Oz: The Complete Collection E-Book

L. Frank Baum

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.
The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.

Here you will find the complete Oz collection in the chronological order of their original publication.

- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- The Marvelous Land of Oz
- Ozma of Oz
- Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
- The Road to Oz
- The Emerald City of Oz
- The Patchwork Girl of Oz
- Tik-Tok of Oz
- The Scarecrow of Oz
- Rinkitink in Oz
- The Lost Princess of Oz
- The Tin Woodman of Oz
- The Magic of Oz
- Glinda of Oz

Leseprobe

L. Frank Baum

THE WIZARD OF OZ: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

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Table of Contents

L. Frank Baum — An Extensive Biography

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Marvelous Land of Oz

Ozma of Oz

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

The Road to Oz

The Emerald City of Oz

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

Tik-Tok of Oz

The Scarecrow of Oz

Rinkitink in Oz

The Lost Princess of Oz

The Tin Woodman of Oz

The Magic of Oz

Glinda of Oz

L. Frank Baum — An Extensive Biography

by Frank Joslyn Baum & Russell P. MacFall

Chapter 1 — The Wizard of Oz

Chapter 2 — Chittenango and Rose Lawn

Chapter 3 — The Gleam of Footlights

Chapter 4 — Gold Days and Gray

Chapter 5 — The Trough of the Wave

Chapter 6 — Pioneer Days in the Dakotas

Chapter 7 — On the Road to Success

Chapter 8 — Show Windows and Success

Chapter 9 — Annus Mirabilis

Chapter 10 — The Wizard Marches On

Chapter 11 — New Worlds

Chapter 12 — A Place in the Sun

Chapter 13 — The Land of Oz

Chapter 14 — Books and the Men

Chapter 15 — Grease Paint and Kleig Lights

Chapter 16 — The Royal Historian Departs

Chapter 17 — Oz Lives On

Chapter 1 — The Wizard of Oz

Deafening applauseand calls of “author, author” rang through the Grand Opera House in Chicago as the curtain fell on the second act of The Wizard of Oz. The young author, slim and elegant in a dark suit, left his box to go down into the wings and walked out on the stage, smiling as he faced the opening night’s audience. Silencing the applause with a gesture, he said:

“Kind friends, thank you for your enthusiasm. It is heart-warming. You have been generous enough to call for the author, but I do not need to remind you that he is only one of many whose efforts you are enjoying tonight. If you will pardon a homely comparison, our play is like a plum pudding, which combines the flavor of many ingredients. The author contributes only the flour — necessary, of course, but only to hold the other good things together.

“What would The Wizard of Oz be without the spice of Paul Tietjens’ music or the brilliant scenery of Walter Burridge; the skill of that master stage chef Julian Mitchell; the golden touch of Manager Fred Hamlin, and above all, our agile comedians Dave Montgomery and Fred Stone, and the plums and peaches of our talented stage company? All of us are happy that you have enjoyed the show, and we hope that you and your friends will be back for a second helping.”

Baum left the stage, but again and again he was recalled by the applause. The third time he brought Montgomery and Stone with him in front of the curtain. When he returned to his wife’s side in the box, he was enjoying one of the proudest moments life would ever bring him. After forty-six years which had often been difficult, he was at last firmly on the way to success. For it was plain that The Wizard of Oz, inspired by his children’s story published two years before, was a winner.

This auspicious night of the first performance in Chicago was June 16, 1902, and the theater on Clark Street was filled to the last seat with first nighters who had come in for the occasion from their summer homes, and with Chicagoans lured out on the warm summer evening by adroit advance publicity and by two postponements of the opening caused by late delivery of the costumes from New York.

The curtain rose on Dorothy Gale and her pet cow, Imo- gene, in a peaceful Kansas farm setting. Then the stage lights dimmed and a deafening roar almost drowned out the cry of “cyclone.” While the wind machine shrieked in the darkness, a gauze screen was lowered. On it the startled audience saw scudding clouds that gave the illusion of a violent storm. Barns, houses, cattle and people seemed to hurtle across the stage. Then suddenly the storm was over. Dorothy and her cottage reappeared, but this time in the peaceful and sunny country of the Munchkins in the Land of Oz. Blown there with Dorothy and Imogene were a waitress, Tryxie Tryfle, and a Topeka streetcar conductor named Pastoria, whose adventures formed a thread of the diaphanous plot that held together the songs and comedy.

Setting off for the Emerald City in search of the Wizard, whose powers she hoped would be great enough to get her back to Kansas, Dorothy picked up a motley company, including the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. These were the parts, of course, in which Montgomery and Stone literally leaped to fame in a single night. At the end of the first act, the darkened stage was suffused with golden light, disclosing the pretty faces of chorus girls dressed as brilliantly hued poppies. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, being breathing creatures, began to nod as the narcotic perfume of the flowers overpowered them. The Scarecrow and Tin Woodman vainly tried to waken Dorothy. But just as she was dozing off she called “Oh, Locasta, Locasta,” and the good Witch of the North flew to her assistance. Seeing the girl to whom she had promised protection in the “deadly grasp of these treacherous blossoms,” the good Witch exclaimed:

“Heartless and poisonous flowers, dare you defy the power of the Witch of the North? Defy me, who rules the North Wind and holds the Frost King as a willing subject? For this you shall die. For this shall I cloud the sunshine which is your breath, and chill the warmth which gives you life. Hail! Winds of the Frozen North! Come to my aid! Embrace these false blossoms and wither them with your cold caresses! King of the Frost, you do I invoke in this, my hour of vengeance! Hurl your glittering atoms upon these cruel flowers.”

As the poppies knelt, she continued: “Congeal their sap of life and set upon them the icy seal of your freezing kiss, which kills as surely as does their own treacherous breath. Thus shall my enemies perish! Thus shall I restore to life these mortals who now sleep, and rescue the maiden I have sworn to protect.”

Shadows fell across the stage; on the gauze screen was projected the illusion of a snowstorm; the poppies shrank away, drooping, and fell to the ground. As the Poppy Queen fled from the cold and dreary scene, the Storm Queen appeared, drawn on the stage by reindeer hitched to a sleigh. Dorothy and the Lion were duly aroused from their deadly sleep by the cold, clear air, and they and their retinue resumed their colorful march toward the Emerald City.

