Up, Up, and Away! Meet the Flying Girl!

In 1910, at the end of The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum attempted to end the Oz series. Princess Ozma was concerned about the great outside world encroaching on the magical Land of Oz. She was concerned about a new kind of magic. The magic of flight. The magic of airships. The world was going airplane crazy! So Ozma (with Glinda's help) cut Oz off from the rest of the world with a Barrier of Invisibility. No more Oz. At least that’s what folks were saying back in 1910.

During Baum’s two-year hiatus as Royal Historian, 1911 and 1912, he wrote his two best non-fantasy novels, The Flying Girl and The Flying Girl and Her Chum. So let’s sit back, fasten our seatbelts, and see exactly WHAT’S UP with . . . the Flying Girl!

The original idea for the Flying Girl books may have come from Baum’s publisher, the Reilly and Britton Company of Chicago. In 1909 Reilly and Britton published a profusely illustrated five-hundred-page volume called Vehicles of the Air by Victor Lougheed. It was subtitled “A popular Exposition of Modern Aeronautics with Working Drawings.”  The book seems to have sold well. New editions were published in 1910 and 1911. It’s not unreasonable to assume Reilly and Britton might have sent Baum a copy of the book for research purposes.

But Reilly and Britton were publishing lots of other airplane books, too, including several aviation series for children. In 1909 they began The Airship Boys series by H. L. Sayler. And in 1910 they added The Aeroplane Boys series by Ashton Lamar.

In 1911 and 1912 Reilly and Britton issued two beautiful and oversized aviation fairytale novels: The Magic Aeroplane and The Flight Brothers, both by Mrs. L. R. S. Henderson. These are especially interesting, as they look a lot like giant Oz books, even down to the color plates and title page design. Interestingly, the illustrator is Emille A. Nelson, who also illustrated several of Baum’s Boy Fortune Hunters books.

But back to Reilly and Britton's aviation books. With all the interest the general public had in aviation, and the supposed end of the Oz series, you can see why they may have been putting some pressure on Baum to get “on board” for a juvenile aviation book.

On the other hand, the idea for The Flying Girl series may have come from Baum instead. He may have been inspired by meeting Glenn Curtiss or other early aviators during his winters living at the Hotel Del Coronado in southern California.

Whatever the inspiration was, Baum responded with the Flying Girl series. The Flying Girl was published in 1911, and its sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, was published in 1912. Baum wrote both books under his popular pseudonym Edith Van Dyne, author of the highly successful Aunt Jane’s Nieces series. Here we see a copy of an inscription by “Mrs. Van Dyne” to his son, Robert Stanton Baum.

In the contemporary advertisement (below) we can see: “. . . a picture of L. Frank Baum’s home and gardens at Hollywood, California. In the center of the pergola is the little sheltered garden house where Edith Van Dyne, a guest of Mrs. Baum, wrote The Flying Girl.”

Reilly and Britton produced two handsome volumes bound in red cloth, stamped in black and white. You can see the lovely (and very rare) dust jackets still further down the page. The paintings for the jackets are by Joseph Pierre Nuyttens, who also provided four halftone plates for each of the books.

This first book, The Flying Girl, tells the story of how seventeen-year-old Orissa Kane becomes a celebrated aviator. The story opens in Los Angeles, where Orissa works as secretary for real estate agent George Burthon. She is the sole support for her blind mother and older brother, Stephen, who is hard at work designing and building his innovative new airplane. After her brother is injured Orissa flies in his place at an air-meet and proves herself an excellent aviator. After numerous travails the Kane Aircraft is proven a success, Orissa is the darling of popular attention, and everyone seems destined for a brilliant future.

In 1912 the second Flying Girl book was published. Suggested titles for  book were: The Flying Girl of Castaway Island, The Flying Girl’s Adventures, The Flying Girl’s Runaway Aeroplane, The Flying Girl’s Best Record, and The Flying Girl’s Exploits. In the end Baum and his publishers agreed on The Flying Girl and Her Chum.

In The Flying Girl and Her Chum, Orissa and her “chum” Sybil Cumberford are testing Stephen Kane’s new experimental Hydro-Aeroplane, which can land in the water. They take of from a bluff in San Diego, but when the aircraft is damaged, they’re forced to crash land near an isolated island in the Pacific. Their struggles to stay alive on the deserted island add quite a bit of realism to the book, although the cheerful demeanors they exhibit throughout might not have such a counterpart in real life. Meanwhile, a rich heiress, Madeline Dentry, sets out on her yacht with Orissa and Sybil’s friends in a dangerous attempt to find the lost girls. The book alternates between the girls on the island and the rescue party that’s trying to find them - a double-plot line device that Baum was very fond of. When the rescue party finally reaches the island, the entire group is threatened by a Mexican bandit and his band of cut-throats. Of course, the bravery of the Flying Girl and her chum saves the day and the story ends with the entire party sailing to Hawaii on the Dentry yacht. In this book Baum deals less with the world of aviation. Steve’s new Hydro-Aeroplane serves merely as entrance and exit to what is essentially a straight adventure story.

