Carl Dean Switzer got poked in the eye during the first few seconds he ever appeared on film.

You can see it only if you watch very closely, but it's there. It happens about a third of the way through an Our Gang episode called "Beginner's Luck", which involves an amateur talent contest. We see a busy backstage scene, with all the young performers milling about, including two tiny boys—Tom and Jerry, who form an act they call the Arizona Nightingales. Dressed in cowboy regalia, they rush up to the harried MC and shout "Here we are, all ready!"

The two boys were Carl Switzer and his older brother Harold. They had traveled with their parents and their sister Janice from their rural Illinois home to visit their grandmother in California. Since both boys had performed regularly in county fairs and the like back home, their parents decided to show up at Hal Roach Studios to see if their two sons could make it in pictures. Spurred on by their parents, the boys jumped up in the middle of the studio commissary and had begun singing cowboy songs, and within three weeks they were appearing on film. But was this how the movie business was supposed to be? Getting jabbed in the eye in your very first seconds on camera?

    But little Carl is a trouper. He finishes delivering his line, even though we see him putting his hand up to his eye in pain and shock. There was no way he was going to blow this opportunity, his first shot at becoming a famous movie star like his cowboy heroes, Hopalong Cassidy and Tom Mix. It was a rather strange beginning for the little boy that everyone would soon know as Alfalfa, but as things would turn out, it probably shouldn't have happened any other way.

    Film historians Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann co-wrote a marvelous book entitled The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang (Three Rivers Press), which is far and away the authoritative piece of scholarship on this beloved film series. In this book, Maltin and Bann remark that Alfalfa "captured the imagination of American movie-goers like few other child stars have before or since" (Life and Times, page 267).

We heartily agree, and we'll go even further than this, without any fear of being accused of hyperbole: We think that Alfalfa is one of the greatest icons of twentieth-century American culture.

   "Unique" is a word that is used in our society far too often, but it's probably the most proper adjective when discussing the remarkable talent who was born Carl Dean Switzer on August 7, 1927 in Paris, Illinois, just west of the Indiana border.




Little is known about his youth—the folks at 4alfalfa.com want to change that in the weeks and months ahead—but we do know that the Switzer boys, Carl and Harold, were raised in an environment so rural that neither one even wore shoes much before they came west. Hal Roach first wanted to name the boy "Hayseed", but "Alfalfa" seemed to be a better fit. It was in his second Little Rascals film, "Teacher's Beau", that he was first addressed as such. At first, Alfalfa achieved notoriety primarily by his, shall we say, "idiosyncratic" song stylings. His big number, at least early on, was "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain" which he sang four times in his first eight Little Rascals episodes (there is an entire section of this site devoted to his singing performances which we call "Alfalfa's Greatest Hits"). But very soon, it became obvious that he was able to do more than sing off-key.

    Alfalfa had talent. Lots and lots of talent. The total time he spent on-screen in the 34 episodes he appeared in during the Hal Roach era was only 3 hours and 58 minutes. Just think: All of Alfalfa's scenes in these 34 episodes, strung together, would equal less than four hours of screen time. But, what he packed into those 3 hours and 58 minutes! The boy from the Illinois farm would eventually become so popular that, as Darla Hood recalled, he once attracted more attention from waiting fans outside the MGM gate than the other actor with whom he was exiting the lot at the same time—a fellow by the name of Clark Gable.

Even though he was, of course, paired off with another enormously talented and appealing young actor, George McFarland—better known as Spanky—Alfalfa was soon regularly getting the most difficult assignments within the dramatic structure of the Little Rascals episodes. It was Alfalfa who was given the most challenging dialogue. It was Alfalfa who had spiders land on his nose while doing chin-ups, and who drank a glass of lemonade made with starch instead of sugar. It was Alfalfa who chased people away with his onion breath, got tricked into boxing Butch, had a frog sneak into his shirt, had firecrackers go off in his back pocket while trying to recite "Charge of the Light Brigade", and who was pelted with rotting fruits and vegetables while singing "The Barber of Seville".

    He fell through a stage curtain from a ladder, swallowed a balloon, a pesky moth landed on his nose while he was trying to sleep, his feet were bitten by crabs and tickled by a feather, and a monkey threw bottles at his head. And don't forget his Valentine's Day adventure: Spanky secretly stuffed soap into his sandwich and creampuff— given to him by Darla—but Alfalfa ate both anyway, afraid to offend the girl of his dreams. By the time his Little Rascals career would come to an end, Alfalfa had taken his place along with Spanky and Allen "Farina" Hoskins as one-third of the series' triumvirate of all-time immortals.

In 1938, Hal Roach—the genius primarily responsible for creating the Little Rascals—decided to try his hand at making feature-length films and so sold the entire Little Rascals property to Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM lavished handsome production values on its Little Rascals films, but there was something missing. No, there was a lot missing. Like believability and charm and spontaneity and humor and—well, you get the idea. By 1940 Alfalfa, nearly thirteen years old, had outgrown the Little Rascals. And this is where the story becomes complicated.

    If you listen to most modern-day commentators, you would think that other than his small part in "It's a Wonderful Life", Alfalfa couldn't get any film roles as an adult and spent the rest of his life getting in trouble, until he was shot to death in 1959. If 4alfalfa.com had to provide a central reason for being, it is this: To demonstrate that this "urban legend" is a gross exaggeration of the real story. An example of this misconception can be found in an otherwise admirable book published in 1988, a sort of pictorial history of the Little Rascals. The book provided the following summary of Alfalfa's career, post-Little Rascals:

"Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer had a brief acting career. He played in the 'Gas House Kids' in 1947, a film which reunited him with another Our Gang alumnus, Tommy Bond. Then, unable to get more acting jobs, he worked as a fishing and hunting guide in Northern California. In 1959, he was murdered by his ex-partner in the hunting business. He was 31 years old at the time."