Baum from his box could not help but deeply enjoy the furor which his poppy scene aroused in the opening night audience. It was the first of the memorable spectacles of the play, and it never failed to win volleys of applause.

Act Two, in the courtyard of the Wizard’s Palace, opened on a dimly lighted stage. The Phantom Patrol of girls in glittering military dress displayed well-turned ankles and calves as they marched from high in the rear of the stage down a winding path until they disappeared in the dusk of the background. Again the sheer brilliance and perfection of the chorus, the lighting and the setting, won a clamorous tribute from the audience. The third act wound up the threads of the plot by rescuing Dorothy and her cohorts, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, while the other principals, surely as varied a crew as was ever seen on any stage, came to a comic opera end in a potpourri of topical songs and banter.

The final curtain was not allowed to fall until one a.m.,so many were the encores and curtain calls. Even then the audience filed out slowly. The magic effect of The Wizard of Oz on its contemporary audiences has seldom been equalled by any musical before or since. One spectator recalled that as he walked home, he saw groups still standing on downtown street comers, whistling tunes, comparing impressions, and generally reliving parts of that first performance.

Next day’s newspapers were generous in their critical comments. “The most superbly arrayed, beautifully set and humorously played spectacular burlesque ever given at any time in this summer show town,” wrote Amy Leslie of the News. “Money fairly drips from the gorgeous walls and skies of the Emerald City and the Land of the Munchkins, and from the costly robes of the pretty girls and amazing atmospheres of silver mists and golden lights.”

“Unhackneyed and fascinating,” commented another critic, while a third described The Wizard of Oz as the “handsomest show of its kind ever put on here.” From the score of songs, they distinguished two with lyrics by Baum — ”When You Love, Love, Love” and “The Traveler and the Pie,” both set to Tietjens’ music. The former, which critics guessed correctly would prove to be the “hit” song of the show, was sung by Anna Laughlin as Dorothy with Montgomery and Stone in front of the curtain while the stage was being set for the Poppy Scene. Montgomery, as the Tin Woodman who lacked a heart, sang:

Oh, love’s the thing that poets sing

Their sweetest lays regarding

And none say nay to love’s gay sway

Which wounds when not rewarding.

Naught can allure the heart so sure

As one swift dart from Cupid.

And none I know would dodge his blow,

Unless exceeding stupid.

For love’s the thing that poets sing

Their sweetest lays regarding,

And all are gay ‘neath Cupid’s sway,

All worldly cares discarding.

And then the chorus, first by Montgomery alone, and then with Dorothy and the Scarecrow:

When you love, love, love

In mad delirium;

When to love, love, love

That’s quite sincere you come,

There is nothing so divine,

There is nothing half so fine

As the gladness of your madness

When you love, love, love.

“It is possibly the most whistleable song and dance article in the new musical piece,” one reviewer reported.

Another song which kept its place in The Wizard of Oz until the play left the boards nearly a decade later was Baum’s “The Traveler and the Pie,” also to Tietjens’ music With its intricate rhyming and verbal dexterity, “When You Love, Love, Love” is in the tradition of W. S. Gilbert, but the robust, anecdotal humor of “The Traveler and the Pie” is as purely American as James Whitcomb Riley. It was sung in the third act by the Scarecrow and the chorus:

One day a weary traveler walked down the dusty street

Did he? I think he did.

He thought he’d stop and ask a lady for a bite to eat.

Did he? I think he did.

He knocked upon the door and said

In accents most polite:

“Dear Lady would you kindly let

Me have a little bite?”

“Oh you shall have my pie,” the young wife answered

In delight.

Did she? I think she did.

Chorus

Oh, the weary, weary traveler,

The weary, weary traveler.

He took one little bite, next minute took to flight

Did the weary, weary traveler.

Like the first verse, the second is nothing but an expert elaboration of a situation as old as the comic strips:

He went into a restaurant and ordered quite a spread,

Did he? I think he did.

The waiter brought the bill to him before the man was fed,

Did he? I think he did.

He rapped upon the table and

Exclaimed: “See here, mine host,

I’m hungry and of course I’d like

A course of quail on toast.”

The landlord didn’t quail but yet he gave his guest

A roast

Did he? I think he did.

Slapstick and sentiment in the mood of the time, agile dancing and pretty girls, golden lights and spectaculars — to all this favorite fare of the turn of the century the critics and first nighters gave themselves over almost without reservation under the enchantment of the Land of Oz. Baum and his company had built on the stage a utopia where problems were evanescent and tears were shed only in joy. Then, as now, people had need of refuge from reality. Decades after this first night, Walt Disney created something like the world of The Wizard of Oz in his film fantasies, with their humor and splendid color and their counterparts of Baum’s acrobatic Lion and companionate Cow.

The work of many hands went into The Wizard of Oz, but the most priceless ingredient in its success was Baum’s story. Even though on the stage The Wizard of Oz was no longer a child’s simple fable, but a farce for adults, it had not lost the disarmingly magic moods, or the delicate air of wonderment that still make his books the delight of children and the young in heart. A contemporary newspaper preserves a verse written by May McKenzie, a young woman of the chorus, which shows that even the ensemble recognized how much credit belonged to Baum. Scribbling backstage as she waited to go on with the chorus in the first week of the show, Miss McKenzie wrote:

A nursery magician took all little children by the hand

And led them laughing through the book

Where Dorothy walks in Ozland.

Ours is the task with elfin dance

And song, to give to childhood’s days

That merry Land of Oz. And should it chance

To win a smile, be thine the praise.

“A joy for children, a delight for adults, and a happy thing for everybody,” was the comment of Cecil Smith, musical comedy’s historian, on The Wizard of Oz.

