Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 63, no. 2 (Autumn 2019), pgs. 33–39
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Shook, Coyote. “30 Beautiful Heads: Return to Oz Through a Disability Lens.” Baum Bugle 64, no. 2 (2020): 31–35.
MLA 9th ed.:
Shook, Coyote. “30 Beautiful Heads: Return to Oz Through a Disability Lens.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 64, no. 2, 2020, pp. 31–35.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs and a cartoon that have not been reproduced here.)
Just before slipping away from this world, L. Frank Baum—according to family legend—spoke a mysterious phrase to his beloved wife, Maud: “Now we can cross the shifting sands.” Since the time this account was first published in Frank Joslyn Baum’s 1961 biography of his father, To Please a Child, Oz fans have pondered the meaning of this enigmatic statement. Was the Royal Historian of Oz contemplating his passage across the desert into Oz or out of it? Would he hold tight to the keys to the Emerald City or pass them on to new explorers and chroniclers?
The man who knew the heart of a child
Even after a lengthy illness, the news of Baum’s death on May 6, 1919, came as a hard blow to his admirers and faithful readers. “Though friends had been expecting it for some time, the death of L. Frank Baum, the west’s premier writer of juvenile fiction, came as a severe shock to those who knew him and called him friend,” wrote drama critic Guy Price.[1] The press had been reporting on Baum’s poor health for the past year, explaining that the author’s serious illness was “a result of overwork on his latest novels,”[2] notably his 1918 Oz book, The Tin Woodman of Oz. In fact, he had undergone an operation on his gall bladder and had his appendix removed in early 1918, worsening his heart condition.
One young reader, hearing the rumors in late 1918 of Baum’s fragile health, wrote to advice columnist Kathleen Kaye asking about whether the author was still alive. “In these uncertain days one almost hesitates to say who’s alive and who isn’t,” she replied, just weeks after Armistice Day in 1918. “We do hope L. Frank Baum has not been any sort of victim. The kiddies couldn’t get along without HIM!”[3]
When the fateful day arrived, the wire service announcing Baum’s death was succinct:
Los Angeles, May 6 ¾ L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz and many other plays and books, died in his home here tonight, after having been ill for some time with heart trouble. He was born in Chittenango, N. Y., May 15, 1856. He is survived by his wife and four sons, one of whom is now in the American army in France.
The funeral for L. Frank Baum was held at 10:30 am on Friday, May 9, at the “Little Church of the Flowers” in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. Dedicated the previous year, the small chapel was inspired by Thomas Gray’s immortal poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” His body was cremated and the ashes buried in a beautiful plot under a shade tree along Acacia Lane.[4]
The Rev. Edwin P. Ryland of the Mt. Hollywood Congregational church officiated. Ryland had recently joined the church after being expelled from the First Methodist Church of Hollywood for his pacifist beliefs. A personal friend of the deceased, the reverend spoke in his sermon that Frank Baum “was the man who knew the heart of a child, and was a friend of men.”[5] A quartet from the Los Angeles Athletic Club “Uplifters” social club, of which Baum was a founding member, sang several selections including “Eternity” with a solo by Harold Proctor. Many of the club members and literary friends of Baum attended.[6]
Bubbled with humor and human kindness
In the days that followed, editors and journalists across the country eulogized on the passing of the Royal Historian of Oz. The outpouring of touching tributes reminisced about the joys of reading the Oz stories or watching them come to life on stage.
Although there were many testimonials, one California reporter wrote that he had “not seen any adequate notice of the life and achievements of Frank Baum. Like so many men who achieve importantly for the stage and literature, he was a journalist, and a Western journalist at that.”[7] Noting that “the reading public and the stage has lost one of its most notable contributors and best friends,” Los Angeles drama critic Guy Price offered this testimony to Baum’s legacy:
Beloved by thousands of children, who had him to thank for many delightful hours spent in reading his beautiful narratives on animals, narratives that bubbled with humor and human kindness, the author was just as well known for his gifts to the stage … Many persons of the theater knew Frank Baum intimately. His lovable personality endeared many to him, to know him meant the welding of a warm friendship. He was, indeed, a man whose mere acquaintance was prized.[8]
Peculiarly fortunate and blessed
News of Baum’s death reached his former residence of Aberdeen, South Dakota, where the family of Thomas C. Gage, Maud’s brother, lived. The Aberdeen Daily American editorial page offered this remembrance of their town’s most famous citizen:
The announcement of the death of L. Frank Baum, the writer of children’s stories, will be received with grief by Aberdeenians, where he once lived. An author who succeeds in obtaining a following among the children of the country is peculiarly fortunate and blessed. Mr. Baum’s Wizard of Oz, and his later creations, succeeded in touching the right spot in the hearts of children all over America, and he acquired a large and enthusiastic following of little folk who watched eagerly for his stories. His passing will be mourned by them, as well as by his personal friends and acquaintances in Aberdeen.[9]
Family member Helen L. Gage in Duluth, Minnesota, also received a wire from her sister, Maud. Perhaps using information coming from the Baum family, the Duluth News Tribune assembled this tribute:
Children all over the world loved L. Frank Baum and his delightful fairy tales about Dorothy of Oz, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the other characters of these delightful books. He received hundreds of letters from his young lovers.
