Kansas Twister

At four feet and nine inches, I don’t often run into people who are shorter than I am. But it does happen now and then. I met Jerry Maren a few years ago while he was signing autographs in a Las Vegas shopping center. Jerry is one of a handful of surviving Munchkins from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. He was a scrappy three-foot-four teenager when he handed Judy Garland a really big lollipop. He’s in his nineties now, and he hasn’t changed all that much. He told me he took a bus from New York City along with several other little people. In Los Angeles they joined over a hundred other small actors from all over the world. He claims he was paid $50 a week while the movie was in production. Toto was paid four times that much.