The Boy in the Robot Suit

 

Well, here's a treat! I had known for many years that the performer inside Tik-Tok in Disney's Return to Oz was an adorably cute guy named Michael Sundin. I also knew that Michael died of AIDS in 1989. He was only twenty-eight.

It was quite a job being strapped into the Tik-Tok costume. Sundin had to fold himself in half, curled up inside Tik-Tok's spherical body. He then had to walk backwards to make Tik-Tok move forward. Sundin's only view of where he was going was a small video monitor.

I had later discovered that Michael Sundin was also connected with a BBC children's television show called Blue Peter. This info has been rattling around in my brain for years and I had never thought to look up the show online . . . until now! And what a nice few treats I found!

First up is an episode of Blue Peter from 1985. And what do you know, it's an Oz episode! Sundin, delightfully cute in a Christmas sweater and yellow slacks, introduces a group of seven kids who have put together a Wizard of Oz dance - performed to the Meco disco album! After the dance Sundin talks to them about their costumes and tells a bit about his time on Return to Oz. Followed by a segment on the cut "Jitterbug" number from the MGM film, complete with Harold Arlen's 1939 home movies. Have a look!

And I can't resist sharing one more sample. Michael Sundin's Blue Peter interview with Elton John. Michael begins the interview climbing out of Elton John's swimming pool wearing a Speedo! What more need be said!

Jack Snow's Secret High School Crush

Jack Snow's Senior Photo (1925).

Some of you know that Eric Shanower and I are quite interested in genealogical research as well as being Baum and Oz fans. I've recently been merging these two passions and using various genealogical tools to explore the lives of various Oz creators. A few weeks ago I randomly did a search for Jack Snow and quickly found his Piqua High School year book. I assumed I'd probably find a photo or two, but I was surprised by how much more was revealed about Show's teenage years and what Snow might have been like as a person.

Jack Snow (1907-1956) was, of course, the author of The Magical Mimics in Oz, The Shaggy Man of Oz, Who's Who in Oz, and Dark Music, a collection of horror/fantasy. He was also gay in an era when it was much less easy than it is today.

The title of this blog is at best speculation. I have no idea if Snow had a crush on the other boy we'll be getting to know. But when researching lost gay lives, one often has to read between the lines, and it's hard not to view events through the lens of one's own experience.

Snow entered Piqua High as a Freshman in the Fall of 1921. In the '22 Yearbook, Snow wrote of his Freshman experience:

When we Freshman enter high school there are many things we have to find out before we can consider ourselves full fledged high school students.

In the first place we expect to find nothing but A's on our report cards, and we find instead C's and D's.

We expect to have no difficulty in finding the value of X in Algebraic equations, but before we are Sophomores discover that there is nothing more elusive.

Science is always puzzling to the poor Freshman. made especially so by cruel looking apparatus arranged in the long dark cases of the science room.

And Latin! When a Freshman takes Latin, if he is to judge by the experiences of the wise Sophomores, he will accept it as an established fact that he is doomed to failure the first year.

English sounds familiar, but the first year students find the unexpected here, too, as well as in the Commercial subjects.

Now read this second bit written by Snow's fellow Freshman classmate, Maurice Peffer:

When the Class of '25 first entered P. H. S. in September, the faculty in all probability, were steeled to encounter a heard of numbskulls. However, they were not long in altering their opinion of us. . . .

If you don't believe this, just ask any one of them, and what they say will make you green with envy. They confidently expect each one of us to have his name engraved at the head of the Hall of Fame.

We don't wish to boast, but their confidence is not misplaced, for, to use a slang expression, "We're there with the goods." To some who may be dubious, we can only say, "Wait and see," and if the Class of '25 does not equal or excel any other class that has entered old P. H. S. in the past, or that expects to enter in the future, the fault cannot be laid at our door, nor can the faculty be blamed.

While Snow and Peffer seem to have had somewhat different ways of looking at the world, they both did well in school and both made the Honor Society. In the Honor Society photo below you can see Maurice Peffer, standing tall in the center of the back row. Jack Snow is in the photo, too, a foot shorter than Peffer (they are standing on the same slush-covered step), Snow's face partially obscured by the girl in front of him.

Piqua High School 1925 "Honor Society" Jack Snow in back. Click to enlarge

I had never realized how small Snow was. I checked his later Army enlistment records and found Snow was only 5' - 1" tall. No wonder short and insecure little Snow came to look up to Peffer, both literally and figuratively.