Baum's publisher, Reilly & Britton, seems to have really promoted the new series, arranging for both books to be serialized in newspapers around the country.

Newspaper serialization of THE FLYING GIRL AND HER CHUM.

Original dust jacket for the book.

The Flying Girl and Her Chum presents themes and devices found in other books by Baum, too. Baum-scholar Michael Patrick Hearn has pointed out how Glinda of Oz repeats the basic plot of The Flying Girl and Her Chum. Both books feature two girls becoming stranded on isolated islands and a second plot-thread is introduced when the girls’ friends form an expedition to rescue them.

The Flying Girl and Her Chum also has similarities to Baum’s Sky Island. Both stories begin in the San Diego area. In Chum an airplane carries Orissa and Sybil over the Pacific and beyond the island they intended, while in Sky Island a magic umbrella carries Trot, Cap’n Bill, and Button-Bright far beyond their Pacific island destination to an island in the sky.

Baum’s The Boy Fortune Hunters in the South Seas (1911), published under the pseudonym Floyd Akers, features a ship tossed onto the shore of a Pacific island, a near duplication of the beaching of the Dentry yacht in Chum. Furthermore, hostile forces threaten both vessels and an airplane takes off from the deck of each boat.

The famous California resort, the Hotel Del Coronado, where Baum himself stayed during winters from 1904 until 1908, appears both in Chum and in Baum’s Aunt Jane’s Nieces and Uncle John (1911).

The Hotel Del Coronado first opened in 1888 and is still today a functioning hotel and a National Historic Landmark, just across the bay from downtown San Diego.

Original dust jacket for the book.

From the tone of the Flying Girl books and the real people and incidents mentioned in them, we know Baum did do some first-hand research on aviation as he was writing them. In the guise of Miss Van Dyne, Baum thanked two of the most famous American aviators of his time in his short foreword to The Flying Girl:

The author wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness to Mr. Glenn H. Curtiss and Mr. Wilbur Wright for courtesies extended during the preparation of this manuscript.

Baum is well aware of aviation’s potential. He goes on to say:

These skillful and clever aviators, pioneers to whom the Art of Flying owes a colossal debt, do not laugh at any suggestion concerning the future of the aeroplane, for they recognize the fact that the discoveries and inventions of the next year may surpass all that have gone before.

If fact, Baum seems so aware of the leaps and bounds of early aviation that he places a caveat into his forward. It’s almost as if he fears that Orissa’s accomplishments may be eclipsed by the time his book sees publication when he states:

So the story of Orissa Kane’s feats has little exaggeration except in actual accomplishment, and it is possible her ventures may be emulated even before this book is out of press.

At that time the history of modern aviation was only eight years old. The Wright brothers’ first heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, occurred on Dec. 17, 1903. But it was not until around 1909 that the public at large became enthused by airplanes. Newspaper headlines trumpeted each new aerial record achieved. Crowds flocked to aviation meets to watch the amazing new machines mount to the skies.

Despite Baum’s declaration of indebtedness to Glenn Hammond Curtiss and Wilbur Wright in the foreword to The Flying Girl, and whatever he might have gleaned from his research, his knowledge of the technicalities of heavier-than-air flight seems lacking.

In his attempt to make Stephen Kane’s invention distinct from other aircraft, Baum describes the Kane Aircraft as a biplane whose upper plane is placed at a right angle to the lower. In the Hungry Tiger press reprint of The Flying Girl, illustrator Eric Shanower draws what Baum describes, with the upper plane running perpendicular to the lower plane.

Eric Shanower's depiction of Stephen Kane's aircraft from THE FLYING GIRL.

Yet the Wright brothers’ innovation of placing one parallel plane directly above the other was both a key factor in their 1903 success and a safety feature of biplanes. Even Joseph Pierre Nuyttens, the original illustrator of both Flying Girl books, seems to have been confused by Baum’s crossed-plane arrangement; his illustrations show a triplane with the two upper planes crossed.

Joseph Pierre Nuyttens depiction of Stephen Kane's aircraft.

Baum is far more successful in integrating reality into his story by describing actual air meets at Dominguez Field. The Los Angeles International Air Meet was held January 10 to January 20, 1910.

It was among the earliest airshows in the world and the first major airshow in the United States. It was held in Los Angeles County, California, at Dominguez Field in present day Carson, California. Spectator turnout numbered approximately 254,000 over eleven days of ticket sales. The Los Angeles Times called it "one of the greatest public events in the history of the West." Baum was living in Southern California at the time of the Dominguez Field air meets. It remains unknown whether Baum actually attended the 1910 Air Meet, but he surely was aware of the extremely popular event.

Baum populated the background of the story of The Flying Girl with real-life aviators. Wilbur and Orville Wright, Glenn H. Curtiss, Hubert Latham, Archibald Hoxsey, Charles F. Willard, Philip O. Parmalee, Eugene Ely, Walter Brookins, and James Radley, all international figures in the history of flight, appear—albeit briefly—in the pages of The Flying Girl.

