1987
Brenda Baum Turner
(1903 -1996)
Brenda Baum was the wife of Harry Neal Baum—as she put it, “only an Ozzie by marriage.” But no other Club member has better epitomized Ozma’s stated tenet, “Our Land of Oz is a Land of Love.” Anyone who participated in the first decade of Club conventions was invariably enveloped in the warmth, wit, and down-to-earth magnanimity of Brenda. She was “the hostess with the mostest” at Ozcot, the Wizard of Oz Lodge that she and Harry ran at Bass Lake in Knox, Indiana.
The first Oz Club convention was held at Ozcot in 1961. Ozmopolitans then met there annually until 1967. That year Harry passed away less than two weeks prior to the convention, but Brenda insisted that her Oz family gather ’round her on schedule. The following year, she was hired as hostess for a hotel at Castle Park, Michigan, and the Ozmopolitans followed her there, making it their annual home until the Castle ceased operations some years later.
Brenda joined the group as a fellow conventioneer several times after that first season, but she eventually remarried and settled in Laguna Beach, California. From then on she was a regular participant in the Winkie and South Winkie Conventions.