Author: Jane Albright

The summer’s Expanding Oz exhibit in Overland Park, Kansas, (a Kansas City suburb) is open and wonderful. It’s always fun to loan material from my collection to a public exhibit. This one, where the Johnson County Museum has done such a beautiful job of creating an Oz environment, is particularly satisfying.  These photos, taken just ahead of the opening event, will give you an idea of what you can expect Murals cover walls. You wander between them among cases of Oz items. Bits of ephemera, book covers, and photos have been enlarged and incorporated with W.W. Denslow’s original artwork.  I took my large bookcase, re-styled it to include all Baum’s books, and they’ve presented it life-sized in one place. They created a fun corner with some vintage pieces made for a child’s bedroom. And the Oz Club!  Their presentation of our organization is everything I could hope for. I’ve agreed to support some public events in July, including hosting a fashion show of Dorothy costumes. We first did this at our Club convention in 2017. I’ve changed a couple costumes, added more, and look forward to introducing fourteen versions of Dorothy to the audience.     https://www.jcprd.com/330/Museum  

The Woodsman, on stage now at the Bluebarn Theater in Omaha, is an engrossing, innovative production I completely loved. Although I heard James speak last summer and read his interview about The Woodsman in the Winter 2018 Baum Bugle, I had not seen the play performed live. You can read a glowing review at BroadwayWorld.com.  Much of what made my visit memorable happened after the show when writer/director James Ortiz introduced me to cast members and showed me some of the extraordinary puppets used on stage. Thursday May 30 and June 6 following the 7:30 p.m. shows, James is scheduled for talk-back sessions with the audience. Too fun!  If you could make it, I can’t encourage you enough. Tickets are general admission. Arrive early and have a Green Monkey at the bar… Bluebarn Theatre 1106 S 10th St Omaha, NE 68108 http://bluebarn.org Phone: 402.345.1576   The only reason I won’t be there again is because I have an exhibit opening June 1 here in Kansas City.  Expanding Oz borrows hundreds of pieces from my collection aiming to “trace the growth of the The Wizard of Oz phenomenon, explore its global appeal, and illustrate its influence on popular culture.” An opening event is planned May 31; I’ve included all Kansas and Missouri Oz Club members on the invitation list, but if you can join us, let me know! The more the merrier.    Johnson County Museum 8788 Metcalf Ave. Overland Park, KS. 66212 https://jcprd.com/330/Museum Phone: 913.826.2787 But the Midwest isn’t the only place to end the month.  Oz-Stravaganza!, the wonderful weekend festival produced by the All Things Oz museum , kicks off May 31 in Baum’s hometown of Chittenango, NY.  Saturday’s parade — the only Oz parade in the country — is always a highlight. All Things Oz Museum 219 Genesee St. Chittenango, NY 13037 http://allthingsoz.org http://www.oz-stravaganza.com Phone: 315.687.7772 West Coast?  You’ll have to wait a couple weeks, but the El Segundo Museum of Art opens Experience 41: Oz June 13. I’m especially pleased that selections from the Oz Club’s collection will included in this exhibit. Which reminds me to sign and return paperwork!  I’m loaning a few pieces, too. ESMoA 209 Main Street El Segundo, California 90245 https://esmoa.org/experience/oz/ Phone: 424.277.1020

The Tin Woodman of Oz was published in 1918, so our last 2018 issue of the Baum Bugle celebrates that particular story.  As Oz book readers know, it was in this book that the Tin Woodman was prompted to revisit his past in search of the woman with whom he’d been in love prior to suffering the enchanted that cost him his heart.  A quest with twists and surprises, giants and transformations, discovered “twins” and old friends, the book was L. Frank Baum’s 12th Oz title. For the Bugle, editor Sarah Crotzer provided an appreciation and John Bell a plot analysis. Scott Cummings revisited reviews and advertising in one of his occasional “Oz Under Scrutiny” reports.  But we didn’t stop when the last page turned.  This story has found a life of its own in stage and screen adaptions. Five men who’ve brought Nick Chopper to life were interviewed about their projects in our cover story. Todrick Hall, the performer who’s Straight Outta Oz tour infused contemporary music, dance and themes into Oz, created memorable Tin Men; Dina Schiff Massachi explores them in her article, “Metal, Malleable, Male.”  You also get a look at what the Tin Man has looked like through the years. Tin Man toys and collectibles (100 of them) are pictured inside the back cover. After describing the defining characteristics of some of the more collectible book reprints, the variety of character interpretations led to this issue’s “Baum Bugle Extra”, an online gallery of 100 different appearances of the Tin Woodman. Follow this link to see it here.  https://www.ozclub.org/galleries/100-years-100-tin-men/ Of course there are also the popular Bugle reports. The Bulletin shares news. In addition to Ozma’s Honor Roll, we profile Bill Thompson, winner of the 2018 L Frank Baum Memorial Award. Oz in the Arts reviews some recent performances, and the Bugle Review serves up some recently published titles.  Finally, to her her many friends most importantly, the loss of the Oz Club’s beloved past president and Bugle editor, Barbara Koelle, is recognized with fond tributes from her daughter and dear friend Patty Tobias.