Baum continued his research into aviation for the second Flying Girl book. Baum’s letter on Jan. 23, 1912, to his publishers states, “I’ve been working on The Flying Girl and Her Chum, and my attendance at the present aviation meet was in furtherance of that plot. I’ve got aeroplanes down to date, and it will all help me in this volume.”

No female aviator—except Orissa Kane—appears in the first book, and the concept of an American female aviator is presented by Baum as unique. While this serves to heighten Orissa’s importance in the story, it deviates from reality.

Although in 1910 a French woman, Raymonde de Laroche, was the first woman to qualify as a pilot, Harriet Quimby was the first licensed and most celebrated American female aviator of her day.

Harriet Quimby with the Moisant monoplane.

Quimby's rise to prominence at the same time Baum began the Flying Girl series sparks the question: to what extent may Orissa Kane have been based on this real-life counterpart? The Delineator magazine of November 1911 reports that Harriet Quimby “is young, good-looking, energetic, ambitious and has lots of just plain, everyday nerve. . . . As she stands at the helm of her bird-craft . . . , it is a question whether the blue of her eye and the rose of her cheek call forth less cheering from the crowd of interested spectators than the fact that the little sky pilot represents the first type of buoyant young American womanhood.” This description could easily fit Baum’s own heroine. On April 16, 1912, Harriet Quimby was the first woman to fly across the English Channel.

Only weeks later, on July 1, 1912, she died while flying in the Third Annual Boston Aviation Meet at Squantum, Massachusetts. William Willard, the organizer of the event, was a passenger in her brand-new two-seat Bleriot monoplane. At an altitude of 1,500 feet the aircraft unexpectedly pitched forward for reasons still unknown. Both Willard and Quimby were ejected from their seats and fell to their deaths, while the plane glided down and lodged itself in the mud.

In the Flying Girl and Her Chum, Baum finally acknowledges the existence of other American female aviators: Blanche Scott, the first American woman to fly an airplane, and Matilde Moisant, who trained at her brother’s New York aviation school with Harriet Quimby.

Blanche Scott in her biplane.

The site of the Kane Hydro-Aeroplane’s launch may have a contemporary counterpart.

Baum’s text states that Stephen Kane’s aircraft hangar is near Glenn Curtiss’s aviation camp on a low bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In reality Glenn Curtiss’s aviation camp was on North Island in San Diego bay. But there are no bluffs on North Island. However, a location near San Diego closely resembles Baum’s description of the Hydro-Aeroplane’s launch area.

The bluffs at the Torrey Pines Gliderport as they look today.

The Torrey Pines Gliderport perches on the bluffs north of San Diego, adjacent to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Here on clear days, modern enthusiasts launch gliders, paragliders, and sailplanes to soar high above the Pacific coast. It’s tempting to see in this activity a continuity with Orissa’s fictional flight. At the base of the sandy bluff is San Diego's "clothing optional" Black's Beach.

Unfortunately the Flying Girl series ended after only two titles, though the fault was clearly not in Baum’s writing. The two books are arguably the best non-fantasy novels Baum ever wrote. They are almost completely free of the ethnic stereotyping and slurs that mar his other young adult novels. And Orissa is a strong female character - like Dorothy. Perhaps the books were too ahead of their time. Maybe boys wouldn’t read about a girl hero; and girls weren’t terribly interested in aviation? Reilly and Britton seemed to be carefully trying to find a balance.

In fact, the first-draft manuscript of The Flying Girl and Her Chum proved far too thrilling for the publisher. Sumner Britton in a letter to Baum on May 9, 1912, wrote,"We don’t need to have the second book any more daring than the first—which was very exciting. I read that myself and felt that it carried all the thrills we could possibly stand in a book of this kind. We are shooting at boys and girls from eleven to fourteen and we have to pass muster with their parents, teachers, and librarians.” Baum altered the manuscript.

A third volume in the series, to be titled The Flying Girl’s Brave Venture, was planned, but never appeared. Chum’s year of publication, 1912, brought both Harriet Quimby’s fatal air accident and Matilde Moisant’s retirement from flying after her own fiery crash. Fred Erisman, in The Baum Bugle, speculates that publicity surrounding these events may have caused parents to look on aviation as unsuitable for girls, resulting in poor sales for the Flying Girl books.

In January 1912, Baum wrote to his publisher, Sumner Britton, that a letter from Britton had remained unanswered, "Because I’ve been attending an aviation meet. But I’m through with that now. Saw a man killed yesterday and that settles the thing for me."

Whatever the reason, Baum abandoned the Flying Girl series and in 1913 he restarted his popular Oz series.

Although the Flying Girl series ended after just two volumes, it wasn’t the end of at least one of the characters. In Mary Louise Solves a Mystery (1917), the third of Baum’s Mary Louise books (which were also credited to Edith Van Dyne), Stephen Kane turns up as the owner of a successful flying-machine factory. Orissa’s career as an aviator seems to have subsided, but her oft-stated goal of showing the world the merits of the Kane Aircraft has been achieved; Baum states that “Stephen Kane’s aeroplane was now admitted to be one of the safest and most reliable ever invented.”