The play roiled along through one of Chicago’s most humid summers. Patrons disregarded the heat and the rain in their eagerness to pay a dollar fifty for a main floor seat, or fifty cents or a quarter for the balcony and gallery respectively. The newspapers reported that every performance was crowded and that hundreds were turned away at the Wednesday matinees. Manager Hamlin, now certain of a golden future, acted on a suggestion Baum had made to him on the opening night and signed Montgomery and Stone to a five-year contract. After fourteen weeks at the Grand Opera House, the show dosed in Chicago and went on tour. During its stay in the city it had played to 185,000 persons and grossed $160,000. At only two of the one hundred and twenty-five performances did receipts fall below one thousand dollars. By today’s standards, when a top flight musical comedy will gross fifty thousand dollars a week, this is small business, but in 1902 it was sensational. Advertised as having cost forty thousand dollars to put on the stage, it had quadrupled that sum in box office business in fourteen weeks. Montgomery and Stone got top salaries of two hundred dollars each a week; the scale for other members of the cast ranged down to twenty-five dollars.

After a road trip west and into Canada the company opened again in Chicago after Christmas for a two-week engagement before tackling New York. Chicago welcomed its return with sold out houses, and the Tribune called it “the best show of its kind Chicago has seen in many seasons.” One gallery devotee recalls that he saw The Wizard of Oz for the sixth time during the holidays. In New York a brand new theater, the Majestic, at Broadway and Fifty-ninth Street, was waiting for the players. They took the train after the last Chicago performance Saturday night and opened in New York on Tuesday.

Abraham Klaw, of the mighty theatrical firm of Klaw and Erlanger, had attended the first performance in Chicago. A nice play for the Middle West, he had told Baum, but too innocent and unsophisticated to please New York audiences. New York reviewers were at first in agreement. Their comments were cool and critical. But the box office was busy, and the theater was “drawing crowds nightly,” according to the magazine, Theater. Two weeks after the opening, Paul West of the World wrote in a letter that the show was “an enormous hit.” The metropolis was as enthusiastic about Baum’s extravaganza as Chicago had been. The Wizard of Oz ran for two seasons on Broadway, and when it moved in the fall of 1904, it went no farther than the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street.

Road companies multiplied; casts changed; Montgomery and Stone played in the show four more years and moved along into The Red Mill and other successes. Songs and jokes were worn out and replaced with fresher ones, and still The Wizard of Oz ran on and on “like Tennyson’s brook, forever” as a New York newspaper remarked. As late as 1911 it was showing at the Castle Square Theater in Boston. In August, 1957, a modern adaptation ran for a week in St. Louis at the Municipal Opera, using music from the 1939 motion picture, and firing Dorothy and the Wizard back to Kansas in a rocket ship. Chicago saw three original versions at Loop theaters in the winter of 1960-61.

***

Through the mists of half a century it is still possible to discern the complex structure of events and personalities that brought The Wizard of Oz to life on the stage. The foundation already existed; for Baum’s story of the same name had been published in 1900 and had already begun the extraordinary career that was to make it an all-time best seller. The illustrator of his fantasy, William Wallace Denslow, was the center of a group of artists, writers and bohemian friends who gathered in his studio in the Fine Arts Building. Baum, an occasional visitor, met Isaac (Ike) Morgan there. Morgan, a newspaper cartoonist, later illustrated Baum’s The Woggle-Bug Book. Through Morgan, Baum met Tietjens, a young musician who had come to Chicago recently from St. Louis. Baum offered Tietjens the opportunity to write the music for King Midas and The Octopus, two “comic operas” for which he had already completed books and lyrics. Work proceeded far enough for Baum to seek a producer for the shows, but without success. Two melodies from that collaboration, “The Traveler and the Pie,” and “Love Is Love,” were later used in The Wizard of Oz.

A half dozen persons have received credit for first perceiving the musical comedy possibilities of The Wizard of Oz, but amid the welter of claims, the most logical presumption is that Baum himself recognized the opportunity to collaborate with Tietjens and make his successful story into something like the Irish melodrama with music that he had staged many years before. Tietjens’ diary records that the script that Baum turned over to him was in five acts, and that as soon as he received it he wrote the music for the opening chorus and several songs, including “When You Love, Love, Love.”

Frederick R. Hamlin, business manager of the Grand Opera House, became interested in the Baum-Tietjens venture, perhaps through his brother George, a singing teacher and later a member of the Chicago Opera Company. They were sons of John A. Hamlin, who had made a fortune with a linament known as Hamlin’s Wizard Oil. With his profits from this remedy, sold to a great extent through traveling medicine shows, the father had bought the Grand Opera House. Ralph T. Kettering, veteran Chicago showman, recalled that Fred Hamlin was only mildly interested until he heard the title of the piece. Perhaps he had a hunch that The Wizard of Oz would be as much of a bonanza for him as Wizard Oil had been for his father.

Baum’s first script was quite close in plot and spirit to the book version. The characters remained the same, but the dialogue was somewhat more sophisticated. Opportunities had been made to interpolate a number of songs and choral numbers. Percy Hammond, then the Grand Opera House press agent and later the celebrated stage critic, is reputed to have approved the script, and Hamlin then called in Julian Mitchell, stage director for the Weber and Fields shows, whose career as a maker of successful stage spectacles extended from the 1880s right up to the Ziegfield Follies of the 1920s. In January, 1902, Baum and Tietjens, accompanied by Denslow, who had to be included because he was half owner of the copyright for The Wizard of Oz, met in New York with Mitchell and made financial arrangements to bring him in as stage director. Tietjens’ diary records that Hamlin had agreed to pay Baum and his associates a six per cent gross royalty. Under the new arrangement Mitchell got one per cent of this gross royalty and the other five per cent was split one and seven-eighths per cent each to Baum and Tietjens, and one and one-quarter per cent to Denslow.