The Baum Bugle is near and dear to my heart—but it has limitations. Color is a big one; there are so many things I wish we could share in color!  It would quadruple the budget to go to a full-color interior, and that’s just not an option for our club.  And long stuff—stories or checklists that would consume a quarter of the entire publication—just isn’t fair to serve up when our membership is so diverse that a majority would have no interest in that particular topic. Club webminister Blair Frodelius added them to the Baum Bugle Extras section of OzClub.org. (If I understood WordPress better, they’d be .html pages, but I’m fumbling along as best I can. Please, bear with me—or better still, volunteer to help us bring the site to the next level!) With our Winter 2018 issue, editor Sarah Crotzer was much more ambitious. She proposed the terrific idea that we deliver a gallery of Tin Man images created by various illustrators through the years. The Bugle was celebrating The Tin Woodman of Oz turning 100, so 100 different Tin Men became the goal. I have a conveniently large collection with lots of unusual and international editions that I was happy to photograph. Those made up roughly half of the final selections, bolstered by contributions from other members, including a few books from Sarah’s own collection. She was driven to confirm an illustrator credit and date for any image we used, so that became its own challenge for reprinted books and selections from Russia, Japan, Korea, and China.   100 Tin Men later, the gallery is live! You can find it at https://tinyurl.com/100tinmen. As a Baum Bugle Extra I’m delighted that we—the Oz Club, not just Sarah and I—have made this fascinating Tin Man revue available. Happy 100th, Nick Chopper!

I grew up reading Oz books that we had at home. Once I realized there were more, I began the hunt to complete my set. I could borrow other titles for reading, but I wanted my own.  How could I know I was innocently stepping right into an abyss? From Oz, to Baum, to Denslow and Neill and Thompson–I was still in high school when my desire to read had somehow morphed into the need to acquire.  After college I met Tod Machin, who had little interest in Oz books at that point, but had the most jaw-dropping, eye-popping collection of vintage dolls and toys and valentines and and and and…   There was a whole world of Oz things to look for that I had been overlooking! As you can see, it pretty much went to seed from there (there are five cases of books in that back right corner that remain dear to me): With nearly 50 years of accumulating Oz under my belt, I listened to our Baum Bugle editor Sarah Crotzer, tell me what she had planned for the Winter 2018 issue honoring the 100th publication anniversary of The Tin Woodman of Oz.  I offered to add a collection of Tin Men. Surely will a little digging I could round up one hundred of them. Clearing a double bookcase  that was only about half-Oz anyway, I began to pull Tin Woodmen from every nook and corner of my Oz collection. Books, figurines, dolls, a chair, a snowboard, a marionette. Muppets, puppets, and wind-up walkers, a Wogglebug Lesson Card and a Tin Grin t-shirt. I wanted the rarer, unusual ones, some common favorites everyone would remember, and important stage/screen appearances. The shelves filled up and I began to count. How did “too many” happen?  Editing followed–anxiously lamenting each that had to go–to ensure I’d hit exactly one hundred.  That left pouring on lots of light for a photo, reviewing, tweaking so every little Veggie Tale Tin Man could be distinguished, then a little Photoshopping to lessen the appearance of the underside of higher shelves. Voilà!  The inside back cover of the Winter Bugle was complete!        