Early in this century he received a medal from the Beyreuth Society [sic], calling him the second Hans Christian Anderson [sic]. In the last 50 years but two medals have been bestowed by this society. Mr. Baum was a prolific writer, having written 20 Oz books in addition to numerous other fairy tales.
The statement that Baum had written twenty Oz books may have surprised Oz fans reading the paper! Perhaps the reporter was counting The Woggle-Bug Book, the six “Little Wizard Stories,” and the forthcoming The Magic of Oz along with the previous twelve books of the Oz series? The note about the “Beyreuth Society” honor is a reference to Baum’s having received the “medal of distinction” in 1905 from the International Fairy and Folk Lore Society, headquarters in Bayreuth, Germany, for The Marvelous Land of Oz. The medal had been awarded only once before in fifty years, to the Rev. Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) for his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.[10]
Other papers also included some erroneous information when attempting to summarize Baum’s life and career. The venerable New York Times reported that among Baum’s literary output was a book titled The Kingdom of Oz.[11] How many Oz enthusiasts enlisted their local bookseller to track down that elusive title?
Mr. Baum’s works attracted all
Several tributes enshrined Baum in the pantheon of children’s literature authors. New York’s daily The Sun offered this thoughtful summation of his accomplishments on page and stage:
Nothing can take from us the Wizard of Oz and his inimitable retinue of odd, ingenious, grotesque followers, but his creator, L. Frank Baum, is dead, and he leaves no successor in the field his genius made his own. To him children of all ages owe a debt of the kind which can never be repaid: hours of golden pleasure, enduring memories of wholesome, innocent fun, unalloyed by any labored effort to point a moral or enforce a lesson. The strange creatures of his active fancy are amazingly appealing, as they are always amusing.
Mr. Baum had a remarkable gift for the grotesque, a rare sense of humor, a splendid sense of balance. Through all his works there is woven a fine simplicity, an interpretation of childhood and its unlimited imaginings, which make a mockery of time and space and natural laws but always retain their firm foundation in the commonplace and easily comprehended experiences of human life. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow with whom Montgomery and Stone will be forever affectionately identified were essentially human beings, and all their adventures were human adventures. The Cowardly Lion was an exceedingly human lion; more human, indeed, than lionlike.
It was Mr. Baum’s good fortune, and the public’s, that he could appeal to his followers through many channels. His books, formally dedicated to children, were as eagerly read by adults as by those for whom they were originally intended. To be able to rouse and hold the interest of youngsters and their elders is an unusual gift; commonly the child’s book that enlists the sympathy of a grown-up bores children. Mr. Baum’s works attracted all. Although one of his projects was a theatre for children, the Wizard of Oz was not a children’s play, nor did it owe its prosperity to children’s patronage, much as they enjoyed it. Mr. Baum was able to put many of his fantastic creations in motion pictures, and his literary productions included several plays besides that with which his name is popularly identified, and a technical work on the art of decorating. This recalls the incident told of Lewis Carroll¾C. L. Dodgson who, being informed of Queen Victoria’s interest in one of his works¾perhaps Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland¾and her desire to receive his next publication, dutifully sent to her a work on mathematics of great importance but scarcely to be classed as amusing.
