Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

I have to say I'm a little rusty on everything that's going on in the '"Wizard of Oz." I didn't realize one of the Munchkins was a coroner who pronounces the Wicked Witch dead as part of his duties.

It turns out that the actor who played the coroner has just passed away, and Margalit Fox in Saturday's NYT starts his obituary off in a highly unique fashion. She leads with the announcement for which he became famous, and remained so for 70 years.

As coroner, I must aver
I thoroughly examined her.
And she’s not only merely dead,
She’s really most sincerely dead.

Meinhardt Raabe, who has now passed away at 94, announced this event with great fanfare when he was 23 in the 1939 movie classic the Wizard of Oz. And while I may not have remembered he was a medical examiner, I do remember the song that followed, "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead."

Several times in my work career at a major insurance company I remember paraphrasing that ditty when a vexing female management member shuffled off for another position outside the company. They didn't have to go all the way and die to deserve the ditty, just moving on was good enough.

Ms. Fox points out in the obituary that Meinhardt was one of the few Munchkins who had a speaking role. He certainly made the most of what God gave him, excelling in fields that one wouldn't expect.

There was one story from the movie that I remember hearing that told of the time there was an extended break in the shooting of a Munchkin scene. To kill time, several, or all of the Munchkins took to having a few belts of their favorite libation while waiting to resume shooting. Someone said that you really haven't seen anything until you see a set full of 100 Munchkins stewed to the gills trying to do the next take.

Ms. Fox doesn't try and explain the difference between dwarf and midget. We basically know it means they are people who remain short into adulthood.

It wasn't until I moved into a Levitt home sub-division umpteen years ago that I saw "dwarf" applied in a symbolic fashion. All the streets in our area start with the letter D. We are in the D section. There are people somewhere who are in a W section, but they're not really neighbors.

Anyway, using streets with a D starts to exhaust the possibilities within the English language. We have streets named Deep, Dell, Disc, Dock, Deer, Daffodil, Downhill, Dahlia, Duck Pond Drive East, North and South, and finally, Dwarf.

Dwarf Lane is very short. It only has one house on it.

Honest.

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