On February 6, 1902, the Chicago Record-Herald reported that “yesterday a contract was signed by Fred Hamlin and L. Frank Baum to produce an extravaganza founded on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Fortunately, Baum has left behind a record of the process by which his script was remodeled into the version that finally reached the stage. This statement, published as a letter in the Chicago Tribune on June 26, 1904, arose out of a press agent’s scheme to stimulate attendance at the New York showing of The Wizard of Oz. He started a report that Baum was angry because of the “butchery” of his story in preparing it for the stage. The newspapers took up the controversy; the public curiosity improved box office business, and the report having served its purpose, the management derided to squelch it. Accordingly Baum wrote:

As a matter of fact, I am in perfect harmony with both Julian Mitchell and Mr. Hamlin... Few authors of successful books are ever fully satisfied with the dramatization of their work... This was my own experience. I myself made “The Wizard of Oz” into an extravaganza, and it was accepted by Mr. Hamlin... But when Julian Mitchell came to go over the script he declared it would never do in the world for the stage.

Through deference to the opinion of so experienced a stage director, I labored hard to remodel the play and even called in the assistance of professional dramatists. Mr. Mitchell then took a hand in the reformation itself. The original story was practically ignored, the dialogue rehashed, the situations transposed, my Nebraska Wizard made into an Irishman, and several other characters forced to conform to the requirements of the new schedule.

A story has been circulated by the press that I was heartbroken and ashamed of my extravaganza when it was finally produced, but that is not true. I was filled with amazement, indeed, and took occasion to protest against several innovations that I did not like, but Mr. Mitchell listened to the plaudits of the big audiences and turned a deaf ear to my complaints.

I confess, after two years of success for the extravaganza, that I now regard Mr. Mitchell’s views in a different light. The people will have what pleases them and not what the author happens to favor, and I believe that one of the reasons Julian Mitchell is recognized as a great producer is that he faithfully tries to serve the great mass of play goers — and usually succeeds.

My chief business is, of course, the writing of fairy tales, but should I ever attempt another extravaganza, or dramatize another of my books, I mean to profit by the lesson Mr. Mitchell has taught me, and sacrifice personal preference to the demands of those I shall expect to purchase admission tickets.

Mitchell left the first act of Baum’s story relatively intact, except for the introduction of several new characters. Some of the changes were directed by necessity. This was before the day of dogs trained for the stage; so instead of Dorothy’s pet dog Toto, Mitchell gave her a pet cow, Imogene; perhaps because a pet cow had been a great hit in Edward E. Rice’s old time burlesque, Evangeline. The second and third acts have only a passing resemblance to their original. Into them Mitchell, out of his great experience, threw many time-tested elements, such as the marching choruses so popular in the extravaganzas of the 1890s. Blackface acts and dialect characters came out of the same contemporary treasury. The whole thing was embellished with topical songs and skits by several composers and lavishly mounted in the best Weber and Fields style until what Baum had originally written as a fairy tale for children became, in Mitchell’s adept hands, a farce aimed to hold the interest and tickle the funny bones of the play-going public he understood so well.

Stone, in his autobiography, Rolling Stone, recalling his experience in The Wizard of Oz and other extravaganzas, wrote that “a musical comedy isn’t written, it is rewritten. In fact, what happens to the original script is still a puzzle to me. You cut it down and turn it around; you put in new parts and take out old ones, and after a while you have a musical comedy.” Perhaps Stone had in mind that, owing to his insistence, the Mitchell script was remodeled to raise the role of the Tin Woodman to greater prominence so that Montgomery could be his co-star. Only on this condition did the two actors, who were then playing in London, agree to accept Mitchell’s invitation to appear in the show.

One striking novelty that contributed greatly to the success of the opening and closing seen« of the first act may have been inspired by Baum’s interest in mechanical devices. This was the large revolving celluloid disc which rotated in front of a strong spotlight placed in the balcony. The disc used for the opening scene was painted with stormy black clouds. As it turned, the images giving the illusion of a hurricane were projected on an almost invisible gauze screen. For the poppy field scene at the end of the act, another disc simulated a snowstorm as the flowers nodded and froze.

Baum and Mitchell’s work had its influence on the general course of American stage amusements, which in the early years of the century were leaving behind the older pantomimes, burlesques, minstrel shows, and spectacles, and were developing the formula for the modem musical comedy. For example, Victor Herbert’s Babes In Toyland staged in 1903, and his The Lady of the Slipper produced in 1912, both looked back to Baum’s work for inspiration and specific plot material. So did Piff! Paff! Pouf!!! of 1904, in which Eddie Foy had a Scarecrow-like role.

Financially, The Wizard Of Oz rewarded Baum and his associates liberally. Tietjens’ daughter is authority for the estimate that her father received ninety thousand dollars in royalties. One of Baum’s sons places his father’s share at more than one hundred thousand dollars. According to the reported agreement, Tietjens would have received as much as Baum. Such royalties indicate that The Wizard Of Oz during its first eight years took in close to $5,500,000 and that it was seen by more than six million people.

Thus, after having written to please a child, Baum found that he had written to please a good part of the nation.

Chapter 2 — Chittenango and Rose Lawn

The longroad that brought Baum to literary and dramatic success started in the comfortable Mohawk Valley hamlet of Chittenango, New York, some five miles south of Lake Oneida and fifteen miles east of Syracuse. The seventh child of Benjamin Ward and Cynthia Stanton Baum, he arrived in the world in the early evening of May 15, 1856.

It was an exciting time to be born, for the expansive period that has become known as the Gilded Age was just ahead. The new baby’s sturdy paternal ancestors had come from the Palatinate a century before and had done their part to push the frontier west from New York State, where his Grandfather Baum had been a Methodist lay preacher. His mother was descended from Scotch-Irish farmers who had lived in Connecticut since the seventeenth century.

The new baby was born into an age that would live in cities; that would harvest its wealth from oil wells and factories instead of the soil; whose heroes would be politicians and bankers and plutocrats; an age that would know all the awkward problems of raw new wealth and the temptations of new power. His father was one of those who grew up in the old ways but soon mastered the new. Trained to be coopers, Benjamin and his brother Lyman were the proprietors of a small factory making tight barrels and butter firkins when Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil at nearby Titusville in 1859. Benjamin Baum was not slow to recognize that the tight barrels he knew how to make were just right to hold the liquid treasure gushing from the earth. By 1861 he had seen that there were even greater opportunities there and had become a successful dealer in oil land leases. According to an item in the Syracuse Herald of October 19, 1885, Benjamin Baum prospected around Titusville and secured producing territory at Cherry Tree Run, a tributary of Oil Creek a few miles south of Titusville. This field was active in the middle 1860s.

