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The advisory committee also could only “advisory.- West Avenue boutn.Yosemtfe convention100 Winkies gather to honor OzN.Y. 1 imes News ServiceVOSEM1TE — One hundred Winkies from the West of Oz met recently in Yosemite National Park— about as far west as they could comfortably get in the continental United States — to bid at an auction of Oz books, T-shirts, pillowcases, homemade dolls and coloring books.Three-quarters of a century after L. Frank Baum created it, the mythical Land of Oz is flourishing, The original Winkies were those people who lived in the yellow country in the West of Oz in Baum's classic children's stories.Today’s Winkies are ardent devotees of the stories who have joined the international Wizard of Oz Club. 'Hie club, which has 2,000 members, was formed in January 1957 by a 14-year-old schoolboy, Justin Schiller, now a rare-book dealer in New York.Current members include a disproportionate number of adolescents and college professors. Most of them can give no better reason for their obsession than Warren Hollister's relief “to discover a lot of people sharing my insanity.Hollister, a 46-year-old professor of medieval history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has a collection of Oz books and memorabilia that includes the pencil with which Frank Baum wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz— “underinsured at $40,000.Each year, the Munchkina meet in the East, the GiUikins in the North, and the Winkies in the West. The 100 Winkies who met at Yosemite ranged fromPeter Haniff, spccial-collections librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, to a 10-year-old with an encyclopedic knowledge of Oz.That knowledge was tested in a Wi nkie quiz on the 41 official Oz books, which, among other things, asked the occupations of such characters as Kar-wan Bahi, Ilier Cargo, Hopfrog Esq., Madam De Fayke, Peggo and Umb.The amount of alcohol consumed over the weekend was small but the number of cookies eaten was enormous. It took Edith Hollister, who has been making cookies for Winkie conventions for the last 13 years, five days simply to frost the 35 dozen cookies accurately — all baked in the shape of such Oz characters as the China Cow with a broken leg and the soldier with Green Whiskers from “The Wizard of Oz/' not to mention a Cowardly Lion, a Tin Woodsman, Wicked Witch of the West and Dorothy dressed in the long dress and pink sun-bonnet of the original W. W.Denslow illustrations.The mystique of the club seems to have little to do with the 1D39 MGM movie version of “The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland, Some members will collect only the books written by L. Frank Baum. Others are more involved with the 21 books by Ruth Plumley Thompson, who continued the series after Baum's death In 1919.The one thing members have in common, as one club member phrases it, is that we all started collecting at the age of 8 without realizing we were col lec ti n g. Oz has a wca llh of col I ecti bl e material.11
Newspaper Details
Modesto Bee
Modesto, California, US
Tue, Aug 23, 1977
Page 38
Full Page
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USA 04 Dec 2024
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