A worried mother called the reference desk at Sullivan Free Library on Thursday asking where to find a pair of ruby slippers, ASAP.
The librarians suggested Payless and clucked about the mother's predicament. Now "is not the time to look for slippers," said the director, Karen Traynor.
At least not in this village, where road workers have hosed down the yellow brick road, girls appear in gingham and the first Munchkin sighting makes for local gossip.
Chittenango, a small bedroom community 32km east of Syracuse, is where Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was born 150 years ago.
Though his time there was relatively brief -- his family moved to Syracuse when he was 6 -- it is enough for Chittenango to latch on to. In addition to the yellow-brick road -- actually part of a sidewalk -- the village has a number of businesses with names like Emerald City Grill and Oz Cream, an ice cream shop.
And since 1978, the village has held a festival in Baum's honor. This year's event, which started on Thursday and ended yesterday, was expected to attract 15,000 people -- more than three times the local population.
The dingy yellow bricks that were installed in 1982 have been replaced with stamped, dyed concrete that looks the same and promises to wear better. The old bricks are being be sold for US$20 apiece at the festival and on eBay to raise money for a town clock.
The new pathway should require fewer Boy Scouts, who were usually the ones enlisted for the upkeep.
"We could write a book on the maintenance of yellow-brick-roads," said the festival's organizer, Michael Quirk.
Attendance has been steady in recent years but Darwin Houseman, who owns a restaurant called Auntie Em's Place, who organized some of the first festivals in Chittenango, said he sometimes worried about the future of OzFest, as the event is known.
"The older kids almost seem like they're above this," he said.
But not the little ones, he quickly added.
"They like getting dressed up," he said.
The four-day festival includes amusement rides, a spaghetti dinner and a parade with dozens of Dorothys and Glendas.
But the Munchkins make the event. So much so that the festival, once a gathering spot for actors who played Munchkins in the 1939 film, was moved from May, the month Baum was born, to June to better accommodate the now elderly participants.
By Thursday evening, word got out that the original Munchkins -- three this year -- had arrived.
Several autograph-seekers showed up at a restaurant where they were having cake and coffee with festival volunteers.
"I like this town," said Meinhardt Raabe, 90, who in the movie played the coroner who proclaimed the Wicked Witch dead. "All the living Munchkins used to come to this festival. We had, shall I say, a good time here."
Donna Stewart-Hardway, 74, said she was amazed that people still wanted to meet her even though she was cast as a Munchkin because of her age at the time -- six -- rather than her size. She had to lobby Chittenango to spend its limited funds on her.
"When you might run out of funds, you don't want to invite a 5-foot-6 Munchkin," she said.
At another table, Mickey Carroll, 86, was signing autographs and lamenting that the number of surviving Munchkins was dwindling. He reminisced with Roger Baum, the great-grandson of Frank Baum, and told old Vaudeville-like jokes and anecdotes about the film.
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