After having made a large fortune there, so the newspaper account goes, he disposed of his interests, opened an office in New York for stock market speculation, and returned to Syracuse, where he was a founder and director of the Second National bank. His next oil field operations were in the Pennsylvania region near Bradford, where he was one of a number of independents who tried to break the tightening grip of the Standard Oil Company by building a pipe line to Rochester, New York, where Bradford oil would have been transferred to tank cars and shipped to refineries in New York and Buffalo. But the New York Central Railroad, preferring to favor the oil trust rather than the independents, through its lobbyists headed by Chauncey M. Depew, helped to defeat a bill in the legislature to authorize the pipe line.

Benjamin Baum then opened up a field of his own in Potter County, which adjoins Bradford to the east, but retained some interests at Gillmor, a few miles from Bradford, where he was a member of the firm of Baum, Richardson and Company. In 1882 he built the Cynthia Oil Works at Bolivar, New York, east of Olean, to refine crude oil salvaged at a dam where it collected on the surface of the water from the overflow of the oil field tanks upstream.

Meanwhile his wife, for whom the oil works were named, was busy with what was to be a large family. She and Benjamin Baum had eloped in 1842, while he was still a cooper. Full of faith in Providence, in themselves, and in their future, they had gone to the Methodist Chapel on the first Sunday after their marriage, and Baum had put into the collection plate every cent his pockets contained. In the years that followed, while Benjamin Baum was moving forward in his oil enterprises, Cynthia Baum was bringing her babies into the world and giving them what must surely have been one of the most delightful childhood environments possible. But it was a time of severe infant mortality, and the first two children died in infancy. Then came two girls, Harriet Alvena and Mary Louise, and a boy, Benjamin William. The sixth child, Edwin, died a month after the birth of the seventh, Frank. Another boy, Henry Clay, came along three years later, followed by a ninth child who lived only two years. It was a period when such tragedy was written into the history of almost every family.

The Baums’ seventh baby started life as Lyman Frank Baum, a name which at various stages of his life he tailored to his own taste. The Lyman was given to him to honor an uncle, but the boy insisted on being called by his middle name. Nor would he stand for the diminutive, Frankie, used by his mother until he convinced her that it was “sissy.” Some years later, he called himself Louis F. Baum in connection with his activities as actor and playwright, and even when he took part in the family oil business. But in his later life as an author he was always known as L. Frank Baum.

Except for games with his brothers and sisters, Frank was a shy and sedentary child. Much of his time was spent alone in some favored spot in the house or a comer of the yard, where he kept happy for hours with the fey playmates his imagination created. Some of this physical inactivity was forced upon him, for he had been born with a seriously defective heart. In early manhood, heart attacks several times caused him to fall unconscious. Later in life he would walk the floor in agony, tears streaming from his eyes as he fought the pangs of angina pectoris.

Family life in the frame house a quarter mile south of Chittenango was a happy one, for despite business and household cares, both parents took a deep interest in their children. When Frank was four years old his father bought a residential farm property just north of Syracuse and the next year the family moved to the new place. Situated on some fifteen acres of rich land, the new house was connected by a winding driveway with the Cicero Plank Road which ran to Syracuse. Because the gardens and drives were planted with hundreds of rose bushes, Cynthia Baum named the estate Rose Lawn. Elsewhere on the place were planted nearly every variety of fruit tree and grapevine that would flourish in upstate New York. It was another such place as the Bolton estate, described with so much affection by Mark Twain in The Gilded Age, and in its way the fictional Philadelphia family was akin in simplicity, affection and comfort to the reality of the Baums.

The rooms of the large, comfortable house at Rose Lawn were papered in the fashionable dark brown and black patterns of the 1860s. In the bedrooms stood ornate brass beds and walnut washstands with the customary hand- painted wash bowl, pitcher and slop jar. Under each bed was the china pot that saved the room’s occupant a night time trip to the outhouse concealed behind a trellis of roses.

In cold winter mornings in the Baum’s country household it was often necessary to break a film of ice in the pitcher before a child could wash the sleep from his eyes. In spite of what today would seem like the most severe inconveniences, but which were the normal way of life for the times, Frank’s mother preferred to bring up her children at Rose Lawn rather than in the city. Only in cold weather, or when social obligations called them to Syracuse, did the family occupy the ornate, fretted and curlicued town house.

Young Frank also had the opportunity of enjoying the diversions of his father’s eighty acre dairy lands, known as Spring Farm, which adjoined Rose Lawn on the north, Benjamin Baum had imported his herd directly from the Isle of Jersey and had built a handsome barn and stable for the cattle and fast harness horses which were his pride. North of Spring Farm on a road connecting the Liverpool Road to the Brewerton Plank Road was Baum’s third farm, a one hundred and sixty acre commercial grain and livestock enterprise.

From such surroundings Frank developed a deep interest in animals, especially fowl. As a child, he would sit for hours near the chicken yard at Spring Farm watching the birds and before long he had his own flock of Bantams. Throughout his life Frank Baum kept his interest in chickens. A half century later, after he had built Ozcot in Hollywood and was at the height of his career, he kept a flock of Rhode Island Reds to provide meat and fresh eggs for the home table.

In the grain fields of his father’s commercial farm, Frank had his first sight of a scarecrow — a sight so familiar to any farm boy that he would never give it a second thought. But on the future writer’s vivid imagination it made a lasting impression. In his dreams recurred a nightmare in which a scarecrow was chasing him. Happily, Frank always dashed away while the scarecrow waddled after him and finally collapsed into a pile of shapeless straw. Many years later this dream found enduring expression in The Wizard of Oz.

When the boy was eight years old the quiet of one night in the Rust Street home was disturbed by burglars. Frank’s mother heard the intruders and wakened her husband, who had just returned from New York. He hurried one of the burglars through a window by firing several shots and, according to the newspaper account, “produced a skedaddle” of the others outside by another shot. Many years later Frank recalled the delicious excitement of that night.

