Off To See The Wizard Turn 100

At 5:20 p.m. sharp Thursday, Dr. Richard R. Rutter, 68, took off over the University of Indiana in a hot air balloon dressed as the Wizard of Oz in a top hat and frock coat with nine plastic pigs on it.

In real life, Rutter is a professor of orthodontics at the School of Dentistry at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco. But for 10 brief minutes until he drifted down to an athletic field, Rutter imagined that he was the Wizard himself on his way to the Emerald City, pulling baby pigs out of his sleeves and letting them run up and down his shoulders.

“Oh, I felt very wizardly, yes,” Rutter said, after landing.

Rutter was one of some 400 Oz fans who came to the University of Indiana for a weekend celebration of the centennial of L. Frank Baum’s book, “The Wizard of Oz.”

The event was sponsored by the International Wizard of Oz Club, and the group was here to honor the timeless story of a little girl, Dorothy, who is blown out of Kansas by a cyclone and encounters the Wizard, who lives in the Emerald City and promises to help her find her way home.

The publication of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1900 ushered in “a new era of American children’s literature,” Michael Patrick Hearn, an Oz scholar, said in the celebration’s keynote address.

“The fairy is eliminated - and the fearsome morality.”

“Baum dared to offer delight without instruction,” said Hearn.

The story has worked its way into the national psyche as a fable of eternal hope in which things are not always as fearsome as they seem, even lions are cowards, wizards are just pretending to be fierce, and it is always best to be at home. “It’s like a religion,” said the author Alison Lurie, who was here to give a talk. “It has its holy relics, its laity, its clergy” - the Baum descendants and the heads of the Oz fan clubs.

With 5 million copies sold until it went into the public domain in 1956, “The Wizard of Oz” was the Harry Potter of its time.

It is impossible to know how many of the Oz books have been sold since then, Hearn said, but he estimated that more people have seen the 1939 MGM movie of “The Wizard of Oz” with Judy Garland, and more times, than any other movie.

At the celebration, there were lectures on every aspect of Baum’s life and work, displays of Oz collectibles, and a church service with an Oz theme. Three of the original Munchkins from the 1939 movie came.