Archives are full of the unexpected. Randomly opening one of Dr. Charles Wheeler’s scrapbooks about town life, there he was—Shorty the chimpanzee. Dr. Wheeler had preserved a little bit of the story of Shorty’s visit to Williamsburg and Haydenville in the early 1930s.
He tells us: “Shorty was a young chimpanzee who played in moving pictures. He lived in Hollywood in 1936 but had also spent a summer in Haydenville with his owners, John, and Ruth (Nutting) Haeseler at the home of Ruth’s grandfather, Mr. Albert W. Locke of High Street. While in Haydenville Shorty did the motion picture ‘Shorty on the Farm,’ which was photographed at the farm of Mr. Silas Snow, Williamsburg, by John Haeseler, specialist.”
The film was originally a Paramount short feature silent film, released in April 1935. It was later re-released to “home movie audiences” in October 1949 by Castle Films. A restored copy of the 1949 print can be found on E.M. Michael’s Office of Image Archaeology site on Youtube.
The story of Shorty is recorded in the book, “Shorty: The Story of a Little Chimpanzee,” written by Ruth and John Haeseler and published by Rand McNally, in 1936. But the book is long out-of-print and hard to find in any library.
Thanks to Dr. Wheeler for saving two photographs, one of Shorty playing in a tub of water, the other showing Shorty’s cousin on Ruth’s shoulders and Shorty on John’s shoulders. Daria D’Arienzo, Meekins Archivist. #throwbackthursday; #tbt.
Posted to Facebook 12/2/2021
