Here is that article from the Times about the Coroner
in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Some people may not have been
able to open the link.
Kirby McDaniel
February 18, 2007
THIS LAND
He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch Was Dead
By DAN BARRY
PENNEY FARMS, Fla.
Like any coroner, he has seen some things. But one case stays with
him nearly 70 years after the fact, like some old song he can’t get
out of his head.
He couldn’t shake this case even if he wanted to, what with all the
videotapes, the DVDs, the television broadcasts replaying the
gruesome aftermath over and over, in vivid Technicolor. Those striped
socks, curling back like a pair of deflating noisemakers. ...
The coroner’s name is Meinhardt Raabe, and he lives in a retirement
community tucked between here and there. He can’t see or hear too
well, and his short legs need the assistance of a three-wheeled
walker with hand brakes. But none of this means that at 91 he has
forgotten much, because he hasn’t — especially about that case.
Sitting on his small bed, his coroner’s outfit stored in a closet,
Mr. Raabe recalls a rich and varied life but makes clear that he
accepts, even embraces, how his obituary will read: Munchkin City
coroner, handled case of woman killed by house that fell from the sky.
It’s hard to imagine now, but the freak accident was just one of many
wacky events in a wacky, politically charged time, a time when
monkeys could fly and trees could talk and life could change on a
witch’s whim.
With enchantment — or was it poppies? — infusing the air, a coroner’s
role was not so much to determine a cause of death as it was to
determine whether death had indeed occurred. The victim’s identity
only complicated matters: as luck would have it, she was a witch, a
bad one, from the east.
That is why curious residents in curious garb, led by a mayor whose
shoes sprouted flowers, surrounded Mr. Raabe as he unfurled his
scroll. With cameras rolling, he announced his findings:
“As coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she’s not
only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”
If his words seem mannered, one should remember they were delivered
in the singsong language indigenous to the region. And if his ruling
caused some problems for the Kansas-based driver of the house and
some grief for the victim’s green-skinned sister, it was good news
for Munchkinland, Oz — and Mr. Raabe, whose name rhymes with “hobby.”
“I’m still getting mail,” he says, pointing to stacked milk crates
packed with letters yet to be answered. He just cannot get to them all.
As Mr. Raabe recalls in his autobiography, “Memories of a
Munchkin” (Back Stage Books, 2005), he did not follow a coroner’s
typical career path. The son of Wisconsin dairy farmers, he endured
years of schoolyard teasing about what he calls his “abnormal lack of
height” before wandering one day into the Midget Village attraction
at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
Walking its streets, meeting its inhabitants eye to eye, he realized
that smallness was no impediment to happiness. “It was a new world,”
he says.
For the next three years, Mr. Raabe worked summers with other little
people at expositions around the country, often as a pitchman. He
eventually graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a
bachelor’s degree in accounting, only to learn that no firm would
hire him.
“You don’t belong here,” he remembers being told. “You belong in a
carnival.”
Mr. Raabe eventually got a job as Little Oscar for the Oscar Mayer
meat company. Then, in 1938, came word through the grapevine of a
demand for little people in Hollywood. Sensing opportunity, he
boarded a train due west.
In a place where people came and went so quickly, the casting
director first chose the Mayor, the three Lullaby League dancers and
the three members of the Lollipop Guild. Then he lined up Mr. Raabe
and several other little men and asked them to say the fateful line:
“As coroner, I must aver. ...”
“I read that line and I let go,” he recalls. “And he said, ‘O.K.,
you’re the coroner.’ ”
Mr. Raabe’s pronouncement lasted only 13 seconds, and his lines were
dubbed over. But he had made his mark.
After filming ended, he returned to Oscar Mayer and to real life. He
learned to fly airplanes. He joined the Civil Air Patrol during World
War II. He earned a master’s degree in business administration. He
married a cigarette girl who was about his height; her name was
Marie, and her beauty stole his breath. Fifty years they had, until
her death in a car accident a decade ago.
Now Mr. Raabe lives alone at the Penney Retirement Community, behind
a door with a sign that says “No Place Like Home.” Above his bed
hangs a portrait of that girl from Kansas and her unusual pals;
they’ve all passed on. So has the Wizard, who liked his drink, and
the Good Witch, who was a bit of a prima donna, and the Wicked Witch
of the West, who was the kindest of them all.
Every once in a while, though, his presence is requested at some Oz-
related function; he is, after all, the oldest living resident of
that faraway world. He dons his outfit, poses for photographs and
catches up with some of the half-dozen or so Munchkin City residents
still around: the last of the Lollipop Guild trio, one of the
Sleepyheads, a soldier.
Despite that unfortunate house-on-woman matter, Mr. Raabe says his
days in Oz were among the happiest of his life. And for anyone who
asks, he will say that as coroner, he must aver, which means to
assert with confidence.
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