And it was all due to the bravery and skill of Orissa Kane - THE FLYING GIRL!

Both The Flying Girl and The Flying Girl and her Chum are available in beautiful reprint editions from Hungry Tiger Press! The Flying Girl is illustrated by award-winning illustrator Eric Shanower, who has also provided a new Foreword for The Flying Girl and Her Chum, which proved invaluable in the preparation of this essay.

 

The Flying Girl
by L. Frank Baum
Illustrated by Eric Shanower
Click here to order! 

Original halftone plates by Joseph Pierre Nuyttens
5 1/2"x 8 1/2"  - 188 Pages - Hardcover

From the author of The Wizard of Oz comes a high-flying adventure featuring intrepid girl aviator Orissa Kane. Like Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, Orissa is intelligent, self-reliant, and always persevering.

Circumstances force young Orissa Kane into the air in her brother’s innovative new airplane. But a deadly foe is intent on sending her crashing back to earth. Soar to new heights with the Flying Girl as she braves countless dangers to achieve worldwide acclaim.


 

The Flying Girl and Her Chum
 By L. Frank Baum
Illustrated by Joseph Pierre Nuyttens
Click here to order!

5 1/2"x 8 1/2"  - 250 Pages - Hardcover
 
In this high-flying sequel to The Flying Girl, a damaged aeroplane strands brave Orissa Kane and her best friend Sybil on a barren rock somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The two teenage girls must use all their wits just to survive. Meanwhile, in the best Oz-book double-plot tradition, Orissa's friends form a search party to find the missing girls. Throw in a ragged band of ocean-going outlaws bent on mayhem, and you have one of L. Frank Baum's most exciting non-Oz adventure stories, The Flying Girl and Her Chum. 

Eric Shanower provides a new Foreword detailing Baum's writing process and the history of women in early aviation including the young female aviator Harriet Quimby, who was likely a model for the Flying Girl!

"Baum had a way of writing juvenile series without writing down to his audience. At his best, his novels are tinged with a certain amount of cynicism--you weren't always sure at first who the good guys were....It can be very refreshing."

-Yellowback Library

Map of Oz Monday - Origins of the Oz Club Maps

If any Oz maps can come close to challenging Baum's own maps of 1914 it is the highly detailed set produced by the International Wizard of Oz Club. We will spend the next several weeks discussing these maps' evolution, and their many pros and cons.

But I think a look at some of the origins of the Oz Club maps might be in order before we begin our in-depth analysis. The Oz Club maps were researched and designed by James E. Haff and drawn by Oz illustrator Dick Martin.

James E. Haff (left) and Dick Martin (right) creators of the Oz Club's maps.

The Oz Club's maps were first published in 1962. Jim Haff certainly had an affinity for this sort of meticulous note-taking and puzzle solving; indeed he was a civilian cartographer for the U. S. Air Force. But the Oz Club's map project was begun by Robert R. Pattrick, who was already making notes and preliminary Oz maps when he died in August 1960 at the age of thirty-three. The Oz Club, and especially club secretary Fred M. Meyer, did all they could to honor Pattrick's legacy, and the "Explanatory Notes" for the Club's map set pays homage to Pattrick's preliminary efforts, stating: 

The International Wizard of Oz Club is especially indebted to the late Robert R. Pattrick, whose enthusiastic and scholarly studies on Oz geography blazed the trail for the maps and were of immeasurable aid in their compilation.

One of Robert R. Pattrick's Oz maps - Click to enlarge.

Above you can see the only Pattrick map I know of that still survives. You will note that he has flipped Oz so that the Munchkins are on the right hand side of Oz and in the east. While there is no compass rose, Pattrick regarded Baum's 1914 compass as an aberration. Oddly, Pattrick did not flip the rest of the continent, thus it still generally matches the 1914 "Surrounding Countries" map. I believe he did this mainly to keep the map consistent with the text of Ozma of Oz where the Land of Ev is supposed to be across the desert from the Munchkin Country. Correcting for this minor textual inconsistency plays havoc with many of the later Oz books, but that seems to be what he did. I am unsure why Pattrick, the supposed Oz and Baum scholar, failed to make Hiland and Loland into an island and has made Regos and Coregos much smaller than Pingaree, when in the book Rinkitink in Oz it is quite clear they are much larger islands.

A few other things to note in Pattrick's map: he has added Thompson's Corumbia, Corabia, and Samandra to the northern Winkie country. Their shape and placement is nearly identical on the Oz Club map but Corabia and Samandra have switched places. Pattrick has also added Pumperdink, Mudge and Ragbad to the map. As we'll see when we get to the Oz Club's map of "Surrounding Countries," Menankypoo will be where Pattrick placed it, yet yet Jim Haff will have chosen to move Rash to the north

Several choices made by Pattrick were preserved in the Oz Club's maps, most obviously the combining of the Land of Ev and the Nome King's Dominion. Note the cute sign pointing the way to Ozamaland. Dick Martin and Jim Haff used that same solution for dealing with the very distant location (and indeed Pattrick's same little sign buoy!) on the club's "Map of the Countries Surrounding Oz".

