End of the Yellow Brick Road

On April 9, 2010, Mienhardt Raabe, one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz died at the age of 94 after his heart stopped as “averred by a local coroner”, according to a clever Wikipedia writer.  

Why clever? Because Raabe who played a Munchkin coroner in the classic film’s fantasy Emerald City, had one uncredited 13-second line concerning the death of the Wicked Witch of the East:  

                              “As a coroner I must aver

                              I thoroughly examined her

                              And she’s not only merely dead

                              She’s really, most sincerely dead.”

My bet is that the irony would not have been lost on Raabe.  As a youth, he did not believe there were other small people until he visited the Midget Village at Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1933.  Raabe, who was about 42 inches tall, worked for many years as a spokesman for the giant meat products (read hot dogs) company Oscar Mayer where he was known as “Little Oscar, the World’s Smallest Chef.”  Raabe drove the first Wienermobile, an idea attributed to Carl Mayer, the company founder’s nephew. 

But Raabe was bigger than just using his size for entertainment and to make a living.  He had an accounting degree and an MBA.  He served as a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, and was married for 50 years to a woman his height who died in a car accident in 1997.

Raabe’s version of the Oz Yellow Brick Road ended at Penney Farms, a North Florida retirement community dating back to 1926 when J.C. Penney for department store fame planned to develop a village for experimental farming.  The town was incorporated in 1927 and the stock market crash of 1929 caused Penney to scale back his plans.  Plan B for the magnate was retirement community for retired ministers.  Today the 192- acre retirement community houses Christian laypeople as well as clergy.

It’s an old Florida story—built during the boom just before the crash—and it’s an old Florida scene driving along state road 16 south of Jacksonville and heading west from ST. Augustine.  The dark green shade from the trees lining the road sets off the oranges and earth tones of the one-story concrete block homes.  The white glare reflected from piles of limestone gravel on the north side of 16 makes the country road look dark, cool and ancient.  It is a palette that colored 1950s Florida:  green trees surrounding jalousied porches.  The orange colors of the old buildings offer a warm counterpoint to the cool shade.  The scene might fit nicely into a gray scale rendering for the black-and-white Kansas scene in the Wizard of Oz although the leafy North Florida setting is its own version of an Emerald City.  

One Florida obituary, sadly, led to another and I found one for another Munchkin Karl Slover, who played a trumpeter in The Wizard of Oz.  He was born in what is now the Czech Republic.  At eight years old, he was about two feet tall eventually growing to four feet five inches.  His six and a half foot father buried Karl in the backyard up to his neck, subjected him to limb stretching exercises to promote growth and eventually sold him to a group called the Singing Midgets.   After Oz, Slover spent later years training dogs to play the piano and toured a Children’s birthday party circuit with his musical dogs, according to an online Tampa Bay Time obituary.  Slover, who lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, died November 15, 2011.

Raabe, Slover and Penney Farms are just three back roads stories that connect to larger worlds and different times.  Most of my facts are from Wikipedia and the Tampa Bay Times online newspaper.  Quick looks—and even small stories—are a little like the first viewing of The Wizard of Oz, the film that focused a generation’s dreams.  These glimpses can pave the way (like the Yellow Brick Road?) to closer looks and deeper perceptions of unusual lives.

A Most Magical Place

The most magical place in Florida is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home. It’s an old Cracker farmhouse, quiet and hot, surrounded by orange groves and the certain sense time has stopped.

The only way to get there is to suspend time and space. And to come from the north is to cross the Styx, a slow muddy river between Ocala horse country and the college town of Gainesville in North Florida. The Styx—the river of hate-- is one of five rivers that divide the land of the living from the land of the dead in Greek mythology. The other rivers of forgetfulness, fire, lamentation and woe did not hold a big enough place in classic Greek mythology to impress the early settlers who played the name game in north Florida.  The fact that land is hot and snaky as hell south of the river probably played into the river’s title.   

