Delmar Watson, a member of a family of child actors who appeared in more than 1,000 films in the early days of Hollywood, has died. He was 82.
Watson, a former news photographer who oversaw a private archive of news photographs and related memorabilia, died Sunday at his Glendale home of complications related to prostate cancer, his family said.
His movie career started six months after he was born July 1, 1926, at his family home near Mack Sennett Studios in Edendale, an early movie mecca near Alvarado Street and Glendale Boulevard. The home of the nine Watson children -- six brothers and three sisters -- was a ready-made casting office.
The studios "knew we had kids of all sizes," Watson told The Times in 1968. "When they wanted a kid, they'd come over and grab one of us. Pretty soon we were all working steady."
He once recalled that he had parts in more than 77 movies by the time he was 7 and had appeared in more than 300 films during his youth.
In the 1937 film "Heidi," Watson portrayed Peter, Shirley Temple's goat-herding friend. Watson and three brothers played several sons of the governor in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," the 1939 movie that starred Jimmy Stewart.
Watson's father, Coy, was a journeyman plasterer who started in show business breaking horses for cowboy stars and eventually got into special effects. In the 1924 film "The Thief of Baghdad," Coy designed Douglas Fairbanks' flying carpet, considered an engineering marvel at the time.
Delmar worked regularly in the movies until the early 1940s and was one of four brothers to serve as a Coast Guard cameraman during World War II. Eventually, he joined his brothers in another family business -- news photography.
His grandfather, James Watson, shot pictures of Buffalo Bill riding up Broadway in Los Angeles in 1904. An uncle, George Watson, was the first full-time news photographer hired by the Los Angeles Times, in 1917. He later left the paper to run Acme News Pictures, a forerunner of United Press Photos, and trained his nephews there.
After the war, all six brothers worked as press, newsreel or television photographers. In the 1940s and '50s, a Watson brother could be found at four of the five Los Angeles metropolitan dailies. The brothers were such infamous pranksters that no newspaper would hire more than one at a time because they feared mayhem would ensue, according to several accounts of the family's history.