Mr. Baum was one of the fortunate men who know the heart of a child and belonged to the exclusive company of those who have been able to put childhood on paper.[12]
The Christian Science Monitor compared Baum’s fairy stories to those of another famous British author, J. M. Barrie:
There will, perhaps, be writers of fairy stories throughout the ages, and these writers, like Mr. Baum, will be those who pretend no actual belief in the tales they tell … But no one, perhaps, can ever tell more entertainingly than has Mr. Baum the story of his famous Wizard, nor yet the story of Queen Zixi of Ix, or those others with which so many children, small and large, are familiar … And so, by the fireside or in the theater, if the question is asked concerning one’s belief in fairies, one can answer Mr. Baum’s Dorothy, as one has generously answered Mr. Barrie’s Peter Pan, that one really has no doubts whatever.[13]
Marguerite Mooers Marshall wrote fourteen novels and short stories between 1911 and 1952. In her tribute to Baum in the pages of the New York Evening World, she described him as the “American Lewis Carroll” and again evoked Barrie:
The Maker of Fairies is dead. His other name is L. Frank Baum, who set a country laughing seventeen years ago with The Wizard of Oz and followed it up with a dozen charming fairy-books of the mythical kingdom to which, by means of a Kansas cyclone, he had transported little Dorothy Gale and her pet calf, Imogen. [Marshall is referring to the 1902 musical extravaganza.] In the land of Oz she met the Glass Cat, the Crooked Magician, the Giant Porcupine, the Tin Woodman, the Yellow Hen, the Wogglebug and many other enchanting beings.
“Do you believe in fairies?” Peter Pan used to ask. The Maker of Fairies is dead. But he would be the first to tell his young and old child-friends that fairies never die.[14]
A monument erected by the loving hands of children
In the wake of Baum’s journey across the shifting sands, the editorial desk of the San Jose Evening News waxed philosophical:
Frank Baum died the other day. He’s the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz. And that brings up the question: Do we write better stories for children now than formerly?
We invent most excellent airplanes, we talk about extracting power from the air in the same simple way in which a sleight-of-hand performer takes a rabbit out of his hat. But meanwhile, are we getting any closer than adults did a hundred years ago to the secrets of the art of pleasing My Lord Boy and My Lady Girl?
One way of looking at life is to think of the children as the real owners of the earth, with the strutting adults merely so many servants, waiting on the children. And if this theory be sound, and there is much to indicate that it is, then Frank Baum was one of the important men in the world. For did he not please thousands of our little autocrats?[15]
The New York Times dutifully reported on the loss endured by the younger set:
L. Frank Baum is dead, and the children, if they knew it, would mourn. That endless procession of “Oz” books coming out just before Christmas, is to cease. The Wizard of Oz, Queen Zixi of Ix, Dorothy and the Wizard, John Dough and the Cherub, there will never be any more of them, and the children have suffered a loss they do not know. Years from now, though the children cannot clamor for the newest Oz book, the crowding generations will plead for the old ones.[16]
In Memphis, Tennessee, the News Scimitar reminded its readers that grown-ups, too, mourned the loss of their favorite author:
The originator of the “Oz” stories, those magical creations that appeal more strongly to the childish imagination than anything of the kind ever written, has passed to his reward, and his spirit has gone to join the spirits of the Pumpkinhead Man, the Tin Woodman and the Saw-Horse in the mysterious realm beyond where there is no selfishness, no sordid ambition and no evil, but where everyone, in order to enter, must become as a little child.
Baum’s stories were always pure, wholesome and clean. Not only do they appeal to the childish mind, but they impress a moral without seemingly endeavoring to do so, and are equally interesting to many of the grown-up. The “Oz” stories … are entrancing and absorbing. They are a part of the child literature, which cannot be missed without leaving out of his life something that every childish mind craves.
Mr. Baum is dead, but he left behind a monument erected by the loving hands of children in the hearts of childhood. Could any man have builded [sic] better? We think not.[17]
Land of Oz closed for all time
Reporting on the passing of the creator of the “funny old creatures of dreamland,” the Sun observed that the great author was the guardian of his fairyland:
Lyman Frank Baum made the fairies that brought delight through his books and pictures and plays to numberless youngsters. Like the magical, merry little fellows of his imagination it would seem that if the gnomes and brown goblins and sea fairies in the books are to come out at night any more surely the gray haired wizard himself must be there to open the gates.[18]
Now that Baum had crossed the shifting sands, would the gates of the Emerald City remain open? This memorial from the Harrisburg (PA) Telegraph buried any hope of more tales from the land of Oz:
L. Frank Baum is dead, and millions of children, old and young, the country over will mourn his passing.
No more will there appear on the bookstands about Christmas time a new volume of adventures in “The Wonderful Land of Oz.” The door to the enchanted domain of the Wizard has been closed forever. Nobody but Frank Baum ever knew the way, but countless children followed when he led the way, as did the babes of another century the Pied Piper of old. Only, after the journey they always came back home again with sweet memories of the wonders they had been shown and thrilling pleasantly with the strangeness of the homely adventures through which they had passed.
