Steve Crump

The Wizard of Oz - not the story, but the character - has been getting a lot of bad press lately.

In the recent Sci-Fi Channel mini-series "Tin Man" - the highest-rated program in the cable channel's history - Richard Dreyfuss played a vapor-snorting ex-mayor named the Mystic Man who's in drug-induced thrall to the Wicked Witch of the West.

And "Wicked," now top-grossing musical in Broadway history, portrays the Wizard as the dictator of Oz and the villain of the story, which is a retelling of L. Frank Baum's tale from the point of view of the witches. Eventually, the Wizard (played by Joel Grey) tries to drown himself by crashing his hot air balloon into the sea.

And he fails, of course.

All of which annoys me because of a photo that appeared in the Times-News seven years ago.

The paper published an Associated Press picture of a tanker-truck burning on a highway. At the top of the image, in the middle of the plume of smoke, was my face.

It looked exactly like the Wizard of Oz.

See, the page designer had inadvertently juxtaposed my photo over the picture of the burning truck, and it made it into the paper. A few hundred copies were printed before a press operator caught the mistake, and my mug was removed.

But not before an alert reader or two sent a clipping of the image to Jay Leno, who displayed it on "The Tonight Show" as part of a segment he occasionally does on hilarious newspaper mistakes.

"Look at the size of that head!" Leno exclaimed.

For years thereafter, both at work and on the street, people would greet me as "the fat-headed Wizard."

On my honeymoon two years ago, my wife bought a wooden sign that read: "Nobody gets in to see the Wizard! Not nobody. Not no how."

That's a line from the famous 1939 movie, and it sits on my desk.

So whenever the Wizard misbehaves in some way, I get grief.

Shouldn't be that way. The Wizard in the movie, actor Frank Morgan, was the nicest guy in the world. A little befuddled, maybe, and more than a little ridiculous - sort of like me.

"I'm a very good man," Morgan's Wizard says in the film. "I'm just a very bad Wizard."

He played five different roles in that movie. A 49-year-old veteran character actor, he was cast as the Wizard after he agreed to work cheaper than W.C. Fields, who wanted $100,000 to do the part.

"Times being what they were, I accepted the job," the Wizard says in the movie. "But I retained my (hot air) balloon against the advent of a quick getaway."

Can't think of a better philosophy on life.

Steve Crump can be reached at 735-3223, or write to him at scrump@magicvalley.com