WWW's 1st Home of Harold Lloyd

He is mainly remembered today for his antics on a skyscraper clock, but the life and career of Harold Lloyd remain much more diverse and exciting than any single image. This man lived, indeed, the American Success story.

HAROLD CLAYTON LLOYD was born in Burchard, Nebraska, on April 20, 1893, the second son of James Darsie and Elizabeth Fraser Lloyd. During his childhood, they lived, at various times, in the towns of Pawnee City, Humboldt, Beatrice, and Omaha, Nebraska, and Fort Collins, Durango, and Denver, Colorado. The reason for this nomadic existence was his father's difficulty in keeping a job; it was this inconsistency that led Elizabeth to divorce her husband, nicknamed "Foxy," in 1910. The two boys (elder brother Gaylord Fraser Lloyd was born in 1888, and died in 1943) shuffled between mother and father for a time, before making permanent home with Foxy.

Throughout Harold's childhood, he shared with his mother a passion for the theatre, and engaged in amateur theatrics for most of his adolescence. In 1906, young Harold had met the single greatest influence on his histrionic art, actor and mentor John Lane Connor: “Point by point he went over my performance as a mechanic goes over a motor, pointed out bad timing, wrong emphasis, and other A B C errors of technic.”

In 1912, Foxy, now working for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had an accident, which produced a monetary settlement of three thousand dollars. With this money, the Lloyd men could really live, but the question was: where? The flip of a coin sent the men to San Diego, California, where Connor had established a dramatic school, which Harold joined immediately, as both a student and an instructor.

It wasn’t long, however, before Harold bowed to the lure of “cellu-Lloyd” – a 1913 film debut led to sporadic extra work for Edison, Keystone, and Universal. While at Universal City, Lloyd met a fellow extra, Hal Roach, who would later establish his own production house, The Rolin Film Company, and take on Lloyd as principal talent. Together, the young men would learn how to make films, and would grow to virtually define film comedy in the process.