1983 Winkie Convention

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their Oz book, MERRY GO ROUND IN OZ, which was originally published in 1963, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and her daughter Lauren Lynn McGraw were guests of honor at the 1983 Winkie Convention. Aljean Harmetz presented a video-tape of a gathering of original cast members of the 1939 MGM movie. For the Winkie Costume Contest, in the adult category, tall, very slender Larry Irvine won as Jack Pumpkinhead, and Zachary and Tierra Martinez won in the children's category as threatening Winged Monkeys. Another feature of the weekend was a showing in slides of images from L. Frank Baum's FAIRYLOGUE AND RADIO PLAYS, his multi-media theater event of 1908. Warren Hollister ably conducted the Winkie Auction. With this extremely celebratory Winkie Convention it became clear that the Winkie crowd had outgrown the Wawona Hotel facilities. That the group was doing so was actually apparent several years earlier, and finally in 1983, the Winkies voted to travel to a new venue about two hundred miles west of Yosemite: the Asilomar Conference Grounds on the Monterey Peninsula. The next installment of this brief history will provide an account of early years of the Winkies at Asilomar.

From Winkie Newsletter Vol 2 #5, Written by Peter Hanff