Flick: Oz, JFK, and the man wearing a garbage bag

FLICK LITE: Our latest listings, as offered by the readers and your own resident Lite Boy...

Closest tie to Oz

So it's evolving that of all the great novels and monumental movies, the biggest may be a simple fantasy written in the year 1900: "Wizard of Oz."

Those who didn't read it, saw the 1939 movie that years later was sculpted into "Wicked," a Broadway smash that, as we speak, is about to break into yet another form, another Oz movie.

For Scott Sober and wife Sarah Jacobs, of Bloomington, it's something that also touches all of that — their grandparents and parents loved the original movie and had them watch it in childhood, too. Then, when visiting New York City in October 2003, and wanting to see a Broadway play, they happened upon the opening night of Broadway's original, then little-known "Wicked." They loved it, have seen it several times in other cities, and now await with their own grandchildren on Thanksgiving, the opening of the movie musical.

Scott and Sarah have one other special tie, too: On that October 2003 flight out to NYC, they happened to meet another passenger on the plane, Mickey Carroll.

Carroll was the lead "munchkin" in the 1939 movie.

They chatted it up and posed for pictures.

To bring the story even closer to home for Scott and Sarah, Carroll (who died in 2009 at age 89) also is the fellow who in 1997 came to Bloomington to donate and place a new headstone on an Evergreen Cemetery grave — of Dorothy herself, in real-life, Dorothy Gage, the young girl "Wizard of Oz" author L. Frank Baum named his story's lead character after.

"A story full circle," as Scott Sober puts it.

There's no place like home.

Most unusual polling place observation

Remember all the contentious comments on garbage during the last week of the 2024 presidential race that spawned Donald Trump to even ride around in a garbage truck?

On Election Day, McLean County Clerk Kathy Michael was at one of the dozens of polling places in the county, when she asked an election judge: "Have anything interesting happen today?"

Replied the judge: "Just the one man by the polling place who was wearing a large garbage bag."

Funniest disappointment

At last weekend's Class 4A high school football playoff at Illinois State University's Hancock Stadium between University High School and visiting Olney, the southeastern Illinois town, one fan showed up for two reasons:

"I wanted to see my grandson," who plays for U High, and "I wanted to see a football team dressed up like white squirrels."

Olney, of course, is the famed home of the albino white squirrels.

But the athletic teams there (your humbled columnist is an alum) have always been, perhaps inexplicably ... Tigers.

Latest roadway dilemma

"On a two-lane street," says reader Bob Bradley, "I pulled up behind a truck that had a sign above its tailgate that read, 'Work Truck ... Do Not Follow.'"

"It was then I began wondering what were my options."

Latest greatest license plate sighting

Spotted in Bloomington on a Mini Cooper Countryman, with a British flag emblem on the license-plate frame:

"NOT A SPY"

Whew. Good to know.

More Fun Places To Visit, If Only For Their Names

(As offered by the readers)

— Fair Play, Wisconsin

— Index, Washington

— Boody, Illinois

Best promotion that never happened

It was in the Nov. 22, 1963, edition of The Pantagraph — 61 years ago this week — that Kmart, one of the first stores to locate in what would become Bloomington's commerce-loaded east side, advertised a fun promotion: An airplane would pass over its parking lot and drop 1,000 pingpong balls, each to be reimbursed for a prize.

"I'm not sure how one drops 1,000 pingpong balls from an airplane and gets them to land in one parking lot, even one as large as the old Kmart's," says Bill Kemp, a librarian at the McLean County Museum of History, who recently discovered the ad.

And no one will ever know if it could have been accomplished.

That afternoon, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the promotion, scheduled for Nov. 23, was canceled.

And it was never rescheduled.

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Our latest board of contributors: Scott Sober, Bill Kemp, Kathy Michael, Lee Templeton and Joe Culpepper, Bloomington; Roger Hughes, Vincent Williams and Bob Bradley, Normal; Tim Saterfield, Madison, Wisconsin.

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