Little Munchkin Passes Away

Slover seen on right

Who doesn't know of The Wizard of Oz ?  It's impossible not to know about it.  We watched it as children, and as adults.  Hell, Ryan even got me the 70th Anniversary Blu-ray gift box for Christmas last year.

Well, unbeknownst to me, Karl Slover, one of only four surviving little people who played the Munchkins in the movie died this past Tuesday. :-(  He was 93.

The four-foot-five Slover, one of the shortest men in the movie, portrayed not only the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins band, but also a townsman and a soldier. The little guy was born Karl Kosiczky in what is now the Czech Republic, the only dwarf-sized child in the family. According to The Washington Post, his father inflicted inhumane treatments to make him taller, burying him in the backyard, immersing him in heated oil until his skin blistered, and attaching him to a stretching machine at a hospital. Eventually, at the age of nine, his father sold him to a traveling freak show. In his 20s, Slover moved to the States and joined a vaudeville troupe called the Singer Midgets, its 30 members becoming the core group of movie Munchkins. Slover was paid $50 a week, a salary lower than Toto’s. 

Later in life, he appeared around the country at festivals and events related to the movie, and was one of seven Munchkins representing all the little people of Oz at the 2007 unveiling of a star dedicated to them on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “He has a genuine immortality,” said 100 Years of Oz author, John Fricke. “Of the 124 little people, he’s one of the handful who got to enjoy this latter-day fame, to have people know who he was and be able to pick him out of the crowd in the movie.”