Oldest Resident of Munchkinland Avers Every Detail of Fateful Day

In 1938, he heard of a demand for little people in Hollywood. He took a train west.

By DAN BARRY
The New York Times

PENNEY FARMS - Like any coroner, he has seen some things. But one case stays with him nearly 70 years after the fact, like some old song he can't get out of his head.

He couldn't shake this case even if he wanted to, what with all the videotapes, the DVDs, the television broadcasts replaying the gruesome aftermath over and over, in vivid Technicolor. Those striped socks, curling back like a pair of deflating noisemakers.

The coroner's name is Meinhardt Raabe, and he lives in a retirement community tucked between here and there.

He can't see or hear too well, and his short legs need the assistance of a three-wheeled walker with hand brakes. But none of this means that at 91 he has forgotten much, because he hasn't - especially about that case.

Sitting on his small bed, his coroner's outfit stored in a closet, Raabe recalls a rich and varied life but makes clear that he accepts, even embraces, how his obituary will read: Munchkin City coroner, handled case of woman killed by house that fell from the sky.

It's hard to imagine now, but the freak accident was just one of many wacky events in a wacky, politically charged time, a time when monkeys could fly and trees could talk and life could change on a witch's whim.

With enchantment - or was it poppies? - infusing the air, a coroner's role was not so much to determine a cause of death as it was to determine whether death had indeed occurred. The victim's identity only complicated matters: As luck would have it, she was a witch, a bad one, from the east.

That is why curious residents in curious garb, led by a mayor whose shoes sprouted flowers, surrounded Raabe as he unfurled his scroll. With cameras rolling, he announced his findings:

"As coroner, I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. And she's not only merely dead, she's really, most sincerely dead."

If his words seem mannered, one should remember they were delivered in the singsong language indigenous to the region. And if his ruling caused some problems for the Kansas-based driver of the house and some grief for the victim's green-skinned sister, it was good news for Munchkinland, Oz - and Raabe, whose name rhymes with "hobby."

"I'm still getting mail," he says, pointing to stacked milk crates packed with letters yet to be answered. He just cannot get to them all.

As Raabe recalls in his autobiography, "Memories of a Munchkin" (Back Stage Books, 2005), he did not follow a coroner's typical career path.

The son of Wisconsin dairy farmers, he endured years of schoolyard teasing about what he calls his "abnormal lack of height" before wandering one day into the Midget Village attraction at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Walking its streets, meeting its inhabitants eye to eye, he realized that smallness was no impediment to happiness. "It was a new world," he says.

For the next three years, Raabe worked summers with other little people at expositions around the country, often as a pitchman. He eventually graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor's degree in accounting, only to learn that no firm would hire him.

"You don't belong here," he remembers being told. "You belong in a carnival."

Raabe eventually got a job as Little Oscar for the Oscar Mayer meat company.

Then, in 1938, came word through the grapevine of a demand for little people in Hollywood. Sensing opportunity, he boarded a train due west.

In a place where people came and went so quickly, the casting director first chose the Mayor, the three Lullaby League dancers and the three members of the Lollipop Guild. Then he lined up Raabe and several other little men and asked them to say the fateful line: "As coroner, I must aver. "

"I read that line and I let go," he recalls. "And he said, 'OK, you're the coroner.'"

Raabe's pronouncement lasted only 13 seconds, and his lines were dubbed over. But he had made his mark.

After filming ended, he returned to Oscar Mayer and to real life. He learned to fly airplanes. He joined the Civil Air Patrol during World War II.

He earned a master's degree in business administration.

He married a cigarette girl who was about his height; her name was Marie, and her beauty stole his breath. Fifty years they had, until her death in a car accident a decade ago.

Now Raabe lives alone at the Penney Retirement Community, behind a door with a sign that says "No Place Like Home." Above his bed hangs a portrait of that girl from Kansas and her unusual pals; they've all passed on. So has the Wizard, who liked his drink, and the Good Witch, who was a bit of a prima donna, and the Wicked Witch of the West, who was the kindest of them all.

Every once in a while, though, Raabe's presence is requested at some Oz-related function; he is, after all, the oldest living resident of that faraway world. He dons his outfit, poses for photographs and catches up with some of the half-dozen or so Munchkin City residents still around: the last of the Lollipop Guild trio, one of the Sleepyheads, a soldier.

Despite that unfortunate house-on-woman matter, Raabe says his days in Oz were among the happiest of his life.

And for anyone who asks, he will say that as coroner, he must aver, which means to assert with confidence.

Golden Moment

Bruce Casey was thinking about all the things he and Nathalie have done together in their 50 years of marriage. There's not a whole lot they missed out on, he said: three children, four grandchildren, nice places to live, trips to Canada, the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, Niagara Falls once.

