‘MUNCHKIN’ ~ ~memories
Sonoma author recounts journey from ‘Wizard of Oz’ to wildfires and TV journalism
And you thought Dorothy’s time in Oz was eventful. Meet Sonoma’s Betty Ann Bruno.
She’s a former child “Munchkin” who followed her own yellow brick road from Hollywood to Stanford University, a stint with the CIA, a role as a social activist in Oakland and an extraordinary 22-year career in Bay Area television.
Bruno, 89, somehow packed those and many other experiences into “The Munchkin Diary,” a rollicking memoir that not only tracks her many adventures, but is testament to her relentless energy and passion for life.
“I have never been bored,” insists Bruno, who spends much of her time these days performing and teaching hula. “I’m wholeheartedly, 150% into whatever I’m doing. Once in a while when I get into a state of exhaustion, I say to myself: ‘I would like to know what’s like to be bored — to sit on the front porch and swat flies.’ ”
That high-octane approach took root early on. Bruno was born in Hawaii, but her family moved to Hollywood when she was young and they lived right across the street from the 20th Century Fox Studios. Naturally, she and her brother, Everett, were seduced by show business.
The siblings took dancing and singing lessons before they were in kindergarten and began landing small roles in various films. Their island background apparently helped.
“It was the 1930s and Hollywood was in love with all things Hawaiian,” Bruno writes.
Her first movie stint came at the age of 5, playing a “native kid” in “The Hurricane,” directed by soonto-be Hollywood legend John Ford and starring Dorothy Lamour. But her most memorable experience in Tinseltown happened two years later when a casting call went out for girls under 4½ feet tall “who could sing, dance and act terrified.”
Production had begun on MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” and tiny folks were desperately needed to populate Munchkinland. More than 120 adult little people had been recruited for the fantastical musical, but director Victor Fleming wanted additional bodies to fill out the crowd scenes. Bruno was among a dozen or so kids who made the cut.
And on that winter day in 1938, when she finally stepped into the soundstage — wearing turned-up, pointy-toed shoes — Bruno found herself perched on a fluorescent yellow road among giant, colorful plastic flowers and fairy-tale-like huts.
For someone living at a time before Disneyland and television, it seemed like a “miracle.”
“I was a Depression baby. There weren’t Technicolor pictures. Everything was black and white and we led very simple lives,” she recalls. “… To walk on that set with those extravagant costumes and the crazy wigs and to see Billie Burke (as Glinda the Good Witch of the North) floating down — my jaw was wide open the whole time.”
Though some tall tales of drunkenness and rowdy on-set behavior have been associated with the adult Munchkins over the years, Bruno remembers everyone being “fun and great” to be around. That is, except for a particular Munchkin male who kept prodding little Betty Ann to go to lunch with him. Her mom saw something “sinister” in the guy and quickly intervened.
Bruno’s stay in Oz lasted only three weeks, during which she was routinely relegated to the background with the other kids. Still she cherished the “thrill and excitement” of it all. And while she insists that her Munchkin days in “no way define who I am,” she continues to be amazed by how one of the most beloved movies of all time left an indelible imprint on her.
Bruno has been invited to reminisce about the film on talk shows and for books and podcasts. In the early 1990s, she served as the grand marshal of an Oz parade in Indiana. Even now, she continues to receive a “small but steady trickle of letters” from fans eager to connect with one of the few living Munchkins.
“That movie, I tell you,” she says. “It just amazes me.”
Bruno’s show business career ended at the age of 10 when her family moved to a farm just outside the small town of San Jacinto. At the time, she had $750 in her bank account from her movie work.
“People sneeze at that today,” she says. “But that was a lot of money back then.”
Bruno landed back in front of the cameras at KTVU-Channel 2 during the 1970s — first as a host of a community affairs program (“On the Square”) and then as a reporter with the station’s news department. Before arriving at KTVU, she majored in political science at Stanford, had a brief tenure with the CIA’s personnel department in Washington, D.C., and then moved back to the Bay Area, where she started a family, became a force in the Oakland League of Women Voters and ran for a seat on the city council — narrowly losing a hard-fought race.
She describes her years in TV as the “salad days” of Channel 2, when Dennis Richmond was a commanding presence on the anchor desk and “The Ten O’Clock News” a ratings juggernaut. She enjoyed the “rush of adrenaline” that the job provided, but it wasn’t all pleasurable.
There was the time when a notorious drug dealer threatened to kill her after she did an expose on him. And there were the multiple murders and fatal accidents she had to cover. And then there was that horrific October day in 1991, when she went on TV to comment on the loss of her own home of more than 30 years in the Oakland Hills firestorm.
“Looking back, I was numb. I was really in shock,” she says of that moment. “But you just do what needs to be done and you get through it. That personality trait is in everybody. I think in news people, it’s magnified, and it’s bigger than life sometimes.”
Bruno’s Emmy-winning career came to a close with her retirement in 1992, and though she now isn’t “much of a TV person,” she admits to occasionally missing the newsroom.
“Yeah, every once in a while, when something (big) comes up,” she says. “Like after (the Capitol insurrection) January sixth. There is a lot of reporting work to do on that.”
In her memoir, Bruno covers all this and more. She also shares some deeply personal revelations, including past struggles with her identity and ethnicity, a conflicted relationship with her mother and the suicide of her father, who suffered from depression.
Bruno, who moved to Sonoma in 2002 with her second husband, former KTVU cameraman Craig Scheiner, never planned to put her stories out for public consumption. In fact, most of the chapters in “The Munchkin Diary” were penned several years ago and presented to her three adult sons in binders as a gift.
It wasn’t until she joined a local writer’s group that she was prodded to organize them into a book.
“I wanted to write the stories to tell my sons about the way I grew up and to kind of explain me — what makes me tick,” she explains. “… If I had known they were going to be published, I wouldn’t have been so frank and intimate.”
“I have never been bored. … I’m wholeheartedly, 150% into whatever I’m doing.” — Betty Ann Bruno, author