The Winter 2018 Baum Bugle had finally gone to press, four stress-filled months after our most optimistic expectations. Death, birth, illness, images that didn’t arrive and drafts that came well past their due dates—Murphy’s Law had repeatedly triumphed.  We had put the Bugle to “bed” on Monday and this was Thursday night. With all writing, layout, proofreading, and correcting behind me, I was running errands with my husband. I was, in fact, so far from thinking about the Bugle I wasn’t sure who Sarah was when her voice came through my car’s dashboard.  Houston, we have a problem.  The printer had the layout on the press ready to roll the next morning only to discover it was two pages short.  If you aren’t familiar with print production, a sheet of folded paper becomes four pages. There has to be an even multiple of four for a publication to fold correctly. How, you ask, after a dozen proofreaders, could this have gone unnoticed? Well, the inclusion of the kids’ newsletter in the center spread means we have three individual sections of numbered pages; 1-26 before the Gazette, 4 pages of the Gazette, and 27-56 after the Gazette. Shifting pages in the layout back and forth around that center spread had artificially expanded the second half to end on page 56 even though there were only 54 pages. Two pages simply didn’t exist. Sarah and I had both looked at it so many times our brains skipped straight over the omission.   Never mind how it happened. That wasn’t the problem I faced in the Home Depot parking lot, thinking four castors were my priority. Fixing it—that was the problem. Fixing it and fixing it now. Sarah could either pull two pages or add two pages. She’d found a couple of drastic options like converting separate enclosures into new pages, or simply pushing content back to Spring, but she wanted my thoughts before pulling any triggers. And so it is that your Baum Bugle now includes an entirely unplanned, two-page spread featuring five distinctive, and thus collectible, copies of The Tin Woodman of Oz.  Sarah, bibliographic reference books at hand, flew through creating copy and editing the table of contents while I pulled the five volumes from my collection and propped them into a photo and created the layout. I was pouring text into columns when it was only half written. Midnight came, midnight passed. The next morning, the press ran: 56 pages strong. Ultimately, we had to remove the Gazette and include it as a separate fold-out in your Winter mailing. There was no way to preserve the strict flow of articles on either side of the Gazette and still get the new file to the printer so quickly. But necessity is the mother of invention, and we’re proud that no content was lost. What could be more Ozzy than friends working as a team to beat the odds? 

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of MGM’s Wizard of Oz, merchandise tied to the film’s original release is now on display at the Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas, complements of the Oz Club. Twice a year I switch the Oz Club’s display drawing primarily from material in my own collection. Although some 1939 merchandise is on display at the museum all the time — and the screen-used props are the real museum treasures — the 80th anniversary seemed a great opportunity to share more of the merchandise fans could find back when the film was new If you’ve been to the museum, you’ve likely seen the Sealtest cottage cheese glasses, Swift’s peanut butter spread cans, Kerk Guild’s figural soaps, and other vintage pieces in the museum’s permanent displays. Now you can add to that list the Ideal Dorothy and Scarecrow dolls, Bissel adult-sized sweeper, classroom valentines, record albums, rubber Tin Woodman, Whitman board and Castell card games, “movie edition” books from the US and England, Paint Book, coloring, book, and linen picture book. Both this display and the museum have a rayon scarves; I chose one with a different pattern and color combination. Glimpses of other pieces can be spotted in signage. Selecting items for this display was challenged by my need to keep in reserve enough material for a different display I’ll be supporting this summer in Kansas City. Vintage pieces like these are what turned my head back in the 1980s. Until then I was strictly an Oz book collector. But once I saw that sweet composition doll, I had to have her! Be watching the Museum’s website for updates. They have some exciting acquisitions and loans that should make it to your Oz new feeds anytime now. One bit of news I can share is that another phase of the facade has been completed. Dorothy and friends can now be spotted peering out of the second floor windows. A local artist was commissioned to create the original character designs. They were then printed on UV filtering material to help cut down the damaging rays in the second-story administrative areas.

  Planning Oz travels for 2019?  For many fans, the closest event can become an annual favorite. I am fortunate to be within an easy drive of Oztoberfest, the annual event hosted by The Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas. For the museum’s blog I, on behalf of the Club, provide them with a calendar of upcoming monthly events. This year’s Oct. 6 event was especially memorable because it opened with the unveiling of the museum’s marvelous new facade.   This past year’s Oztoberfest was a wonderful Saturday spent meeting Oz fans at the Oz Museum. I was stationed in the Museum’s little theater where a pair of local students put on a hand puppet show. Before performances I talked to the audience about Oz puppetry, and did a bit of show and tell with puppets that were mass-produced for kids. Fun time! The art exhibit in the Swogger Gallery featured Totos with surface designs by local artists. They were imaginative and fun! Additional pieces included a wonderful fiber monkey with Toto, as well as lots of framed paintings and photos. Not every piece had an Oz theme, but the majority certainly did.               The Oz Museum is always a fun place for fans to visit. It’s especially satisfying to see it crowded. There was a steady stream of families Saturday. I am delighted to report that the Oz Club gained a dozen new members! Many thanks to Lynn Beltz for promoting membership next to the IWOC display case in the museum.   Outside the streets of Wamego are now dotted with large, decorated  Toto sculptures. My favorite was in front of the library. His body is layered with page from the book he’s reading, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!   The days prior to the festival, many of us who attend as invited guests speak about Oz in the local schools. This year was particularly fun for me because I got to put together a presentation about international Oz.  Although most of my effort went into the digital presentation, the samples of international products I brought to pass around the class were the biggest hit with the students.