"Morrie" Peffer's Senior photo and achievements. Click to enlarge

You can see Peffer was the perfect boy to idolize: tall, confident, his father the President of the Piqua National Bank. "Morrie" himself was editor of the school paper, in the Chorus, Glee Club, Tennis Manager, Debating Club, Dramatic Club, French Club, Radio Club, Class President, and . . . Head Cheer Leader!

Jack Snow's Senior photo in 1925 Piqua High yearbook. Click to enlarge

I have no idea when Snow came out as gay to himself. He was fairly open about it in the 1950s in New York (at least to some of his fellow employees at NBC). But it must have been difficult being a nerdy, bookish, insecure, (and very short!) little gay kid growing up in Piqua, Ohio, in the 1920s. Was Snow aware of his feelings? Did he have a secret crush on Morrie Peffer? On other boys?

1925 Track Team at Piqua High School.

There is a drawing in the 1925 Piquonian yearbook that was undoubtedly drawn by either Peffer or Snow, and possibly both, showing "Snow's Snappy Speedster, Special Split-Six." Note that it has a "Body by Peffer."

Below is the full page about the imaginary car from the yearbook. I hope that it was a fun collaboration of the two boys.

I don't know which boy drew the Snappy Speedster, but we can get some idea of how Snow felt about Peffer in his Class Prophecy, below, published in the Piquonian yearbook.

This "Class Prophecy" is one of the earliest surviving text pieces we have by Jack Snow. It is a four page "prophecy" outlining where the Class of '25 will be in twenty years. It is fun and easy reading and presented complete at the bottom of this blog post. Go ahead and read it all! It's funny, laced with irony and a little sarcasm. But here's his section on Peffer. It is twenty years in the future and Snow has just entered classmate Catherine Coleman's beautiful theatre:

I sighed and thought of other and happier days and walked slowly down the aisle seeking a vacant seat. Presently I found an alluring chair and seated myself next to a tall handsome man about whom I found myself wondering almost as soon as I saw him. Then after thinking for a few minutes I knew that he was no other than Maurice Peffer, the distinguished United States Senator who only a few months before had been influential in securing the passage of a bill forbidding all women under seventy-five years of age to bob their hair.

Maurice greeted me quite heartily and agreed to tell me something of my old classmates.

It sounds like Snow and Peffer were indeed friends, and I for one am glad Snow found his handsome friend to sit near in his "prophecy of the future."

Unfortunately Snow's prophecy was wrong and Peffer suffered a tragic end.

PIQUA DAILY CALL, February 14, 1931.

Maurice Peffer was engaged to be married on Valentine's Day 1931. At 11:30 PM on February 13, Morrie Peffer was killed when an Interurban freight train slammed into a car he was riding in. His two companions, Frat mates from Miami University (one of whom was to be his Best Man), were not seriously injured. Peffer died on the way to the hospital, only a few hours before his planned wedding; he was only twenty-three. Here's the full account:

PIQUA DAILY CALL, February 14, 1931. Click to enlarge

Peffer was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Piqua, Ohio, where Snow himself was buried in 1956 at age forty-nine. Alas, Snow's family buried him in an unmarked grave. Click here to read more.

This has not been a very cheerful blog, but I feel I have gotten to know Jack Snow a little better. Perhaps in some alternate universe Snow's Class Prophecy came true? And perhaps, in a land behind the moon, beyond the rain, Jack Snow once got to go joy-riding with Morrie Peffer in that snappy Speedster, happily cruising down the Yellow Brick Road.

Below you can read Jack Snow's entire "Class Prophecy" from his 1925 Piquonian Yearbook. Click on the individual pages to read this very early work by the future Royal Historian of Oz.

That's My Shaggy Man!

One of my favorite Oz acquisitions of 2011 was this very nice first edition copy of The Shaggy Man of Oz in a rather nice first dust jacket.

I've generally enjoyed the Snow Oz books. They don't violate Baum's Oz as much as Thompson's often do. I've also developed a fondness for Snow because he was gay in a time when it was not so easy to be so. I wish someone had done an in-depth interview with him, or an oral-history of sorts (though that really wasn't being done much back then). Snow did leave his personal papers to Fred Meyer - but Fred proceeded to destroy all of Snow's personal letters and documents not of an Ozzy nature. It's a great shame. Snow's private papers might have shed some light on his private life in New York City but Fred had a homophobic streak and probably felt he was improving Jack's reputation by destroying the personal material.