Young Frank’s ordinarily placid childhood was occasionally broken by a visit to the oil fields in Pennsylvania with his father. One fall, when he was about eight, Benjamin took him on one of these trips. The child was left to amuse himself while his father negotiated an oil lease. Cold and tired, the boy wrapped his coat around him, rolled under one of the big boilers that supplied steam for the pumps, and went to sleep.

He awoke suddenly. Opening his eyes he saw, by the flickering light of the boiler fires, a huge rattlesnake coiled near his head. Too frightened to cry out or move, he lay still. The minutes seemed like hours; then, slowly, the snake lowered its ugly head. For a tense moment it remained staring into the boy’s eyes, then slowly uncoiled and slithered away into the grass.

Until he was twelve, Frank, like the other Baum children, got his schooling at home in the big Rose Lawn farmhouse. He read and reread the books there, and his eager young mind let little escape of what he heard and saw on the farm and in the family circle. In 1868, the doctors, who because of his weak heart had earlier recommended against his going to school, decided he was strong enough to attend Peekskill Military Academy. But his stay there lasted less than two years. After the freedom of Rose Lawn, the confinement and discipline of the military academy were galling. Whenever his father visited him, Frank complained. After every vacation at home he found it more and more difficult to force himself to return to Peekskill.

“I complained to my father about the brutal treatment I felt I was receiving at the school,” he remarked many years later. “I said the teachers were heartless, callous and continually indulging in petty nagging. I told father they were about as human as a school of fish. In those days, of course, instructors were quick to slap a boy in the face, or forcibly use a cane or ruler to punish any student who violated in the slightest way any of the strict and often unreasonable rules.”

One day Cadet Baum was severely disciplined for looking out of the window at the birds while he should have been preparing his lesson. His resentment of the penalty brought on a heart attack — the first in several years — and he fainted in the classroom. The episode convinced Benjamin Baum that the military academy was not the place for his son. He took Frank home, and the youth completed his education at Rose Lawn and in Syracuse with tutors. From his reading he became familiar with such popular Victorian English novelists as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and Charles Reade, whose The Cloister and the Hearth was always one of his favorites. He also enjoyed memorizing passages from Shakespeare’s plays. Of all these authors, the strongest influence discernible in Baum’s own writing is undoubtedly Dickens, whose use of caricature for comic and moralistic reasons is mirrored in many of the inhabitants of Oz.

As a young boy, Frank had a keen ability to learn from the life around him. One day when he was fourteen he went with his father into Syracuse. While Benjamin was attending to some business, the youth wandered idly down a nearby street. Presently he found himself in front of the dusty window of a small print shop. He stood entranced watching the elderly owner of the place operate an old- fashioned foot treadle press. Every time the door swung open Frank breathed the odor of ink, lead type, and fresh cut paper. As he watched the man set type in a “stick,” lock it up in a form, and run off a batch of cards or handbills, he became so enthralled that he lost all track of time.

His father scolded him when he got back late to the office, but Frank was never to forget the thrill that came from that afternoon’s whiff of ink. He decided he would become a printer or a newspaper man when he grew up — a decision that led him into several of the blind alleys he explored before finding his true calling.

Frank talked so much about his experience in Syracuse that his parents soon paid some attention to this new interest. Always an indulgent father, Benjamin sought out a dealer in printing supplies on his next trip to New York and bought a small foot-treadle press, fonts of type, ink, and paper. A few weeks after this equipment was delivered to Rose Lawn, Frank, who throughout his life displayed unusual ability to work with his hands, had mastered the art of “sticking” type, of justifying and making up the forms and of feeding the press without nipping his fingers. He taught these new skills to his younger brother Harry, the closest friend of his youth, and when they were able to turn out an acceptable job, the brothers decided to issue a monthly paper. From surviving copies it appears that the first issue was in May, 1871. Frank christened it The Rose Lawn Home Journal, and from his pen came most of the stories and short poems that filled the small, four-page sheet, augmented at times by poems from the pen of his sister, Mary Louise.

Perhaps to these days belongs a more ambitious piece of writing of which the only surviving evidence is a presentation inscription in a book to his sister Harriet. He wrote: “It was you, I remember, who first encouraged me to write. Years ago you read to father an incomplete ‘novel’ which I, in my youth and innocence, had scribbled, and you declared it was good.”

In the newspaper Frank had his first opportunity to display the literary creativeness that found its culmination in his tales for children. One poem written at that time he thought worthy of including, years later, in a small book By the Candelabra’s Glare, which he was to print and bind by hand in the basement of his Chicago home. It read:

The Romance of a Broken Window

A little kit

On end did sit

To wait for mouse or sparrow.

A little boy

Played with a toy

Known as a bow and arrow.

Intent on game

Near Puss he came

And slyly raised his weapon.

And drew the bow

And then let go

And wondered what would happen.

The little cat

No longer sat

In dreamy contemplation.

The arrow sped

Straight for her head

To her intense frustration.

Roused from her dream

Puss gave a scream

And out of danger fled,

While through the glass

The stick did pass

And injured that instead.

After three years of editing the Journal, young Frank joined forces with a friend, Thomas G. Alford, and founded The Empire, which the opening issue announced would be “a first class amateur monthly newspaper, containing poetry, literature, postage stamp news, amateur items, etc,” Tom Alford, son of a former lieutenant-governor of the Empire State and later a noted New York. City newspaper man, was publisher and Frank was editor. The Empire was discontinued in 1875, after two years of publication, when its youthful proprietors developed new interests.

Frank’s new interest was the breeding of Hamburg chickens at Spring Farm. Hamburgs are rather small, brilliantly plumaged birds of German and Dutch origin and distinguished by a peculiar rose-colored comb terminating in a sharp point. The boy developed several new strains and won prizes exhibiting them at fairs and poultry shows until “Baum’s Thoroughbred Fowls” were widely known throughout the Mohawk Valley. In 1886 Frank wrote a seventy page pamphlet, The Book of the Hamburgs, which was published by H. H. Stoddard in Hartford. One of two known copies, a small volume five by seven and a half, is in the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library. In it the young expert describes such Hamburg types as the Golden and Silver Spangled, the Golden and Silver Penciled, the Black, White, Bolton Greys, and the Creoles; and knowingly discusses plumage and other show points, care, mating, exhibiting, and judging of the breed. There is a newspaper reference in the Syracuse Public Library to indicate that several years before he published his pamphlet on the Hamburgs, Baum was editing a monthly journal, The Poultry Record, for the Syracuse Fanciers’ Club.