One other aspect of Pattrick's map to take note of is that he has drawn the entire continent of Nonestica, though it is a bit uninspired, essentially just a modification of the original 1914 rectangular map (see his map above).

Now, there is one map that I still need to share with you as a progenitor of the Oz Club maps. This is the map drawn by Dick Martin for The Visitors from Oz (1960).

Dick Martin's Map of the Land of Oz from THE VISITORS FROM OZ.

While this map is only part of an illustration, it holds many interesting details. First it is clearly a modified photostat of the1914 Baum map; the lettering matches the original map exactly. But Martin has also provided a coastline for Nonestica and a much more interesting one than Pattrick had drawn. I especially like the long peninsula jutting out from Merryland (click the map above to see it more clearly). For me, details like that spark the imagination! There is no good textual reason to add it (no such peninsula or harbor is referenced in Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland), but it adds detail; and detail makes for reality. And to me, believing in the map is critical to me if said map is purporting to be the real Land of Oz. One oddity in the map is that Martin has moved Pyramid Mountain to the land of the Mifkets, just south of the Quadling Country. I suspect Martin simply moved an existing detail (here obscured by the Scarecrow's hat) to a more visible location to add detail to the map.

More interestingly, Martin is the first person to have added Baum's Isle of Yew (from the 1903 The Enchanted Island of Yew) to the Ozziverse (see map above), though it is shown here in a different location (south of the Forest of Burzee) than it will be on the Oz Club map. But note, too, that Martin has also added some unidentified islands both off the coast of Merryland, and also in the vicinity of Pingaree. There is another detail I had not spotted until I enlarged this section of the map below, which is that Martin has indicated the mainland extends out to the east at the southern border of Rinkitink (see below).

Detail showing several unnamed islands added by Martin.

When I joined the Oz Club in March 1977, the first thing I ordered was a set of the Oz Club's maps. My parents were in the midst of separating; and I was burying my anxiety in Oz research and Oz collecting. A year or so earlier I had begun a large four-foot-wide topographical Oz map with lichen trees and salt-dough mountains. Mapping the fairyland I was taking refuge in made it seem all the more real I suppose. Below you can see young me with my Oz Map birthday cake!

Me with my Map of Oz birthday cake a few months after I got my first set of Oz maps.

Oh, what a photograph! I had also begun requesting sale-lists via SASE from the Club's "Oz Trading Post," and as the Ozzy fates would have it, the first two things I bought were purchased from Oz Club map designer James E. Haff: a copy of Magical Mimics in Oz and a copy of the 1920 Reilly & Lee Map of Oz. I was very excited to see and own a "real" and "old" Oz map! The club's map set didn't arrive until after my mom, sister, and I had moved out of my childhood home at the end of April.

I must admit I loved the Oz Club's maps. They went up on my wall and stayed there pretty much throughout my teen years. One aspect of the maps that Oz fans today might not take into account is that the maps also functioned as a window into the post-Baum Oz series. Back then all of the post-Baum Oz titles were out of print and difficult to find. I had never yet read any of the post-Baum Oz books when the maps arrived and I remember spending lots of time trying to imagine what book each odd location might be from, and then, following along on the maps as I eventually read each of the later twenty-six Oz books.

Next week we will begin our detailed look at the Oz Club's "Map of the Marvelous Land of Oz" as originally released in 1962. So pack your rucksack, a canteen of Ozade, and make sure you have your compass, I'm sure it will come in handy at pointing us in the right direction!

Take me to the next Map of Oz Monday blog!

You may also go back to the beginning of this multi-part series by clicking here.

Mom, I Think I Hurt my Finger . . .

Me and Zeb circa 1967 in Albuquerque at Tingley Beach.

This is the tale of my first Oz collectible, before I had any books, or records, or anything else. I am pretty sure that when I was this young I had only seen the MGM film, once, on television. I had liked the movie and I have some memory of being in the pharmacy with my mom and seeing Oz band-aids, and then mom got them for me!

Curad's OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD "Oz" bandages (1967-'68).

What I most remember was that when we got home, I wanted to look at the actual bandages, and then I wanted to put one on my finger. I think mom let me have one. But then after it got wet, or came loose, I wanted another. Mom said they were too expensive to just "wear," that I needed to save them for when I actually hurt myself.  I waited. And waited. And then twenty minutes later I was playing outside and I came running in to show some vague impression on my hand that I was sure needed a band-aid. I don't recall if I got one or not.

I think I recall my dad later than night bellowing, "Christ, what a racket! That damn company only put pictures on their band-aids so kids would want to wear 'em, and we'd go through band-aids six times as fast!"  Dad was probably right.

