Boys Town is known worldwide for its success as a national child-care organization that gives kids help, healing, and hope. But if not for one meeting in 1938, the rich history and success of Boys Town might never have been. Oddly enough, the meeting didn't involve Boys Town administrators or political giants. It wasn't even at Boys Town. This meeting occurred between two actors and a movie company president in far away Culver City, California.
The story begins earlier that year when actors Spencer Tracy , Mickey Rooney and the rest of a cast and crew came to Nebraska to film the movie “ Boys Town,” one of the first films to be shot on location. For 10 days in July, the troop rehearsed, shot and re-shot scenes under the oppressively hot, dry, dusty summer sky. For those 10 days, Tracy, Rooney and Director Norman Taurog experienced, firsthand, Father Flanagan's no-nonsense urgency to give his boys hope and his day-to-day struggles to keep his home for boys solvent. They saw the boys' farm crops withering in the dust bowl heat as the young lads were reduced to eating mush. And they heard real-life stories of abandonment and neglect, which injected new color and meaning into their film script.
When the actors and crew returned to Hollywood to finish shooting the film, they left a Boys Town that was merely an outpost struggling to care for local boys who had run out of alternatives. "Like everyone else in this area, Boys Town was struggling through the ravages of the Depression along with the drought of the 1930s," explained Tom Lynch, manager of Boys Town's Hall of History. "The boys depended on the food they raised on the farm, and the drought depleted their supply." With no food, the boys were eating mush three times a day. One day, overcome by frustration, they marched out to the root cellar because they thought the Home was holding back some food. They found the root cellar bare.
Donations were also depleted because of the Depression. When the sheriff showed up at Father Flanagan's door once in 1934 to close the Home down, it was saved only by some last-minute donations that helped meet the rock-bottom requirements. Clothes for the boys were just repaired over and over until thread would no longer hold the rags together. Furniture was never new; repaired furniture was the style of the day.
"I can remember like it was yesterday sitting with Father Flanagan on the steps of his house," recalled Tom McGuire, who as a young boy played an extra in the movie. "He had tears in his eyes because he didn't know if he could keep the doors open."
Thousands of miles away in California, insulated from Father Flanagan's struggles at Boys Town, Louie B. Mayer finished watching the freshly edited movie “Boys Town.” By 1938, Mayer was firmly entrenched at the top of the number one film factory in the world, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer was known in the industry as the master manipulator whose omnipotence allowed him to make the rules that would maximize profits for MGM and dictate his social messages to America. His state-of-the art contract systems put all of Hollywood's top actors, directors and producers under his legal bindings for years. Mayer's formula for success for his cinema assembly line was chaste romance, apple pie and Andy Hardy.
Within this setting, the “Boys Town” movie arrived. “Boys Town” didn't fit Mayer's formula for success. It didn't have the romance featured in his blockbusters like “ Mutiny on the Bounty.” The Andy Hardy series dealt with a variety of themes but always centered on an intact family. And there were no songs like in the soon-to-be released “Wizard of Oz.”
“Boys Town” was about a priest in Nebraska struggling to give a group of throwaway boys with no families a second chance at life. The film exposed a bare-knuckled reality of life in America that didn't embrace glitz and glamour. Mayer decided to shelve the film.
Upon hearing the news, Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney got a meeting with Mayer. In his visit to Boys Town, Rooney recounted the meeting. "Spence and I said, 'You've got to release ‘ Boys Town ’ because our nation needs this,'" said Rooney. Mayer bluntly replied, "It will never sell. There's no sex. There's no songs."
Rooney then responded, "It's a song of freedom. It's a song of rehabilitation. It's a song of youth no matter what color or faith you are. It's about praying. It's about living a good life." Tracy nodded in agreement. Mayer changed his mind to release it because, in Rooney's words, "We didn't give him anyplace else to go."
“Boys Town” played before huge audiences all across America. It was nominated for Academy Awards in five different categories. Spencer Tracy won the Oscar for Best Actor (his second in a row), and the movie’s writers won Oscars for Best Original Story.
More importantly, the movie started Boys Town on the road to recovery. But the road turned out to be a long one. For three years after its release, donations to Boys Town dried up because the public thought the money made by the movie was going to Father Flanagan's Home. In reality, Boys Town received only $5,000 for the movie rights. To clear that up, Spencer Tracy made national public appeals for donations to the Home and MGM agreed to donate $250,000 to Boy s Town to build a new dormitory building to handle the increasing numbers of boys who saw the movie and wanted to come to Boys Town.
"The popularity of the movie basically turned around Boys Town's fortunes," said Lynch. "The movie suddenly put Father Flanagan and his mission on not only a national stage but gave him international notoriety in the field of child welfare." Indeed, after the movie released, Father Flanagan's schedule was jammed with speaking engagements around the country and overseas as he championed his revolutionary approaches to juvenile social problems.
"This sounds ironic, but World War II beginning after the movie really spread our name and reputation far and wide," said Hank Avilla who played an extra in the film. "So many of our boys went into the military and the war scattered us all over the world. So when ever a boy died or did something heroic, the press mentioned Boys Town in the article and the readers immediately knew their story because of the movie."
Lynch said, "From that point on, any references in the press or anything our sports teams, choir or Father Flanagan did around the country was just magnified because of the movie. Over the years, this led to increased donations which enabled us to expand here at Boys Town and eventually to 19 other sites around the country."
So what would have happened to Boys Town if Rooney and Tracy hadn't changed Mayer's mind? "My guess is that Boys Town would have probably remained a local home for a few children like any other local charity," said Lynch. "We would probably not be the national organization we are today."
In 2007, Boys Town Boys Town provided help, healing and hope to more than 51,000 children through direct care programs at more than a dozen states and through the Boys Town National Research Hospital. More than 500,000 children and families were helped through the Boys Town National Hotline, and nearly 900,000 more were served through outreach and professional training programs last year.
"The ‘Boys Town’ movie was really like any boy who came through our gates," Lynch said. "All the boys wanted was a chance to succeed and Father Flanagan gave it to them. Even though they didn't realize it at the time, Tracy, Rooney and Mayer gave the movie a chance to succeed. And the rest, as they say, is history."
