“Imagination
has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization.
Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to
discover electricity.” – L. Frank Baum
Baum, who was born May 15, 1856 in New York,
not only won lasting success but also several spots in the lexicon with his
imagination by creating The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And while
that is the story for which he is mainly remembered, he wrote some 60 other
novels, 83 short stories, 200 poems and countless scripts, produced on stage
and in the fledgling movie industry of the early 1900s.
Baum also was a newspaper editor for
several years, working at the Saturday
Evening Pioneer in Aberdeen, S.D.
He said it was his newspaper work in what was first the Dakota Territory
and then South Dakota that led to his long and lucrative writing career.
His 1880s experiences on
the Dakota prairies, in fact, became his model for the rural setting at the beginning of Dorothy’s journey into
Oz. But, of course he decided at the
last minute – maybe to stop friends from thinking “Hey, that character sounds
like me” – to change the location to Kansas, which he had never visited.
And thus, along with
Dorothy, Toto, the Tin man and his idea that a land could be found somewhere over the rainbow, his phrase “Toto I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” would become one of the most
recognizable in the English language.
It’s probably for the best, since it has a much better ring to it than “I
don’t think we’re in South Dakota anymore.”
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