Today we took the afternoon off to journey to Wamego, KS and the Oz Museum. There were over 2000 artifacts relating to L. Frank Baum's books, a showing of the Wizard of Oz movie, board games, and silent films. Some terrific pictures, features on the munchkins and main characters of the film.
We had no idea Baum wrote series of Oz books and the transformation of the books to the theatre to the technicolor magic of MGM's 1939 release. Buddy Ebsen (Jed Clampitt) was originally supposed to be the Tin Man but couldn't handle something about the costume. Shirley Temple was originally offered the role of Dorothy. W.C. Fields was originally offered the part of the Wizard. Stan Laurel was in the theatre version before he hooked up with Oliver Hardy to form Laurel and Hardy.
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| Official "Death" Certificate of the W.W.O.W |
Great artifacts leading up to the film, the film itself, then the aftermath. Well done. Touching vignettes with the munchkins from a few years ago. Margaret Hamilton autographs as W.W.O.W. 
About 15 miles to the West of the Oz Museum is the city of Manhattan, Kansas and the campus of the Kansas State University Wildcats. The two was bigger than we imagined. There was a football camp going on at Bill Snyder Family Stadium, but we got in to take some pictures. The upper deck on the East Side (added in 1998) shoots straight up and increased the capacity to 50,000. Looks and feels smaller, actually.
Kansas State is the 6th of the ten Big XII schools we've been to.
Directly north of the stadium was Bramlage Arena. Only way inside was through the offices. No problem. Totally forgot former Illinois basketball coach Bruce Weber was the new coach there. There was some sort of practice going on (and they were waxing the aisles, so we couldn't get close), but we would have looked for him. Arena holds 12,528 although the largest crowd was 13,762. Looked like a great venue to watch basketball. TV makes it look a little dungy, but thought it was very nice.
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