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her first husband Charles Rawlings arrived from the cool north.  Born in 1896, Majorie wrote stories from the age of five or six.  Her early childhood was privileged. Her father was a patent office lawyer in Washington DC but his heart and his daughter were often at his farm outside in Maryland. Marjorie was a Daddy’s Girl. Her relationship with her Mother was difficult.  She grew up while women were getting the vote and graduated from the University of Wisconsin and married her college sweetheart when he returned from World War I.  The marriage was troubled, and when Marjorie received a small inheritance from the sale of her father’s farm, she consulted her husband’s brothers who lived in north Florida about a place to live. They helped her choose a working orange grove with a house dating back to the 1890s situated between Orange and Lochloosa Lakes.  It was also moonshine country.   By this time—1928—it was Prohibition and she was already a heavy drinker.  Although she and her husband held good reporter jobs in Louisville and Rochester, Majorie wasn’t able to write creatively in an urban setting.

 By the 1930s, the marriage and Marjorie’s husband headed south.  They divorced amicably in 1933 when Majorie’s first book, South Moon Under, a Pulitzer finalist, was published. Accounts differ, but Majorie almost certainly suffered psychological abuse and possibly personal abuse.  

South Moon Under details the life of a moonshining family and also lays out the effects of corrupt laws on people and land.  Timber companies and turpentine camps were taking over the old agrarian lifestyle. Marjorie felt at home in the old ways.  By the time Charles left, she could hunt, fish and drink shine with the boys and was attuned to the Black matriarchy that ran life at the Creek.  These were her safety nets when the bottom dropped out of the stock market in 1929.

The Yearling was published in 1939 and became a Pulitzer Prize winner the same year.  Better fortune followed but Marjorie was still enthralled by the silence and peace of Cross Creek. She survived a lawsuit by a good friend at the Creek, married a second time, weathered World War II writing to young soldiers every day and attempted with partial success to write more books. She began to change own attitudes toward race largely due a personal and professional friendship with Zora Neal Hurston, a brilliant Black novelist who also wrote about a small Florida community.

 She died at the age of 57 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

But she leaves us with our own journey.

We imagine ourselves at tourists in Miami in the early 1940s, staring at a paper Florida map placemats in a diner.  Drawings of mermaids and pirates on Florida’s west coast strike us as elementary school myths.  Instead of I-95, 441, A1A, US1 and county roads are flowing like the Karmic Rivers of birth, old age and sickness and death away from the Fountain of Youth near Tampa. 

We choose 441 as our ticket out. This is the Route 66 of Florida.  Decades later Tom Petty wrote about it in his song “American Girl”.

       “She was an American Girl raised on promises…She stood alone on the balcony. Yeah she could hear the cars roll by out on 441 like waves crashing on a beach.”

Exhaust shimmer and green lights combine to carry us past Palm Beach mansions.  The Magic Kingdom we are seeking isn’t in Orlando and it doesn’t exist in our 1940s mental continuum.  We think about gator farms as we skirt Big Daddy Don Garlits Drag Racing Museum and a small strip club named Café Risqué, both imaginary at this point.  Now we enter County Road 325, the River Styx is right around the bend near One-Beer Road, and we are home.

The heat is prehistoric and clocks have stopped.  Our busy imagination is still.  We slip three bucks a carload into the honor system box, and as we enter, we pass a Rawling’s quote talking about the enchantment of Cross Creek.

In the book Cross Creek published in 1942, she hinted at the force of nature which is the flip side of rural peace.

       “All life is a balance, when it is not a battle, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, between love and hate, between life and death. Perhaps it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins, for even creation and destruction are relative.” Rawlings wrote.

Because we have taken house tour so many times, we just sit on a wooden bench in partial shade and listen to insects crank up a dissonant concert,  Flowers, chickens and the wind in the trees are different from the flowers, chickens and wind we noted during our last visit.  The markers morph into one standard light sound and noise show as we wait.  After a while, we walk slowly in the heat around the rusted, parked 1940 Oldsmobile and read a sundial showing high noon:  Grow Old Along with Me.  The Best is Yet to Be.”  These words surround a gnomon shaped like a man carrying a scythe.  Is the part of the sundial that throws the shadow figure the Grim Reaper or just Father Time?