One of the express purposes of The Empire was to publish postage stamp news, another of Frank’s abiding interests. In 1873, under the name of Baum, Norris & Co., he published an eleven-page pamphlet, Baum’s Complete Stamp Dealers Directory. The pamphlet, 3½ by 6 inches in size, is described on the title page as “a complete list of all dealers in the United States, together with the principal ones of Europe, and a list of philatelic publications.” On the back of the title page is a key, listing symbols to indicate whether the dealer is known to be reliable, not reliable, or deals in counterfeits. Frank’s interest in stamp collecting continued all his life, and at the time of his death he owned a large collection.

Chapter 3 — The Gleam of Footlights

In thatgilded day of beckoning prosperity the son of awell-to-do business man did not become a poultryman or aprinter. But instead of preparing himself for becoming rich, as was the proper ambition of his class and time, Frank, along with his printing, stamp-collecting and poultry enthusiasms, became infatuated with the theater. The young man had first seen Shakespeare’s plays performed in his father’s theater in Gillmor, Pennsylvania. While the elder Baum was dickering over oil properties nearby, his son had ample opportunity to sample the wares of the traveling companies whose entertainments were the “culture” of the region. Years later he could still recite long passages from Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III and others. When Frank was eighteen and still living with his parents in Syracuse, he chose what he thought would be his permanent career. He would be an actor. He began haunting the Syracuse theaters, avidly studying the tricks of stage business, and treasuring up in his mind the elocutionary mannerisms and flamboyant gestures affected by the actors of that day.

Several times he approached managers of traveling companies for small parts, but without success. One day, however, the manager of a Shakespearean troupe playing two and three night stands in upstate New York saw “promise” in this well tailored and obviously affluent young man. He agreed to take Frank into the troupe if the aspiring young actor would equip himself with a complete set of costumes for all the starring roles he might be called upon to take in the company’s repertoire. Members were required to provide their own costumes, the old manager explained, and if Frank expected to have a place in the company and become an actor, he would have to bring a suitable wardrobe. To the eager youth this did not seem unreasonable, and he agreed. The manager then drew up a long list of the items he said Frank would need. The young man took the list to his father, pleading that the wardrobe be bought at once so he could join the troupe without delay. When Benjamin asked why it was necessary to have such a large number of costumes, Frank explained that the manager had promised to cast him in the leading role of every Shakespearean play the troupe performed.

The older man first tried to make his son see that leading roles would not be given, even in a third rate company, to a young man of no professional experience. But Frank’s pleading won over his mother, and together they finally won the consent of his father. Benjamin Baum made only one condition: Frank must not use his own name on the stage, for the name of Baum was respected in the community, and it must not be tarnished or cheapened by association with the theatrical profession, which in those days still had a dubious reputation.

Frank ordered the finest of velvets and silks, the best imported lace and gold bullion fringe, from a noted New York theatrical costumer. The bill totaled several thousand dollars — a much larger sum than it would be today. While waiting for the wardrobe to be delivered, Frank spent most of his hours in his room, stalking up and down before the mirror, practicing grimaces and declaiming the Bard’s resounding lines. At last the delivery man brought five large trunks crammed with clothing, wigs, shoes, and properties. Frank, who had taken the name of George Brooks for his stage career, hastened to join the troupe in Oneida. When he got to the theater with his baggage, the manager took him inside, opened the trunks and inspected Frank’s purchases, carefully checking each item from a list he drew from his coat pocket. Grinning in high good humor as he appraised the costly materials and fine workmanship, he congratulated the youth on his taste. Summoning other members of the company, the manager introduced the new star to them, and Frank was welcomed into his chosen calling.

As they parted, the manager particularly instructed Frank to be in his dressing room an hour before curtain time. Impatient to set foot on the stage, the youth hurried through dinner and back to the theater. As he was opening his new trunks, which almost filled his tiny dressing room, an old actor came in, sat down on a trunk, made conversation for a few minutes and mentioned casually that he was the Romeo of the night’s performance. Unfortunately his doublet was torn and there had not been time to mend it. Might he borrow Frank’s — just for the one night, of course. The youngster obliged with one of the shining new garments from his trunks.

By curtain time almost every man in the Romeo andJuliet cast had found his way to Frank’s room to borrow a costume item. Each one had some small emergency. Within a few days nearly the entire wardrobe, ranging from wigs to shoes, was in use by other members of the troupe. Nothing was ever returned. Frank’s wardrobe had plenty of stage experience, but his personal career consisted of a few walk-on roles. Crestfallen, Frank spent a few weeks with the company, then with empty trunks returned to his family, wiser in the ways of the world and particularly in the wiles of threadbare actors.

Frank appears to have spent the next year or two as a salesman for Neal, Baum and Company, importers and jobbers of dry goods, which Benjamin Baum had organized with William Henry Harrison Neal after the marriage of his elder daughter Harriet to Neal in 1866. Benjamin Baum built a block of stores for the concern at 17-19 Clinton Street in Syracuse. Later the company became Sperry, Neal and Hyde.

But Frank could not forget the fascination of the stage. He finally left Neal, Baum and Company and managed to get a bona fide start in professional acting with Albert M. Palmer’s Union Square Theater in New York. Palmer welcomed new talent and had a coaching staff to train young actors. Under the name of Louis F. Baum, Frank appeared in one of the company’s most notable successes, The Banker’s Daughter by Bronson Howard. First presented on November 30, 1878, this drama of finance and family ran for one hundred nights. A photograph taken in New York at the time shows Frank Baum as a handsome young man with finely molded, regular features whose youth was poorly disguised by a luxuriant walrus mustache. He was turned out in the very height of fashion. A velvet collared, double breasted coat was buttoned high on his chest, while a stiff white stand-up collar framed the area from chin to Adam’s apple.