Curiously, I remember the bandages as being in full-color. While I haven't seen one since 1968, my memory is vivid. I remember the Wicked Witch bandage as being bright green and black. I had not seen the box since 1968 either, not until an Oz friend sold me the one above last year. The price sticker on this box is from Longs Drugs and they cost 45 cents.

I have no memories of ever seeing Off to See the Wizard, back in the 1960s. The show was produced by Chuck Jones and broadcast on ABC in 1967-'68. The Oz segments were essentially just a framing device for an anthology series that showed films such as Flipper and Clarence the Cross-eyed Lion. But I do very much remember all of the merchandising! It feels like this show produced more Oz crap than anything before the 1989 boom of MGM material.

A black-and-white clip can be seen below. I am curious why no color material is up on YouTube. There were perhaps ten episodes in good color on the 1993 MGM "Ultimate Oz" laser-disc set. Why haven't these been included in later reissues or put up on YouTube? Still, check out this samples anyway!

The first clip has only the opening, but a much better picture; the second clip has an actual "episode," including the closing credits. So watch them both!

Meet Dale Ulrey!

Dale Conner circa 1939

A couple weeks ago one of my readers asked why there seemed to be so little information on 1950s Oz and Baum illustrator Dale Ulrey. Indeed, no Oz folk seem to have ever even seen a photo of her! Might something be done about this? While a basic internet search proved rather fruitless, popping into a couple of Eric's and my genealogical resources turned the trick!

Mildred Dale Conner was born January 1, 1904, on a farm near Sulphur Springs, Texas. Her father was William Madison Conner (1870-1936) and her mother was Nellie Nichols (1872-1949). The family moved to Dallas in 1916 where her father became a salesman for Butler Bros., a department store and mail-order firm.

Young Mildred seems to always have drawn. The Dallas Morning News, September 2, 1939, wrote of the small brunette: "Before she was old enough to enter school, the future artist drew sketches of people. Her consuming ambition as a child was to 'write a book and draw all the pictures.'" She finished grade school at John S. Armstrong School in Highland Park, Texas, and spent all four years of High School at Oak Cliff High. She graduated in 1921.

Mildred Dale Conner at Oak Cliff High (1921).

Her year book says: "Some one has described Mildred as the little girl with the 'come hither' eyes and it's not such a bad description. Besides being very easy to look at, 'Cricket' can draw almost anything on earth - even a crowd." So little Mildred had the nickname of "Cricket." Oh, the things one can discover online! Cricket spent all four of her high school years on the staff of "The Acorn," the Oak Cliff High newspaper. 

Mildred Dale Conner and the "Art Staff" of THE ACORN.

She apparently adored her art instructor, Nellie Clement, and according again to The Dallas Morning News, two of her classmates also found art careers: Commercial artist Jewel Brannon of Fort Worth, and Lansing "Lance" Nolley, who went on to have a very full career working for Walt Disney Studios. See the "comments" section below for more information on Lance Nolley.

She spent another year in what the newspaper calls "post-graduate work" at Oak Cliff High studying art and Advanced French; and spent a year at the University of Texas "concentrating on line drawing and technical drawing." She also studied anatomy and life drawing with Vivian Anspaugh. While still studying in Dallas she began work in the art department of the Palace Theater.

Dale must have enjoyed her movie theater art work as she moved to New York (for the next twelve years) where she worked for Hap Hadley's theatrical art studio, handling publicity for many of the major movie studios.

Her earliest cartooning work seems to have begun when she started working for Martha Orr, creator of  the comic strip Apple Mary, later renamed Mary Worth's Family. In 1937, Orr married, and turned over all of the drawing chores to Dale.

One of Dale's "Apple Mary" strips from August 23, 1939 - click to enlarge

An original Sunday strip of MARY WORTH'S FAMILY from 1941.

You can read the entire and fascinating history of the transformation of Apple Mary into Mary Worth, here, in this Comics Journal essay. But Conner's reasons for departing from the strip are best summed up here, in a letter she wrote to fellow cartoonist Milton Caniff: “I’m so heart-sick over what Apple Mary has turned out to be. Working on it has become a chore. There’s no action to draw, only dull and childish conversation, and the plot is so inane that I gag as I try to make something of it. I dread seeing the proofs each week for my feeling shows in them.”

Sometime between September 1939 and April 1940 Dale Conner married Frank Herbert Melville Ulrey (1898-1958). The 1940 census shows them living in Chicago. Herb Ulrey was a navigator in World War I and after the war continued his work as a navigator, working for Sir Thomas Lipton, the famous yachtsman. A 1942 Dallas newspaper article states that Herbert Ulrey had previously drawn his own comic strip about a "G-Man," but I can find no information on or evidence for this claim.

Soon after their marriage, Dale quit Mary Worth's Family and she and Herb developed a new strip called Hugh Striver, relating the adventures of a newspaper boy; it debuted October 5, 1942.

Hugh Striver seems to have been only moderately successful. It came to an end in February 1945. You can see the first strip below:

HUGH STRIVER, October 5, 1942, by Herb & Dale Ulrey - click to enlarge

For a time the Ulreys lived in Barrington, Illinois, (on Bateman Road) and in August of 1943 they had a daughter, Dale Caroline Ulrey.

