The death of the Coroner

The death of the Coroner

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Click on the above link to view the actual article on www.examiner.com.

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

Singing those four lines, Meinhardt Raabe stood proudly in downtown OZ one day, wearing his big funny black hat and pronouncing the death of the wicked Witch of the East; who died suddenly when a little wooden farmhouse happened to land in her general direction. Her untimely death would incur the certain wrath of her nastier, older sister, causing the banishment of the meek and timid Dorothy Gale, to some far-off land called Oz.


I thought it would be nice to share a few things about Meinhardt, who sadly, passed away on April 10, 2010, at the Orange Park Medical Center in Orange Park, Florida, after suffering a heart attack. He was 95.
Meinhardt was an exceptional little man. Barely 4’ 7”, he never heard the word dwarf or midget when he was young; he just thought he was special. He was born on Sept. 2, 1915, in Watertown, Wisconsin and until he visited the ‘Midget village’ at the Chicago World's Fair he thought he was all alone. He worked there as a barker in 1933.

He received a bachelor’s degree in accounting at the University of Wisconsin in 1937 and obtained an M.B.A. from Drexel University in Philadelphia many years later. In 1938 he took a job as a salesman for the Oscar Meyer Company. Soon after they made him a corporate icon when he became the ‘Little Chef.’

*For those of us who may have forgotten, (I was one of these) the ‘Little Chef’ is the person who rides around in the Oscar Meyer Wiener mobile. Meinhardt traveled in the famed hot dog car, touring the country for thirty years.

In 1938 he decided to take a trip to Hollywood after reading that MGM was auditioning little people for a new film. His skills as a barker helped him, no doubt, to be selected as the coroner in the, ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ At 23, he was one of 124 actors that were cast as the ‘Munchkins,’ only nine had speaking parts.

Later he would join the Civil Air Patrol and became a skilled test pilot and spent the war years as the smallest uniformed pilot in US. History. After the war he married Margaret Marie Raabe who had once worked in Vaudeville. They were married for 50 years until her death in a car accident in 1997, near their retirement community in Penney Farms, Florida.

In 2005 he published his memoirs, “Memories of a Munchkin” (Back Stage Books, 2005; with Daniel Kinske) and on November 21, 2007, Mr. Raabe was honored with six surviving Munchkin actors at the unveiling of a ‘star’ on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.


Meinhardt was the last surviving actor with a speaking part in the ’Wizzard of Oz,’ a movie which has captured the hearts of so many in the seventy years which have passed. His four lines were not credited, but they really don’t need to be. We all know them so well and today we fondly remember Mr.Meinhardt Raabe, who was a special little man


…whose credits are still rolling.

I saw this on the news this morning while I was changing my patient's bed linen and my patient stated he knew the man. I had no idea anything about any of the Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. My patient told me a lot about the guy and so, I did a search to read more. Interesting life! It's pretty amazing what he accomplished as "a little person" back in those years. Sounds like he lived an amazing 95 years!