According to family tradition, the young actor also served a turn at this time on the New York Tribune, to which he had previously contributed occasional articles and humorous verse. This casual connection stimulated his old interest in journalism. Through the influence of his father, he found a job on a weekly newspaper, the Era, in Bradford, Pennsylvania, where the elder Baum had considerable oil interests. Since that time the Era has become a daily, but back in the eighteen seventies Frank Baum’s Era was a typical small town, four-page weekly. Front and back pages were filled with news items and advertising collected by the editor on his daily rounds. These outside pages were printed in the paper’s shop at Bradford on “stock sheets” bought from a company in New York City which printed the inside pages with what was then known as “patent insides” or “boiler plate” — a miscellany of fiction, comment, foreign intelligence, proprietary medicine advertisements of potent concoctions “good for man or beast,” and edifying articles. Such a sheet, when folded down the middle, formed a four-page newspaper with the local news of Bradford on the outside and of the rest of the world on the inside.

After about a year with the Era, Frank returned to the stage. His father, who owned a string of theaters in Olean and Richburg in New York State, and Bradford and Gillmor in Pennsylvania, as well as in other small towns throughout the region, made his son their manager in 1880. Later he deeded them outright to Frank, who recalled:

We had a lot of trouble getting shows for the playhouses, hidden away in the oil fields, because the towns were too small to provide profitable patronage for a one night stand. So I decided to organize my own company and produce some of Shakespeare’s better known plays.

About that time we were asked to give a special performance of “Hamlet” In the town hall of a small oil settlement. When we got there we found the hall had no stage — not even a raised platform. We asked the oil workers to arrange some saw horses at one end of the room and cover them with one by twelve inch planks that were stacked outside for use in a building under construction.

They soon had a make-shift stage in place, but because they refused to nail the boards to the saw horses for fear of spoiling them for use in the new building, the footing was very uncertain. It was necessary to make this wobbly platform answer the purposes of a stage, but we had to be careful not to walk too heavily or jar the boards, lest they shift under our feet.

That night everything went well until Scene Four was under way. Horatio had just said: “Look, my lord, it comes,” and at this cue the Ghost entered and started across the loose planks. I, playing Hamlet, exclaimed: “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us” and jumped back, stumbled and displaced the ends of two of the boards.

The Ghost was covered with a white sheet and could not see where he was walking. He veered to one side and stepped on a plank I had dislodged. It tipped and before anyone could stop him, the Ghost slipped from sight through the floor of our make-shift stage.

None of the oil workers in the audience knew the plot of “Hamlet”. They thought the disappearance of the Ghost in this slapstick manner was part of the play and they roared with laughter. They shouted and whistled, stamped their feet and called “More — more” until we had to repeat the scene five times before we could continue with the show.

The old actor who played the part of the Ghost took his work very seriously, and he was still angry the following morning. He claimed his arms and legs were skinned from the rough boards because he had been required to repeat his performance of the accidental fall so many times. He quit the company in spite of the fact that we tried to make him see he should have felt highly honored. He had received more encores than all the other members of the cast together. But his spirit was bruised, like his body, and we had to get a new man for the Ghost before we could put on “Hamlet” again.

Familiar now with the taste of his audiences, Frank set to work to satisfy it by writing original plays. On February 11, 1882, he entered for copyright in the Library of Congress the titles of three dramatic compositions — The Maid of Arran, Matches, and The Mackrummins. Application was made from Richburg, New York, where he had a small theater. Matches is known only from a playbill and a review in the Richburg Oil Echo of June 3, 1882 when it was given in Brown’s Opera house there by the Maid of Arran company. A performance the night before had been cut short by fire in the theater. Frank played the part of an impecunious fortune hunter who had to outwit a vinegar-faced landlady to whom he owed money so that he could win the heiress of his dreams. “Mr. Baum is to be congratulated,” said the newspaper, “not only for his successful interpretation of the leading character, but on his good judgment in selecting such excellent support.”

But The Maid of Arran, an Irish melodrama, more than made up for these nebulous projects by solid success. The script, music and lyrics were all from the versatile pen of Louis F. Baum, which was the name that the playwright now used for theatrical purposes. It was based on a novel, A Princess of Thule, by the Scottish novelist, William Black. A new company was organized so that The Maid of Arran might make its bow under the most favorable auspices possible. Frank was leading man and stage director. His father’s youngest sister, Catherine, had an important part. Benjamin Baum had persuaded her to join the company so that she would be in a position to keep a friendly eye on Frank, who was very young for so much responsibility.

“Aunt Kate, as we called her, was already well known as an elocutionist,” Baum told his son Frank in later years. “She had been giving public recitals for many years and was in demand at social gatherings as an entertainer. She turned out to be an excellent actress as well and became a favorite with our audiences. She played two roles in the show, that of the Prophetess under the name of Kate Roberts, and that of Mrs. Holcomb under the name of Katherine Gray.

“We opened The Maid of Arran in the opera house at Gillmor. It was an immediate success. This encouraged me to engage the Grand Opera House in Syracuse for two performances. The first was on May 15, 1882, my twenty-sixth birthday. A correspondent for a New York newspaper sent a favorable account of the play to his editor, and through this notice the Windsor Theater in New York booked us for the week of June 19 through 24.

“Apparently our play appealed to the big city folk as much as it had back home. We had a well filled theater all week. But I soon found that playing the principal part and managing the company, too, had become too much for me. When I asked father what to do, he assigned his brother, John Wesley Baum, to us as business manager for the road tour. It started in Ithaca. We played in Toronto and Rochester and several other cities in northern New York State. Then we took the train west to Columbus, Ohio, and Milwaukee, arriving in Chicago for ten performances at the Academy of Music beginning October 9. It was my first sight of Chicago, which was very busy and energetic after rebuilding from the great fire.”

The young playwright seems to have revised his melodrama and whipped his company into a smooth running organization on the road. At the first Syracuse performance, the newspapers were kind to their fellow townsman; the Journal