Herb and Dale Ulrey circa 1943.

In April 1945 Dale Ulrey launched a new "adventure" comic strip that she both wrote and drew called Ayer Lane, about a young man with an airplane. This strip ran until sometime in 1947.

Ulrey's AYER LANE strip from August 11, 1945 - click to enlarge

Dale Ulrey began her association with Oz publisher Reilly & Lee in 1953 when she illustrated L. Frank Baum's Jaglon and the Tiger Fairies. The cover has always struck me as extremely dull. I suspect the blame should be placed with Reilly & Lee, not Ulrey, as anyone with Ulrey's skill and gifts at composition simply could not create such an uninspired cover.

Compare the cover to one of the interior illustrations shown below. It is lovely, beautifully executed, and thoroughly charming.

Interior art for JAGLON AND THE TIGER FAIRIES by Ulrey.

In 1954 she designed a dust wrapper for Jack Snow's Who's Who in Oz, but it was used only in advertisements for the book, being replaced by the yellow and red jacket based on the endpapers of The Royal Book of Oz.

There are a number of drawings by Ulrey for Ozma of Oz. No such edition was ever published, and given the fact that they were executed in varying techniques, I suspect they were work samples. You can see more of these on Bill Campbell's Oz Enthusiast blog. One of the prettiest is seen below.

Unpublished illustration by Dale Ulrey for L. Frank Baum's OZMA OF OZ.

Reilly & Lee must have liked the samples because in 1955 Ulrey began a project to re-illustrate the Oz series with a new edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz. Presumably the publisher thought more modern illustrations would help invigorate sales.

While most Oz fans would argue that Neill's original illustrations are inseparable from Baum's text, Ulrey produced a very handsome volume. You can see and read much more about Ulrey's edition of The Tin Woodman of Oz in this previous blog post.


The next year, in 1956, Ulrey got the honor of illustrating the first edition of The Wizard of Oz to be published by Reilly & Lee.

Ulrey's jacket design for the 1956 edition of THE WIZARD OF OZ.

Ulrey's illustrations are handsome, though not as successful as those she did for Tin Woodman. They were all printed in two colors.

Dale Ulrey illustration from the 1956 edition of THE WIZARD OF OZ.

Herbert Ulrey died on January 29, 1958, of a cerebral hemorrhage. At the time he and Dale were living in Hickory, North Carolina, on 450 3rd Avenue Drive, S. E., though I can not yet find when or why the family had moved to North Carolina, but it was after 1951.

After her 1956 Wizard of Oz, Dale Ulrey may have retired, as I can find no evidence that she did any additional work in either comics or illustration. Dale died October 14, 1989, in Dallas, Texas. It seems an absolute crime that no one ever interviewed her for The Baum Bugle or tried (as far as I know) to get her to a convention. Such missed opportunities! We will take closer looks at Ulrey's edition of The Wizard of Oz in the coming weeks.

Map of Oz Monday - Under Baum's Directions

Next week we will begin our discussion of the Oz Club's set of maps. But before we start on that part of our journey I wanted to revisit, and I hope strengthen, one of my views on the geography and orientation of the Land of Oz: there is no mistake in directions on Baum's original 1914 map of Oz. He fully intended that Oz have a backwards compass, with east on the left and west on the right.

Baum's 1914 Map of Oz with non-standard compass points.

I am not the only Oz fan to prefer Baum's quirky directional sense. Bill Campbell on The Oz Enthusiast blog said of Baum's 1914 map:  "This is unlike any standard map, but Oz is a magical land - perhaps that is simply how things work there! . . . I still like the original map in Tik-Tok with its unique directions - that's how I think the map should be!"

Oz fans long surmised that Baum probably had a hand in drawing the 1914 map and sent it in to the publisher where it was redrawn by a staff artist. Yet there was never any proof that Baum had a hand in the creation of the 1914 map. But a couple years ago I found verification when I was given access to the papers of Louis F. Gottschalk, composer of the 1913 musical The Tik-Tok Man of Oz and of the scores to the 1914 Oz Films.

Gottschalk and Baum circa 1913 - Collection of David Maxine.

In 1925 Louis F. Gottschalk wrote his memories of watching L. Frank Baum draw the Oz map that was included as the endpapers of Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). Here's Gottschalk's recollection:

I remember when we were at work on the Tik-Tok Man of Oz, Frank took a day off to answer at least 100 letters that had accumulated during the previous week. One little girl wrote and asked him for a map of the land of Oz saying she wished to follow them in their travels. In my presence he made a map of the mythical country of Oz and in the next Oz book the map appeared. “I do so love the map of Oz” wrote the little girl, “for now I can follow the Scarecrow, Tin-Woodman, and Tik-Tok and Betsy and Pumpkin head when the cyclone picks them up here and drops them down there in another country.”

Gottschalk's full-length memorial to Baum, which includes this passage, was published for the first time in the Winkie Con 50 Souvenir Program which is available here: Order a copy of the Winkie Con 50 Souvenir book.

