Welcome, neighbor. My name is Nancy Miner. I am 68 years old, I live in Topeka, Kansas, and for thirty-four years I was a telephone operator, first on the cord board downtown and later on the long distance desk. I retired in 1993. My son-in-law says that makes me the right person for the Internet, because I spent my whole working life connecting strangers to each other. I suppose he is right.

This page is about The Wizard of Oz, which turned sixty years old this August. I saw it the fall it came out, when I was eight. I have seen it more times since than I could count, and last November I took my granddaughter Robin to see it on a real movie screen, which I had not done since 1939. So this page is laid out like a road, the way the picture is, with a stop for each year that matters to me. Follow the bricks.

A word about the bricks: I could not find yellow ones for the background, so these are red. Call them Kansas bricks. We still have red brick streets in parts of Topeka, and they rattle your fillings just the same.

MGM opened The Wizard of Oz in Hollywood in the middle of August 1939, and it took its time coming out to us. I grew up in a little Kansas town about an hour west of here, the kind of town with one grain elevator, one stoplight and one picture show. Ours was the Rex. It had a pressed-tin ceiling and a balcony that smelled like popcorn and wet wool, and on Saturdays it cost a dime.

My big sister Mildred was eleven and in charge of me. We had been hearing about this picture all fall, because it was about a Kansas girl, and in those years nobody made pictures about Kansas girls. The whole town went. Farmers came in from twenty miles off. I remember the line went past the drugstore.

Here is what I remember best, and I have never read anywhere that it was this way for anybody else, so maybe it was only me. When the picture started, the farm was all brown and gray, and I thought, well, that is Kansas, all right. It looked like our place in the dry years. Then Dorothy opened the door of the house and the color came in, and I grabbed Mildred's arm so hard she had a bruise the next day. I had never seen color like that in my life. Nobody had. Mildred says I said "oh" out loud, and so did half the Rex.

I was scared to death of the Witch. I spent most of her scenes with my coat over my head. I am 68 years old and I still look away when the flying monkeys come.

Victor Fleming is the director whose name is on it. He made Gone with the Wind the same year, which beat our picture for Best Picture, and I have never quite forgiven Scarlett for it. Here are the people I think of when I think of Oz.

The Tin Man who wasn't. Buddy Ebsen, who all of you know as Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies and later as Barnaby Jones, was first cast as the Scarecrow and then traded parts with Ray Bolger. The Tin Man makeup was made with aluminum powder in those days, and it got into Mr. Ebsen's lungs and put him in the hospital. Jack Haley took over. I have always been glad Mr. Ebsen got a long career out of it anyway.

The Oscars. The picture won two: one for the song Over the Rainbow, by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, and one for Herbert Stothart's music score. I have read that the studio came close to cutting that song because they thought it slowed the Kansas part down. Can you imagine? I won't print the words here; you know them already, and you sing them better in your head than I could type them.

Here is a question that wins church-basement trivia. In Mr. Baum's book, the shoes Dorothy takes from the Wicked Witch of the East are silver. In the picture they are ruby.

The reason is the reason for everything in that picture: Technicolor. It was new and it was expensive, and MGM wanted every penny of it up on the screen. Silver shoes on a yellow road would have just looked pale. Red ones sparkle. So the screenwriters changed them, and now there is a pair in the Smithsonian and nobody under fifty remembers they were ever silver.

I am a book woman, and I still say the picture got this one right.

CBS showed The Wizard of Oz on television for the first time on Saturday, November 3, 1956. Bill and I had been married four years. We had a Motorola the size of a hope chest and a baby daughter, Debra, who slept through the whole thing.

Our set was black and white, like everybody's. So when Dorothy opened that door, nothing happened. Gray Kansas, gray Oz. Bill said, "Is that it?" and I told him he should have been at the Rex. After that it came on about once a year, and our children grew up thinking it was a black-and-white picture with a slow part at the start. We did not get a color set until 1971. The first year we watched it in color, Bill, who was not a crier, had to go out and check on the car.

Every Kansan who has seen the picture knows the tornado is the part they got right. I put this stop on the road because of the evening of Wednesday, June 8, 1966, when a tornado came over Burnett's Mound and straight through Topeka and Washburn University. The old story had always been that the Mound protected the town. It didn't.

I was on the board that night. Every light on it lit up at once, and we stayed in our chairs and put calls through for hours, people trying to find their families, the hospitals, the police. Our house was spared. Many were not. I won't say more than that here, except that afterward I never watched Dorothy's house go up in the air quite the same way, and I have never once made a joke about it.

Last fall Warner Brothers put the picture back in theaters, all cleaned up and restored, for the sixtieth anniversary. It opened on Friday, November 6, 1998, and on Saturday afternoon I took my granddaughter Robin, who was nine. We went to one of those big theaters out by the mall, with the cup holders and the seats that lean back. It is not the Rex. But the screen was big, and that was the point.

Two things I want to tell you. First, the Kansas part is not black and white at all, the way I had it in my head from all those years on our old Motorola. It is sepia, a warm brown, like an old photograph in the family Bible. They had restored it that way. I had forgotten that. Maybe I never noticed it in 1939; I was eight.

Second, when Dorothy opened the door, Robin grabbed my arm. Same arm, I think. Sixty years apart. I did not tell her about Mildred and the bruise until we were back in the car, and then we both laughed so hard I had to wait to start the engine.

Robin's verdict: the Lion was the best, the Witch was "not even that scary," and she would like the shoes for Christmas. Her mother says we'll see.

If you are from Kansas, you know. You travel somewhere, you tell somebody where you're from, and they ask where your little dog is. Or they say the line. You know the one. I have heard it from a bellhop in Chicago, a nurse in Denver and a customs man in Canada, and every one of them thought he was the first.

So let me say a few things for the state.

Kansas is not gray. Mr. Baum's book describes Kansas as gray from end to end: the prairie, the house, even poor Aunt Em. Well. Mr. Baum was from New York, and he never lived in Kansas a day in his life. He did spend a few years out in Aberdeen, South Dakota, around 1890, back when it was still the frontier. I have been to South Dakota in February. I think I know which state he was really describing.

The picture was not made here. All of Kansas in that movie is a sound stage in California. The sky is painted. You can tell, if you look. Come stand in a wheat field in Rice County in June and tell me that sky is gray.

But Dorothy is ours. Of all the places Mr. Baum could have sent her home to, he picked Kansas. And the whole point of the picture, the very last thing she figures out, is that the place she started from was worth getting back to. I'll take it.

(To be fair: my son-in-law is from Nebraska and says Kansas should be grateful anybody wanted to film it at all. He is welcome at Thanksgiving anyway.)