The Pulitzer Prize in the house probably hasn’t moved since our last visit, but we can tell time passes because in the right season, the blossoms on old orange trees smell like perfume.

It is time to return to our own time.  The route is efficient and boring.  Because we are heading south we avoid the Styx.  We have not aged but the magic of Cross Creek has not been able to return our youth. The magic has, however, stilled the ticking internal clock that measures what we do, when we do it and how our accomplishments measure up to each other and eternity.

Wiser, if not older, our mental vacation has given us a way home.

Habits I had hoped to outgrow by age 61.

1.       Daydreams still plague me. My favorite daydream is G-rated:  I am minding my own business in an unlikely setting and somebody ASKS ME FOR MY OPINION.  The rest of the minute/day/ hour/ millennium is spent organizing my thoughts, fine-tuning my response and fielding possible different perspectives and questions.  Subjects range from exciting (cat training, for example or an anecdotal ramble concerning the gears on the English Racer bicycle of my youth) to just plain boring (politics, religion, etc.). I have noted that throughout my wide and superficial acquaintance—and that includes 140 Facebook friends—not one person mentions gear ratios of defunct bicycle companies or cats in the same breath as training. Politics are mentioned dogmatically.  I am basically afraid to air my views.  All the folks who have known me since childhood may come together in a mob of all races, creeds and colors and a few dubious genders to chase this Frankenstein out of town.  So it looks like I’ll be having a great dialog with myself on topics I know intimately for the next 60 years.  In about 15-20 years, I plan start talking to myself loudly and really enjoying my opinions.  By then I’ll be truly invisible to all but my caretakers.

2.      I STILL WANT A HORSE!  Yes, I know that is a stage endured by 12-year-old girls and their families. I know it is a psycho sexual stage that precedes puberty.  I know I wasted some fun years from 10 to 12 rereading the 1936 edition Breeds of Livestock in America which my Midwestern parents had brought to South Florida from Olathe, KS in an obscure attempt to hold onto their own childhoods.  But if you buy me a horse, I’ll do all the work.  You’ll just have to drive me to the stables.  And pay for lessons, vet bills and hay.   Pleeese.  And I want a swimming pool.

3.      Middle-aged Men On Ladders.  (See psycho sexual disclaimer attached to I STILL WANT A HORSE.) I want to thank my Nameless Friend for making me notice how attractive men look when climbing ladders to finish little home projects.  Fellas just look thinner, more muscular with longer legs when perched on, say, the third rung of a Home Depot Tall.   She used to call me so I could time my visits when her husband was painting and otherwise climbing the ladder of…success.  Unfortunately he has taken an out-of-town job probably unrelated to my semi-frequent visits, but I like to think their weekly rendezvous may include the occasional ladder.   My own DH seems to see ladders in a purely practical light:  When I stare at him as he’s trimming trees, he indicates through a subtle use of body language that I should continue my own projects.  Sometimes he just does not get me.   Another disclaimer:  If your partner is not a professional ladder climber, please restrict him to light housekeeping—spider web removal, chandelier dusting, etc.  The higher they go, the more likely those accidents can happen.  You don’t need him out of commission just when weekends are starting to be fun.

4.      Re-examining Basics:  Each night I re-think flossing.  Is it a government conspiracy to create a market for substandard parachute string?  Why and how does it really help? Well, the fact is that there is no downside to regular teeth flossing and time spent examining alternatives is wasted time.  I also wonder if baby shampoo really is milder.  Do multivitamins work? There are many basics—tangible and otherwise—that really don’t need examination.  Just get on with it.

.      Ending Blogs Abruptly:  Now that I have started down the track of re-evaluating flassing, daydreaming about George Clooney climbing a ladder to paint my ceiling after a day spent horsebackback riding and swimming, it's time to end all this speculation and just get on with it.