The thing that makes this copy of Shaggy Man a favorite acquisition of 2011 is that it is inscribed by Jack Snow on the ownership page: "This Book Belongs to Pat and Janet Nelson with love from the author, Jack Snow".

I've no idea who Pat and Janet are, nor whether Pat is male or female thus the book could be inscribed to an adult couple or to two little girls. Perhaps they were twins like Twink and Tom? In any case I'm very pleased to have this small but direct contact with the fourth Royal Historian of Oz.

Inscription by Oz author Jack Snow in THE SHAGGY MAN OF OZ (1949).

Dickin' Around

Dick Martin circa 1980

No doubt you are all familiar with the work of Oz illustrator Dick Martin. He was the last "official" illustrator for the Reilly and Lee Oz books and created the pictures for The Visitors from Oz (1960) and Merry Go Round in Oz (1963.) He also illustrated picture-book abridgements of the first four Oz books and he designed the ever popular "white editions" of the Oz series that dominated bookshelves in the 1960s and '70s.

Dick also played a huge part in the early days of the International Wizard of Oz Club, doing research, editing and laying out The Baum Bugle, working on bibliography, and much else including illustrating Ruth Plumly Thompson's final two Oz books, illustrating the McGraws' Forbidden Fountain of Oz (1980), and finally writing an Oz book of his own, The Ozmapolitan of Oz (1986). And at the time of his death in 1990 he had the finest Baum and Oz collection in the world.

Dick was a very private man, very reserved and quiet (he was very hard-of-hearing), and he hated fandom of any kind, despite being a fanatical Oz collector, comic collector, and toy collector himself. I am sure, too, that some of Dick Martin's reserve was because he was gay (but pretty firmly in the closet). It wasn't exactly a secret (at least to other gay people). I suspected Dick was gay the first time I got a letter from him. His tone, his quirky sense of humor, his ultra-dapper author's photo in The Oz Scrapbook (1978) all set my Gaydar off, even though I was a sixteen-year-old closeted gay boy myself.

I'll share more Dick Martin stories in the future, but in today's blog I'm gonna discuss Dick's mischievous side. Dick's illustrations were fairly cartoony, always light-hearted and fun. But he also liked to work in quaint references, little in-jokes for his friends. Sometimes these were Baum or Oz collecting references, sometimes bits of sly innuendo like in this charming illustration from Merry Go Round in Oz showing two cute little boys holding hands in the Land of Good Children. In Oz it seems everyone is a Friend of Dorothy.

Two Ozzy boys holding hands in MERRY GO ROUND IN OZ

Or in the illustration of Prince Gules below. Note the placement of the big Easter egg and Gules's excitement at finding that big ring. And if it's not obvious enough what's going on, Gules's right hand signals it quite blatantly.

 
This "after dark" in Oz streak is most evident in a short bit of Oz fiction Dick wrote for friends in the mid-1960s called Oz ad Nauseum. It was later printed in a fanzine called No, no.10 (June 1972), edited by charter Oz Club member Ruth Berman, and it was included as a premium broadsheet in our own Oz-story No. 6 (2000).

But for your reading pleasure it is also available as this month's free on-line Tiger Tale. I'm sure you'll get a kick out of this very irreverent Oz tale, and you'll get to spend a few minutes with a more private Dick Martin than you get to know from only his illustrations. Go read it!

Extra! Extra! Friends of Dorothy Make Good!

Here's a quick heads-up to our southern California readers and those that are otherwise interested. Eric Shanower and I are interviewed in the current issue of San Diego LGBT Weekly.

The magazine is a paper-and-ink freebie given away in coffee-houses, bookstores, bars, etc. but there is in an on-line version, too.

Here's the link to the interview with me and here's a link to the interview with Eric Shanower. The Shanower article focuses on his various Oz Comic, Little Adventures in Oz, and his current bestselling Oz series from Marvel Comics. The interview with me is about the 1903 Wizard of Oz and my Grammy-Award nomination several years ago.

There is a third article of Ozzy interest as well. The current bus-and-truck tour of the MGM Wizard of Oz will be playing in San Diego this weekend. Here's a link to that article, too.