Many readers have heard of H.H. (Harold Howard) Wonacott, the photographer who maintained studios in both Willits and Fort Bragg in the 1910s and on into the 1920s. In 1922 he sold the Willits studio and moved to Fort Bragg full time where he had a large commission waiting to visually document the Union Lumber Company's reforestation project.
Many Mendocino County families possess Wonacott photographic portraits of relatives or his school photographs. Other treasures tucked in shoe boxes or albums may include a Wonacott photo in postcard form. He specialized in postcards of some of the earliest automobile models. The automobile H.H. drove back and forth between Willits and Fort Bragg, circa 1917-1922, had a spare tire on the back with a printed advertisement for his services.
Older coast residents may have visited his Laurel Street business in Fort Bragg which he operated into the 1940s. It stood where the Headlands Coffeehouse is today. Besides portraits and school pictures, customers could purchase larger prints of coastal or redwood scenery as well as buy film processed by him at local drug stores.
However, this is not the story of H.H. Wonacott. We need to drop our seemingly main character as abruptly as Alfred Hitchcock dispensed with Janet Leigh's character at the Bates Motel in Psycho.
This is the tale of H.H. Wonacott's grand niece, Edna May Wonacott. Edna May was born in Willits at the height of the Great Depression (1932). She had a brother, Armond, eight years her senior. Her parents were Amy and Eley Wonacott. Her father ran a grocery store in Willits until the early 1940s when the family moved to Santa Rosa. Therein, Edna May's life turned Hitchcockian.
In July, 1942, Edna May was busy showing her new hometown and its stores to two cousins, Beverly and Shirley Wonacott from Bakersfield. While they waited on a street corner for a bus to take them home on a Saturday afternoon a round bellied man with chubby cheeks and another fellow stood nearby discussing the merits of the intersection.
Edna described what happened next. “I was kind of wondering what they were doing, and all of a sudden they started looking at me. My older cousin wasn’t too happy about it and made me move away, and they still continued looking at me, and finally walked over to us and introduced themselves, and said they were going to make a movie in town and wanted to know if I would like to be in it! Of course I said yes, and they said they would come out to our house and talk to my parents. Then the bus came and we went home. That afternoon they came out to the house and talked to my parents.”
The portly man turned out to be the acclaimed film director Alfred Hitchcock. He was accompanied by producer Jack Skirball. Also in town was assistant director William Tummel. He had won an Academy Award as Best Assistant Director in 1933. That short lived Oscar category was discontinued after 1937.
Hitchcock, Tummel, and Skirball were in Santa Rosa scouting for location shoots, looking at houses that might suit the family at the center of the upcoming movie as well as banks and potential street scenes. Hitchcock also had in mind a girl with freckles, pigtails and spectacles for casting purposes. Edna May possessed all the qualities he was looking for in a youngster to play the little sister to Teresa Wright in his drama Shadow of a Doubt. Ms. Wright was coming off what proved to be an Academy Award performance in Mrs. Miniver.
Chaperoned by her mother, Edna May journeyed to Hollywood, where her screen test proved successful. She got the part, appearing along with Ms. Wright and Joseph Cotten in Hitchcock's account of an ideal Santa Rosa family paid a visit by a mysterious uncle (Cotten) who may or may not be a serial killer.
Four weeks of the filming of Shadow of a Doubt took place in Santa Rosa, a place much different than today. In those days Mendocino Avenue served as the north-south highway through town and the city of Santa Rosa, even in the midst of World War II, was almost as idyllic as Hitchcock portrayed it to be.
Edna signed a seven year motion picture contract, with a clause that she appear in no more than two per year so she could continue her schooling. Edna May's performance in Shadow of a Doubt has been acclaimed as the finest by a child actor in the long history of Hitchcock films.
She was in six more movies over the ensuing decade though she received screen credit for only one, 1945's Under Western Skies. Her last appearance was in The Model and the Marriage Broker during 1951. That year she married Robert Green and retired from film acting. Her 21st Century home is in Arizona.
Perhaps this is more an inside out story line, closer to Tarantino than Hitch. Readers may judge. There's death at the end, but no bloody shootout.
H.H.Wonacott sold his film and camera shop in 1947, semi-retiring to his farm off Simpson Lane. He operated a trout farm there. He advertised it as “U-Catch-em.” He ran a much a smaller studio nearby in which he developed photos of smiling fishermen with their trout caught from his pond. Harlan Howard Wonacott died in May of 1960.
*Beware: Plot twists and turns abound at malcolmmacdonaldoutlawford.com
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