Dorothy Gale

The Nonbinary Review devotes each issue to an existing work. The poems and stories in the issue are in tribute to the chosen work. In the issue devoted to The Wizard of Oz, the prose poem, “Dorothy Gale” by Lorraine Schein, has as epigraph a snippet from a May 27, 2013 New York Times article, which claims that L. Frank Baum took the name for his protagonist from a news report about a real Kansas tornado. Says the New York Times (as quoted by Schein): “The name of one of the victims, who had been found buried face down in a mud puddle, was Dorothy Gale.”

In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy is not given a last name. She only reveals a last name in a sequel. Before Baum wrote any sequels, he adapted the story for the stage. It is in the playscript that she is introduced as Dorothy Gale, “of the Kansas Gales.”

Wikipedia: “The last name of Gale was originally mentioned in Baum's script for the 1902 Broadway stage version of The Wizard of Oz, in which it was originally a setup for a punning joke. (DOROTHY: ‘I am Dorothy, and I am one of the Kansas Gales.’ SCARECROW: ‘That accounts for your breezy manner.’)”

Baum had collaborators for the playscript and it went through many revisions. Gale might not even have originated with Baum. Baum, however, did have a niece named Dorothy Gage, who died a baby. Gage and Gale are pretty close, so it wouldn’t have been a stretch for one to lead to the other. 

The Wikipedia article mentions the New York Times, but attributes the naming claim to Lee Sandlin. If you hunt up the NYT article, you find Michael Pollak writing a review of Lee Sandlin’s book, Storm Kings: the untold history of America’s first tornado chasers. 

There was the double tornado that cut through Irving, Kan., in May 1879. Sgt. John P. Finley of the Army Signal Corps, who would push himself to a nervous breakdown by 1882 while recording Midwestern tornadoes, made his first detailed field report on the Irving destruction; it serves as the endpapers of Mr. Sandlin’s book. Two decades later, he writes, a struggling entrepreneur named Lyman Baum, who was working on a children’s book, came upon a grim detail in a newspaper account of the Irving disaster: ‘The name of one of the victims, who had been found buried face down in a mud puddle, was Dorothy Gale’ — a name the author, writing as L. Frank Baum, would soon immortalize in ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.’

 

I don’t recall any other source offering up this origin for Dorothy’s last name. But Baum was a newspaperman before he was a novelist; he published a weekly in South Dakota in 1890, so it’s not outlandish to think he could come across John Finley’s account. Tornado, Kansas, Dorothy Gale. Quite a coincidence, if not. 

source: Nonbinary Review: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

alphanumeric number three, 2016

edited by Allie Marini and Lise Quintana

Zoetic Press, Santa Cruz CA