Yes, homely, for though grotesque and utterly impossible, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and other figures that played prominent parts in Baum’s stories were human. The things they said and did were the things one would expect of people in the same circumstances. All their experiences and adventures were based on the common, everyday experiences of life transferred to the realm of the white magic with which the Wizard of Oz surrounded his kingdom. The Wogglebug, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Cowardly Lion, Margery and the rest of them were all real personages, always amusing and mostly charming.
Baum had a genius all his own. Nobody will be able to take his place. But his work will live long in the memories of those who saw Montgomery and Stone personify the characters of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, or who followed the adventures of his grotesque crew through the cleverly illustrated pages of his books. Countless others will enjoy the volumes he has left, but for those who have followed each new excursion into Oz, with fresh wonder and delight, the end has come. The door to the road to the Wonderful Land of Oz is closed for all time. Frank Baum has passed through, and locked it on the other side and has wandered away to an eternity of days as light and airy and carefree as the hours his followers spent with him in years agone, following Margery down the sunlit paths and through the shady bowers of the delightful country at make-believe, where the impossible happened and miracles were the commonplaces of everyday life.[19]
Of course, the paper was wrong on two counts. The road to Oz was not barred, and the series continued for decades after Baum. A stranger mistake was the recollection of a character named Margery, who—as far as we know from the first Royal Historian—never made it to Oz.
The Royal Historian of Oz will live
A more optimistic view of the longevity of Oz came from the pen of reporter and book critic Guy Bogart, who greatly admired Baum and had, a year earlier, written about his visit to Ozcot.[20] Bogart’s memorial to Baum was published in the Los Angeles Times:
The Royal Historian rests
And Oz droops in sorrow.
The friend of children has gone to join
Gene Field and Jim Riley.
Pioneer in a new world of art,
Discoverer of realms of joy
Safe-charted for boys and girls of earth,
Where no sting poisons;
Dispenser of light,
Great lover of his kind¾
Frank Baum lives immortal as long as childhood lasts.
Dorothy and Toto and witches kindly,
The Humbug Wizard meek, Kings and Queens.
A joyous phantasmagoria of creatures queer
Romp and play and lead the heart to ecstasy.
Oh, Baum, can it be your pen is silent,
That no longer in your flower garden
The fairies shall arise from your splashing fountain
To whisper into willing ears the secrets children love?
The very flowers shall weep for their loved attendant.
For a thousand generations of childhood the Royal Historian of Oz
Will live.
Long memory to this pioneer soul
Who visioned the New Race needs
And led it into laughing fields
Of the New Fairyland of Love-with-out-Fear.[21]
“Gene Field and Jim Riley” mentioned in this verse presumably refer to fellow Midwest authors Eugene Field (1850–1895) and James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916).
The Kansas City Star offered a quaint, but fanciful, fairy tale about “The Wizard of Ozcot”:
Away off in California, in a cottage that was like a fairy cottage, with lovely flowers and plants making it a fairy land all around it, there lived a man and his wife and four children, and they were a very happy family, indeed.
I know you would have liked the man, for he loved children, and loved to do things to make them happy. It seemed he had always understood how we feel about fairies and gnomes and elves, and he loved to tell his children stories about these little folks as they sat out under trees, or listened before the fire on nights when the rain fell in sheets about the lovely Ozcot, for that is what he called his place. He not only liked to tell them for his children to enjoy and laugh over, but he liked to write them in stories so children the world round could enjoy them, too.
And so this man, whose name was Lyman Frank Baum, visited many strange lands, lovely places surrounded by emerald waters with azure skies above, even desert countries where the sun seemed to hang like a heavy curtain of gold over the hot brown sands. And all of these places he peopled with fairy folk, and he wrote fanciful tales of them.
