In November 1956 we were living in the Great Stone House on my grandparents’ farm just outside Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, but as my mother had been brought up in Richland and my father on a farm just outside Richland, and my mother’s parents still lived in Richland, we visited that borough frequently.

On November 3 Richland’s annual Halloween parade was scheduled to be held. For some reason the Halloween parade seemed to be the big parade of the year in Richland.

In any case it was an event that we were not going to miss.

This promised to be the biggest, most elaborate Halloween parade that Richland had ever assembled. There would be bands and floats and all the local organizations would be represented in one way or another. But you didn’t have to belong to an organization or a band. Merely deck yourself out in some sort of costume and you could march along in the procession. I guess that’s one of the reasons that it was such a big event. Anyone could join in the fun.

I was seven years old and this was a Saturday night, so there was no school the next day. Still, I’m certain my mother had made me take a nap in the afternoon, as she knew I’d be staying up well past my usual bedtime. Whether I actually slept during my nap-time is open to conjecture.

When the parade had finished wending its circuitous way through Richland’s streets (and if you check the route that it took, it’s a wonder that it didn’t get tangled up into itself), we got into our green Plymouth sedan (vintage 1951, I think) and drove back to the Great Stone House.

When we got home, my mother turned on our black and white television set.

She had been preparing me all day (probably all week) for the show that was about to come on. Actually we got home a few minutes past nine o’clock so the show—a movie actually—was already in progress.

There was a girl in a gingham dress talking to a little dog about trying to find a place where there isn’t any trouble. Then she launched into a song about a land somewhere over the rainbow. She had a very good voice for such a young girl.

When that movie was shown again in 1959, I made sure to catch it from the beginning, and in 1964 when Dick Van Dyke along with his children hosted it, I had a tape recorder hooked up to our TV, so I recorded the audio for frequent replaying.

After 1964 that movie became a cultural phenomenon and was shown on TV annually. According to Aljean Harmetz:

As of July 1975, The Wizard of Oz was in 11th place on the list of the highest-rated movies ever shown on network television. (It was also in 12th place, 14th place, 16th place, 21st place, 23rd place, and 25th place.)

When CBS bought the rights in 1956 to show The Wizard of Oz twice at $225,000 for each broadcast with an option to show it seven more times for $150,000 each, they thought that two or three showings would “exhaust the film’s potential”.

Shows you how much network executives know.

 

 

 

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