The book goes on to say that, by contrast, Darla Hood had a "prolific" career as a grownup. Although we love Darla—who doesn't?—the fact is that she appeared in a grand total of five films after she left the Little Rascals.

Alfalfa, on the other hand, appeared in some 53 films and eight television episodes outside the Little Rascals (this includes the twelve feature films he appeared in during his Rascals career). So who really had the more "prolific" career?

    Was a grownup Alfalfa able to get as many roles as he would have liked or hoped for? Probably not; how many actors do? But of all the dozens of Little Rascals alumni, only three were credited with more grownup film or TV roles than Alfalfa: Jackie Cooper, Dickie Moore and, surprisingly, Scotty Beckett (it should also be noted that Jackie and Dickie compiled these film credits while having lived—thankfully—well past Alfalfa's 31 years.)

Were the quality of Alfalfa's films up to the standards that he would have liked or hoped for? Maybe not, as a rule, but he did appear in scenes, and held his own, with such screen legends as Bob Hope, William Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Mitchum, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Thelma Ritter, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Jane Darwell, Charles Bronson, Donna Reed, Theodore Bikel, Bing Crosby, and Loretta Young. And the films in which he appeared, over a period of eighteen years, earned a cumulative total of 14 Academy Awards, and were nominated for 36 others. Might these credentials not be indicative of a career that could at least be called "notable"?

But let's assume for a moment that Alfalfa's detractors are right. Although we don't believe this to be an accurate representation of the facts, let's suppose that his adult life was pockmarked with nothing but failure and personal problems, and that he never equaled the success he had as a child star. What would our reply be to this characterization?
It would be comprised of two words:

So what.

So what if Alfalfa never approached the success of his youth? To the commentators and critics who like to sneer at Alfalfa's supposed failure as an adult actor, we would submit the following question: What have they done in their lives, either public or private, to bring as many laughs and as much joy that Alfalfa did before he even turned thirteen years old? It would have been easy for Alfalfa to quit acting, to join the vast majority of Little Rascals alumni who simply left the acting world and chose to lead quiet, private lives away from Hollywood.

    But Alfalfa chose to keep on going, to keep on acting, just as he did as an eight-year-old in "Beginner's Luck" when he got poked in the eye in his very first seconds on film. Would he have been afforded more respect by modern-day observers had he chosen to simply quit acting, if he had left his Little Rascals body of work as his sole professional achievement? Sadly, we believe the answer is "yes": In a strange way, Alfalfa seemed to have opened himself up to more criticism simply because he tried to keep on acting, tried his best to sustain a movie career.

And what of his personal life? We will not try to portray Alfalfa as a pillar of the community. Even his best friends have recalled that he could be a bit difficult, that he had a temper. He had a special disdain for authority figures: During a Little Rascals reunion, he even cursed at Fern Carter, the dedicated woman who had been the young actors' off-stage school tutor for years. Alfalfa got arrested and placed on a year's probation in the mid-fifties for cutting down spruce trees in northern California (he had planned to sell them as Christmas trees). And there was reportedly—never substantiated, that we know of—some trouble with growing marijuana around the same time.

We submit that both of these indiscretions would be barely noteworthy today. In fact, they would have been barely noteworthy even when they first occurred had it not been Alfalfa who had committed them, had he not raised the bar so high during his childhood career that every misstep he made would become fodder for a press and public who, even in the "innocent" decade of the fifties, had become increasingly hungry for gossip and sensationalism.

But how unpleasant a person could Alfalfa really have been if none other than Roy Rogers—exemplar of middle American family values—agreed to stand as godfather to Alfalfa's only child, and included him in seven episodes of his TV show?

And Tommy Bond (a.k.a. "Butch", of all people) would remain as a lifelong friend with Alfalfa ("Alfie", as he would call him) to the day Alfalfa died; Tommy and his father regularly went raccoon hunting with Alfalfa and his father.


Tommy Bond as "Butch"

As we said, Alfalfa has become a one-man urban legend— perceived as the archetypal child star who had early success, flamed out soon after, then led a misguided life of mischief and tragedy. But there is so much more to Alfalfa's story. It is a story that we hope to tell as accurately as possible. It is a story of a very talented actor who did marvelous things with that talent, and who,
like most of us, hit some bumps in the road along the way. It is a story of an actor whose career—his actual body of work—is often overlooked in favor of unsubstantiated, exaggerated sensationalism. This is why, visitors to this Internet Appreciation will notice, there is scarcely any information devoted to Alfalfa's death. There is already plenty of information on this topic on the
Internet, and those who wish to see it can simply use their favorite search engine to do so.

By contrast, there is very little information on the Internet about why anybody cared about Carl Dean Switzer in the first place. To co-incide with the 75th Anniversary of Alfalfa's birth on August 7, 1927, we have created this website to celebrate Alfalfa's career (both as a child and as a grownup), his enormous yet hard-to-define appeal, and the position he occupies in American culture. We have created this website to help remind people that there is much more to Alfalfa than a mysterious, premature death.

    In short, we have created this website for Alfalfa.

We'd like to think that it would make him proud.

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