He delighted big folks as well as little ones when he wrote about a wonderful wizard he called the Wizard of Oz, and now you know why he called his fairy cottage Ozcot, don’t you? and the stories of the wizard were liked so well they were put into a play and people liked to go to see it, enjoy the laughter it brought them and the pretty music.
But—only the other day this man who created the wonderful Wizard of Oz and other fairy folk, put aside his pen from writing about them, for death had knocked at the little fairy cottage in California and the kind man lay still. In the world he had his fairy folk live in there was no sin nor trouble¾just a world of happiness¾and it is nice, I think, that we can think of him as entering just such a land.[22]
Putting aside the fact that when Baum lived in Ozcot his sons already were grown men not living there with him, this tale offers a sweet vision of Baum’s closing chapter in this world. If we are to believe this story, then we may have an answer to the question of whether Baum crossed the shifting sands into, or out of, Oz. As the heavy curtain of gold parted, the Royal Historian of Oz passed over the hot brown sands to enter his fairyland.
Baum knew that Oz would live on at least for a little while longer, as he left his devoted readers one additional Oz story. In his manuscript of Glinda of Oz, he tucked one of the most philosophical passages of his Oz series:
If every one could wave a wand and have his wants fulfilled there would be little to wish for. There would be no eager striving to obtain the difficult, for nothing would then be difficult, and the pleasure of earning something longed for, and only to be secured by hard work and careful thought, would be utterly lost. There would be nothing to do, you see, and no interest in life and in our fellow creatures. That is all that makes life worth our while—to do good deeds and to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
Throughout his life, L. Frank Baum struggled to find fulfillment: as a worker, as a writer, and even as a celebrity. Yet it is clear his passing was mourned far and wide. The wonderful creations he left behind brought such joy to his audience, and have remained so beloved even after 100 years, that it is hard to think of his as anything but a life well lived. If there is any truth in the family legend—”Now we can cross the Shifting Sands”—perhaps, in the end, he received his well-earned pleasure.
Notes
[1] Price, Guy “Footlights and Flickers” Los Angeles Herald May 10, 1919.
[2] “Wizard of Oz Author Dangerously Ill” Riverside (CA) Daily Press, June 1, 1918.
[3] Kaye, Kathleen “The Heartitorium: Advice to Women and Men Who are Troubled” Salt Lake (UT) Telegram Dec. 18, 1918, p. 17.
[4] “Arrange for Funeral of Frank J. Baum” Los Angeles Herald May 8, 1919, p. 2.
[5] “Frank Baum is Dead” Holly Leaves May 10, 1919, p. 8-9.
[6] “Press Pays Tribute to L. Frank Baum, the Author” Aberdeen Daily News May 16, 1919, p. 6.
[7] “Author of The Wizard of Oz” Red Bluff (CA) Daily News May 20, 1919, p. 2.
[8] Price, Guy “Footlights and Flickers” Los Angeles Herald May 10, 1919.
[9] “Aberdeen Daily American May 7, 1919, p. 2.
[10] “Literary News and Criticism” New York Tribune Nov. 28, 1905, p. 5.
[11] “L. Frank Baum Dead” New York Times May 8, 1919, p. 17.
[12] “The Creator or the Wizard of Oz” The Sun (New York) May 9, 1919, p. 12.
[13] “The Wizard of Oz” Colorado Springs Gazette May 21, 1919, p. 4 (reprinted).
[14] Marshall, Marguerite Mooers “Frank Baum, Who Found American Fairies Like Those in Alice in Wonderland and Made Himself Immortal to American Children” New York Evening World May 10, 1919, p. 13.
[15] “The Wizard of Oz” San Jose Evening News May 9, 1919, p. 6.
[16] “L. Frank Baum Dead; Author of The Wizard of Oz and Many Fairy Tales Was 63.” New York Times May 11, 1919, section 3, p. 1.
[17] “Children’s Friend” (Memphis, TN) News Scimitar May 12, 1919, p 6.
[18] The Sun (New York) May 8, 1919, p. 13.
[19] “The Wizard is Dead” Harrisburg (PA) Telegraph May 10, 1919, p. 6.
[20] “Oz Under Scrutiny” Baum Bugle Winter 2018, p. 28.
[21] “In Memoriam, L. Frank Baum” Publishers’ Weekly June 4, 1919, p. 1637 (reprinted).
[22] “The Wizard of Ozcot” Kansas City Star June 8, 1919, p. 12.
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