So we have confirmation that Baum designed the 1914 map of the Land of Oz. To me, knowing that Baum was responsible makes this map the most authentic of all Oz maps. That, of course, does not address why the map has east on the left and west on the right. But it is too deliberate and if it was a mistake, it was too easily fixed. As I said in this previous post:

Neither Baum, nor his wife, nor the artist who redrew it, nor John R. Neill, nor the publisher ever said, "Hey LFB, you got your compass points wrong!" If Baum had some moment of directional dyslexia when he drew the rough map, there are just too many eyes and too many steps, from his sketchy doodles to finished drawing, to making proofs, to printing the book, for this not to have been EASILY corrected. If it wasn't corrected - it wasn't an error - thus, this is how Baum viewed Oz.

Two years after the map was first published we get confirmation from Baum himself that this is how he viewed Oz and that it wasn't simply a typesetting or artistic error. On September 6, 1916, Baum submitted another map along with the manuscript of The Lost Princess of Oz to the publisher and in the accompanying cover letter he stated:

You will find a "Map of the Search for the Lost Princess," which I would like to have redrawn and printed in black-and-white and placed in the fore part of the book. Nothing we ever did made such a hit with the kiddies as the maps of Oz we once used for endpapers, and I think this present map worthwhile on that account.

So Baum confirms that he drew this map (admittedly to be neatened up by a staff artist), but it preserves the Winkie Country "on the right and in the West" orientation and other geographical details of the 1914 map. Baum has even labeled the branches of the Winkie River, which as you'll read below, becomes very important.

Map of Oz from THE LOST PRINCESS OF OZ (1917).

In the text of Lost Princess Baum writes the following:

At the east [border of the Winkie Country] which part lies nearest the Emerald City, there are beautiful farmhouses and roads, but as you travel west, you first come to a branch of the Winkie River, beyond which there is a rough country where few people live, and some of these are quite unknown to the rest of the world. After passing through this rude section of territory, which no one ever visits, you would come to still another branch of the Winkie River, after crossing which you would find another well-settled part of the Winkie Country extending westward quite to the Deadly Desert . . .

And a little later he writes:

In the course of a few hours, however, they had left the tilled fields [around the Emerald City] and entered the country of the Winkies. . . . Long before night the travellers had crossed the Winkie River near to the Scarecrow's tower (which was now vacant) and had entered the rolling prairie where few people live.

Here we have Baum himself using this map in his written text and describing the travelers leaving the Emerald City, moving left to right on the map, and getting to the "East Branch" of the Winkie River before they get to the "West Branch." A careful reading of the text makes it clear that Baum intended the text to reflect the map - including the reversed compass directions.

It seems very clear that this is simply how Baum saw the Land of Oz. Why he never made more of it I can't imagine. Perhaps he just thought it was quaint or magical. At one time I would have suggested that Baum was bad at directions and simply drew the map with the Winkies and Munchkins reversed. And then, rather than start over, he chuckled and fixed it by labeling the compass to suit his drawing. Perhaps that was how it happened. But it must have become a very deliberate choice, as it could have been fixed at any point in the book's production process at Reilly and Britton. So I'm left with the firm belief that this map shows Oz how it was meant to be.

But I am curious what Baum's hand-drawn map of Oz would have looked like. How detailed was it? Was it a scribble or quite precise? Baum's original map does not seem to survive. But I think I can show you a similar map that I believe was in fact drawn by Baum himself.

This is the map included in Baum's Boy Fortune Hunters in Panama (1908) which has been reprinted by Hungry Tiger Press as Sam Steele's Adventures: the Amazing Bubble Car. If you're interested you can order a copy below! In that book's text the map is found in the diary of  the recently murdered Maurice Kleppisch. The map was almost certainly drawn by Baum himself and submitted with his manuscript to Reilly & Britton. We know Baum was artistic and a good craftsman, and I find it impossible to believe that the publisher had a staff artist draw this map for an inconsequential boys series book. This is simply Baum having fun. And since the map didn't need to be as "polished" as the Oz map would need to be, Baum's pen-and-ink skill were totally adequate. Here's that map.

Baum's map from THE BOY FORTUNE HUNTERS IN PANAMA (1908).

I think you can see there are many similarities to the 1914 Map of the Land of Oz. The way rivers are drawn, forests delineated by little little "x" marks, the "hash mark" mountains, and indeed even the lettering of the oceans which runs top to bottom in differing directions for each ocean - exactly like the labeling of the Deadly Desert on the 1914 map.

Granted, how many ways are there to draw a map? But if Baum drew as detailed and finished Oz maps as he seemingly drew for The Boy Fortune Hunters in Panama, then I think we can say Baum himself is responsible for the detail in the Oz maps, whether the undulations of rivers or the placement of the Winkie and Munchkin countries.

Next Monday we will begin our discussion of the Oz Club's Maps of Oz.
Click here to go to our next installment of Map of Oz Monday!

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Boy Fortune Hunters in Panama?

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