The Minnesota Legislature is pondering the purchase of a genuine pair of ruby-red slippers for the Minnesota History Museum.
Flash back to 1939, to the classic movie “The Wizard of Oz.” With precious dog Toto standing by her side, Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) clicked together the heels of her ruby-red slippers and said, “There’s no place like home; there’s no place like home.” She knew they weren’t “in Kansas anymore!”
Who can forget those dazzling ruby-red slippers? They are one of the most iconic objects in movie history, right up there with the child’s snow sled “Rosebud” in director Orson Welle’s masterpiece, “Citizen Kane.”
There are four pairs of those immortal ruby-red slippers because in the movie Garland had to wear various pairs in different scenes. One pair is in the National Smithsonian Museum, another pair is owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and a third is owned by a private collector.
A fourth pair was stolen in 2005 from the Judy Garland Children’s Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn. – the city in which Garland was born as Frances Gumm in 1922. The slippers at the Garland museum had been on loan from a private collector. In 2018, the FBI nabbed the alleged thief, Terry Martin, now 76, who lived 12 miles south of Grand Rapids and who was indicted for stealing a “major work of art.”
Everybody I’ve ever known has cherished memories of “The Wizard of Oz.”
When I was 7 or 8, in the 1950s, my siblings and I sat on our living room’s linoleum floor one night and watched a program on our TV that astonished us. It was a strange and scary-but-funny movie about a tornado, a farm house, a witch, a bunch of little people called munchkins, a sweet dog, a lion, a tin man, a scarecrow and a loud blustering wizard.
The story confused us kids, mainly because we had this old Motorola TV set, big as a small cottage that had “rabbit ears” on top of it. The TV reception was so hit-and-miss that some scenes in the movie would fade out and be lost in a visual blizzard, but we listened and looked with riveting intensity, peering into the snowstorm. At one point the blizzard cleared up enough so that we could see flying monkeys. Yikes! We cringed with fear/delight.
We saw a witch screeching, “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!”
It was hard to get to sleep that night because that movie was so tattooed on our brains we could think of nothing else. For days!
Every year, “Wizard” was rerun on TV, and we must have watched it at least a dozen times. One day a buddy said, “Wow, I love the colors in the ‘Wizard of Oz!”
“What colors?” I asked. “It’s in black-and-white.”
“It’s not either,” he insisted. “Some parts are in black-and-white. Some are in color.”
“That’s not so!” I said.
“Denny, your TV is only black-and-white, not color!”
Um, yeah . . . duh!
One night in the 1960s, I saw “The Wizard of Oz” in St. Cloud’s Paramount Theater. Sure enough: Color! Wow! Dazzling color! And those ruby-red slippers, sparkling like crazy.
In the hippie 1960s, younger brother Michael had a mane of long wavy brown hair, a face with a large lump of a nose. He so resembled Bert Lahr’s lion in the “Wizard.” At parties he used to love to raise his head skyward and belt out at the top of his voice, “If I were King of the For-r-r-est!” Got a big laugh every time.
To this day, that movie’s songs often go skipping, dancing, meandering through my mind on the Yellow Brick Road of Memory. I haven’t re-watched “Wizard” in quite some time, but I do have an old cassette version. Friends and neighbors sometimes insist we should have a “Wizard of Oz” party and watch it all together.
Yes! We’ll do it. Long live those ruby-red slippers. Toto, there’s no place like home.
