How Two Oz-Obsessed Midwesterners Made Judy Garland’s Birthplace a Museum

(via Atlas Obscura) On a cold and snowy March day in 1938, Judy Garland took a train from Chicago to Minneapolis and set off on the three-hour drive to her birthplace: Grand Rapids, Minnesota. She was 16. The following year, The Wizard of Oz would make her famous as the girl with the red slippers, but she was already well-known as a child actress and singer. John Kelsch, the co-founder of the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, says that a crowd marveled as she stepped out of the car in a leopard-skin coat and hat. Some apparently asked, “Who is that?”