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Note the red tie-bedecked witch flying over Harry Welty’s Emerald City. Photo by Harry Welty.
A decade ago, on the night my mother died, I watched the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz with my grandsons Tanner and Jacob to honor the passing of their great grandmother.
During the last 40 years I’ve built some 100 snow sculptures. My latest is far from my best but none was ever as close to my heart as the one standing in my yard today.
I am at heart a Kansas boy. Although I only spent my first 12 years as a Jayhawk the following 62 years in Minnesota haven’t erased my memories.
Solid, drab, dignified Kansas brought the dazzling Oz to life but Minnesota too played its part. Frances Ethyl Gumm was born here and cinema magic rechristened her Judy Garland.
The ruby slippers she wore as Dorothy Gale rest in Minnesota, although they too were once whisked away to parts unknown. They carried Dorothy through great danger and when clicked together brought her home to Kansas.
Georganne Robb (Welty) like the fictional Dorothy Gale, was born in Kansas. Salina to be exact. Her father was appointed the city’s postmaster by three successive Republican presidents. It was a fitting reward for a war hero. When he was awarded a Medal of Honor for his valor in the “Great War” (The Second had not yet been fought) a public holiday was declared and schools were closed. Children climbed trees to see him decorated.
I doubt that my grandfather ever saw The Wizard of Oz. Movies were an extravagance and he read history. Daughter’s Georganne and her older sister Mary Jane were, however, ravenous readers. They checked every Oz book out of the Salina Public Library. L. Frank Baum started the series after a newspaper career and it was taken up by others until two dozen Oz books lined the library’s shelves. When I was young Georganne read the first half-dozen to me.
Five years ago, when I learned that my French pen pal had never seen the movie, I began hinting she should watch it to understand America and the scarecrow in me.
I love it when Dorothy joins the Scarecrow’s solo and sings, “you could be another Lincoln...” When I sent “Adelaide” a photo of my latest work she sent me a link to the French language Wizard of Oz movie. She finally found it. I put the link on my blog. I can’t understand most of the French yet but the songs are VO, Voix original. When a song is called for the dubbed French voices give way to Judy and company singing in English.
Oz is much more than Kansas. In 1900 the book was immediately turned into theatrical productions and shown across America.
A generation later my mother devoured Oz. When she was 11 the original book became the first Technicolor 4 movie.
After the advent of television, the movie was broadcast once a year for nearly three decades. No baby boomer passing my yard could fail to know what I’ve sculpted.
The Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg soundtrack is as familiar as Christmas music. Americans still quest to steal the broomstick of the wicked witch of the West.
We thrilled when a new author turned the story on its head with a prequel much as Greek authors reimagined tales of their gods. Tickets to Wicked sold out too fast and I missed a stage production 10 years ago but my family just took me to the movie. Looooong as it was, I found it thrilling.
Even Americans left out of the 1939 casting became Ozzians. Black America got its hip version before the millennium’s end in The Wiz, with Michael Jackson.
Forgive my wokeness while our new President wages war on DEI but I too have had misgivings about author L. Frank Baum.
I was born in windswept Arkansas City, Kansas. (Its pronounced R Kansas City not Arkansaw City).
Three hundred years before I showed up the Spanish conquistador Coronado found an Indian city as big as today’s Ark City of 11,000 people. They are long gone now, as were the Indians on my grandfather’s farm in Salina. Only their arrowheads remained as mute testimony to their existence.
L. Frank Baum, wrote an opinion piece that still strikes at the heart of Native Americans. He told his Nebraska readers that just maybe the best thing for Indians was their total extinction. I learned this long ago when I read a native American’s letter to the editor. When I researched the allegation, I found myself hoping that the Oz book’s author, Baum, was so outraged by a massacre of Indians that he wrote the hateful sentence ironically, to chasten Christian readers.
Whether that is true or not all of us live in a land of witches and the bewitched. Anyone passing my sculpture can see the red tie flying from a yellow haired witch that leads his monkey army across a rainbow to attack the Emerald City.
Dark spirits still fly. Courage friends.
Feel free to share Harry’s blog posts at lincolndemocrat.com
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