The Oz Bowl Game

Parents are again preparing for the occasion. It will occur this coming Sunday for the seventh straight year, and the children, with a special restlessness, will collect around the television set in much the way that their fathers do for the professional football championships. The children know the names and styles of the players they are going to see, for the program has become a modern institution and a red-letter event in the calendar of childhood. It is the Oz Bowl game, CBS's annual telecast of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's The Wizard of Oz.

From the dance of the rusty robot to Ray Bolger's tumbling scarecrow and Bert Lahr's campy lion, the children will greet most of it with a knowing and unexcited air. When Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow last year, a three-year-old female sophisticate said: "She always wears her hair in braids, you know." But Judy's Dorothy, as a matter of surprising fact, is not the uppermost character in the children's minds any more. To them, she is just another frosted cornflake.

Meltless Memory. Before the broadcast, the children talk most of all about the Wicked Witch of the West--and when they do, they quiver. "I'm scared of the witch," said a five-year-old girl. By the time the hideous chick with the black eyebrows and the scimitar nose appears on the screen, three-year-olds will whinny, "Mommy, I'm scared," while barely articulate one-year-olds chant "Scared! Scared!"

To be fair to them, The Wizard of Oz really is a horror story, with this grackle-voiced, green-skinned, chin-warted apparition hurling fire from rooftops, skywriting ominously with a flaming broom, or saying: "Now, my beauties, something with poison in it. Heh! Heh! Heh!" Hearing that, one child remembered hopefully, if a bit inexactly, that "last year Dorothy and the Wizard poured hot water on her and she melted." The Wicked Witch will melt again this year, but not from the children's memory. Into bed they will crawl singing "Ding, dong, the Witch is dead," only to stop the melody and ask: "Is she really dead?"

Den Mother. Ding, dong, she isn't, indeed. She lives at 34 Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Mothers sometimes take their children to call on her so that she--Actress Margaret Hamilton, now 62 --can pacify their inchoate neuroses and assure them that she is not in carnate evil after all. She made Oz when she was 36, and worked in Hollywood for years afterward as everybody's "cantankerous cook or acidulous aunt," in her words, "with a corset of steel and a heart of gold." Today she does character parts in the theater and on TV. Before the election, she made several appearances on NBC's That Was the Week That Was, impersonating formidable Republican ladies and the like.

Before she started acting years ago, the broomless Miss Hamilton was a kindergarten teacher in Cleveland. Inspired by seeing Gertrude Lawrence, she gave up teaching and joined the Cleveland Playhouse rep company, where she was soon stirring away as the First Witch in Macbeth. That typed her, but dramatic witchcraft could not change her basic character. She not only went on to become the hag of the half-century, she also became a member of the Beverly Hills Board of Education, and a Cub Scout den mother. Now we will be able to shut off those lights, won't we?

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