BY DON BOXMEYER
Pioneer Press
Thu, Feb. 15, 2007



He counted off his many blessings, one after another, on his toes. Fingers? He doesn't have those. Bruce has no arms.

Bruce is 85, Nathalie is 82, and they were both born small in a large world. They both had full-size parents and standard-issue siblings. And they've both had a lifetime to digest and shrug off all the insensitivities that are somehow reserved for those who are deemed different.

"I needed a pacemaker a few years back," Bruce recalls, "and a doctor described how it would work. He said, 'We put it in your chest and then run wires down your arms.'

"I said, 'But I have no arms.' The doctor just got up and left the room.

"He didn't even say 'goodbye.' "

I last wrote about the Caseys in 1991, and Bruce opened the interview by saying, "I'm handicapped! So what?"

Nathalie is a dwarf, Bruce is not. He was born on Dayton's Bluff in St. Paul without arms, a small body and one leg much longer than the other. It was not in Bruce from the very beginning to be overlooked in a full-size world; he played hockey as the practice goalie with heavy magazines up his pant legs. He even had a jersey from the Bluff Pirates.

"We played in the streets, and when a cop car came, I could move just as fast as any of them," he said.

When he was 21, it was time to vote in his first election. Bruce's father took him to City Hall to register, and a clerk there solicitously told Bruce, "Your father can sign it."

Bruce's dad said, "He'll sign it himself," and Bruce did, with his toes.

Bruce's achievements and his sheer determination caught the attention of legendary Minneapolis newspaper columnist Cedric Adams, who in 1936 wrote, "He's bright as a dollar … to throw (a baseball) he rests on his half leg, kicks off his other shoe and pitches with his long leg. You'd be surprised at the length of the toss. He's the kind of kid that'll take the gripe out of anybody."

Nathalie comes from Kasota, Minn., all 4 feet, 2 inches of her. ("I stand short and sit tall," she told reporters at their wedding.) She went to Gustavus Adolphus College for one year, learned watchmaking in St. Paul and has worked as a proofreader at West Publishing Co. Most recently she was a teacher's aide.

She caught Bruce's eye in the 1950s at a service club for the handicapped in St. Paul. She had just gotten a car (with hand controls), which bought her a lot of attention.

"Two guys heard me say I had my car, and both proposed to me the same night," she says with a laugh.

Bruce won.

"When you see a good deal, you got to jump on it," he says.

Bruce, a 1940 graduate of Mechanic Arts High School, tried once to get a job at a candy company but was turned down — not because he couldn't do the work but because the brass worried about what the customers might think if they found out one of the employees helped make the product with his feet.

He did get a job at the Goodwill Industries cutting stencils, operating office machinery, typing out paychecks and financial reports. In his spare time, he ran the switchboard.

With his toes.

Bruce also loved to play cribbage. One of his friends once told me Bruce would hop up on the table and take his turn at shuffling and dealing. People would gather around because that was a sight to see, and one time after a particularly good hand, a well-meaning spectator began moving Bruce's peg.

Bruce gave the guy a playful little tap alongside the head with his foot and said, "I'll do my own pegging, thank you."

Naturally, Bruce and Nathalie attracted attention, and a fund was once started to get them out of public housing and into a place of their own on the East Side. With the help of late St. Paul Dispatch columnist Gareth Hiebert and WCCO-TV's Dave Moore, the fund grew large enough for a down payment on a home they moved into in 1967.

By then, they had two children of their own, Timothy, who is an average-size person, and Sue, and a foster child, David. David and Sue (and Sue's husband) are dwarfs, as is Sue's son. Tim has three average-size children.

I know that some of her parents' determination was passed along to Sue because I once chaperoned a 30-mile elementary school bicycle trip around Bald Eagle and White Bear lakes in which Sue did the whole ride not on a 10-speed bike like the rest of us had, but on a little direct-drive toy of a bike not much bigger than a roller skate.

Nathalie and Bruce will celebrate their anniversary Friday. They won't have a big party until March, when Sue and her family come home from Salem, Mass. Now, they'll probably celebrate at their country club, which is the food court of Maplewood Mall.

Bruce and Nathalie go there several times a week from their Oakdale home so Nathalie can walk the mall and Bruce can pass the time with his buddies.

"It's fun to see the little kids and how they react to us," Bruce says. "One of them looked at Nath and told her mother, 'Look at the little grandmother!'

"I had one little girl come up to me one day, and her mother wanted her to come closer, and then I could see that she was very, very interested in me.

"She, too, had no arms."

What's another really good thing that's happened to you, I ask Bruce.

"Cordless phones. I love 'em."