run, a walk and an RBI. For the White Sox, former A's star Al Simmons went 4-for-9 with 5 RBIs, and Luke Appling went 2-for-8.

* The Washington Senators swept a doubleheader from the Cleveland Indians, 4-3 and 1-0 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. In the 1st game, the Indians scored a run in the top of the 9th, but the Senators tied it with 2 in the bottom of the 9, and won it in the 10th with Cliff Bolton singling Cecil Travis home. In the 2nd game, Bobby Burke pitched a 3-hit shutout, outpitching future Yankee Monte Pearson. The only run came in the bottom of the 2nd, when Pearson threw a wild pitch to Dave Harris, allowing Buddy Myer to score.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 12-4 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Sam Leslie and Tony Cuccinello each went 3-for-5 with 3 RBIs.

* The Boston Braves beat the Chicago Cubs, 5-2 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* And the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 12-2 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. James "Ripper" Collins went 4-for-4 with a home run, a walk and 3 RBIs.

January 5, 1886: "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is Published

January 5, 1886: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- there is no "The" in the title -- by Robert Louis Stevenson is published. It becomes one of the most-copied stories in popular culture.

What people tend to remember is this: Dr. Henry Jekyll, a London physician, feeling constrained by the conventions of Victorian society, concocts a potion, drinks it, and turns into Edward Hyde, the embodiment of his repressed selfish desires. He ends up committing a murder as Hyde, and eventually finds himself transforming into Hyde even without the potion, and finally commits suicide.

What people tend to forget is this: There is a hero to the novel, and it's not Jekyll in his natural form. It's Jekyll's friend, a lawyer named Gabriel Utterson, who investigates Hyde, and discovers that Hyde was actually Jekyll. The 1st half of the book is Utterson's investigation, and the 2nd half is Jekyll's confession.

Ever since, "Jekyll and Hyde" has referred to a person who appears to be mild-mannered, but has a dark side. The story inspired the Marvel Comics character of the Hulk.

The original story has been filmed many times, with the Spencer Tracy version of 1941 being the best-known. That version is also the one that changed the pronunciation. Up until 1931, with Frederic March in the dual role, the doctor's name was pronounced "JEE-kill." From 1941 onward, it's been "JEHK-ill."

The story has been, sort-of, reversed. In 1963, Jerry Lewis starred in The Nutty Professor, playing Dr. Julius Kelp, a goofy-looking nerd whose formula turns him into the handsome, suave Buddy Love, whose conduct becomes worse as the film goes along. It has long been believed to be a swipe by Lewis at his former comedy partner, singer-actor Dean Martin. Lewis always wanted to do a sequel, but never got around to it. When Eddie Murphy made his remake in 1996, he credited Lewis as a producer, and did produce a sequel.

There's also been gender bends. In 1971, Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick starred in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, one of several stories that makes the Hyde character Jack the Ripper, even though the Ripper murders happened in 1888, 2 years after the book's publication. In 1995, Tim Daly played the doctor's great-grandson, and Sean Young the result of his experiments, in Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde.

In the years following the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1930, some authors have put his creation, Sherlock Holmes, on the trail of Hyde, and on that of the Ripper. Michael Dibdin's 1978 novel The Last Sherlock Holmes Story combines all three: Holmes tries to find a cure for his cocaine addiction, which leads him to become a Hyde-like character, and to commit the Ripper murders.

And of the man who created Jekyll and Hyde? Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland -- the same city where Conan Doyle would be born, 9 years later. Always interested in the sea and in stories of the South Pacific, he published Treasure Island in 1883, creating the character of Long John Silver and forming the common view of pirates ever since.

Like Conan Doyle with Holmes, he based Jekyll and Hyde on a well-known figure in Edinburgh. Unlike Conan Doyle, it was a man he could never have met: William Brodie was a cabinetmaker, respected enough to be elected to the city council, but who fell into deep debt due to gambling, and secretly turned to burglary, and was hanged for it in 1788.

But for all his fame and fortune for writing Treasure Island and Jekyll & Hyde, 2 of the most popular and most-adapted stories in English-language literature, he was in ill health for much of his life. Bronchial trouble led him to seek a warmer climate, and he went to the South Pacific, dying in Samoa of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 3, 1894, only 44 years old. He had been trying to open a bottle of wine, and stopped, and said, "What's that?" He turned to his wife, Fanny, an American born Frances Matilda Van de Grift, herself a writer, and asked her, "Does my face look strange?" Perhaps it was appropriate that the last word he spoke was "strange."

Robert and Fanny had no children together, but Fanny had 3 children, 2 surviving, from her 1st marriage. Those 2 surviving children have living descendants today.

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January 5, 1886 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were in their off-seasons. Hockey was not yet organized. And basketball had not yet been invented. So there were no scores on this historic day.