- Here's the thing about people, everybody's gotta be born somewhere, even famous people, Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Prince in Minneapolis, Richard Widmark was born on this very spot in Sunrise, Minnesota.

And I promise you, Richard Widmark was once very, very, very famous, but not as famous as Judy Garland.

Thanks to "The Wizard of Oz", almost nobody was as famous as Judy Garland, and she was born somewhere too, more specifically here.

Welcome to "Minnesota Historia".

I'm Hailey, your Guide to Minnesota's own Judy Garland.

This is the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

And here are all the fun things you can do there.

Take a tour of her childhood home, see historic Hollywood props and costumes, dress up like your favorite characters, sit on your favorite characters, and of course, you can contemplate Judy Garland's life in Minnesota a lot.

- Hi, welcome to the Judy Garland Museum.

I'm John, if you have any questions, just jump in.

- This is John Kelsch.

As the Curator of the Judy Garland Museum, he also contemplates Judy Garland's life in Minnesota a lot.

- Judy Garland was born in 1922 at the Itasca Memorial Hospital.

She was the third daughter of vaudeville entertainers, Frank and Ethel Gumm.

- Frank and Ethel were showbiz people, so, you know.

- Showbiz people were looked at kind of mysteriously back then.

Like, you know.

- [Hailey] Her parents met while working at one of the many theaters in downtown Superior, Wisconsin.

Frank sang, Ethel played the piano.

- Most people don't realize people wouldn't come to the theater just to sit there and watch a silent movie.

You'd have singers, dancers, acrobats, dog trainers, you name it.

- Frank and Ethel got married at Superior's Courthouse and spent their wedding night in Duluth, taking in a show at the Orpheum.

- A banker here in town heard Judy's father Frank Gumm sing in Duluth, and was so impressed that he asked him, "We need a theater in Grand Rapids.

Would you and Ethel consider moving here and starting one for us?"

For 30 years, we've been looking for pictures of the New Grand Theater, and these are the only pictures we've found.

- [Hailey] In 1914, the newlyweds were hired to run The New Grand in Grand Rapids, where they gave birth to their three daughters and lived for more than a decade.

- Here are the Gumm sisters, Janie, Jimmie, Baby.

- Judy Garland was of course a stage name.

She was born Frances Ethel Gumm, but everybody called her Baby, and Baby loved Grand Rapids.

(upbeat dramatic music) - I do remember it was terribly happy and possibly the only kind of normal carefree time in my life.

- They'd go swimming at Pokegama Lake.

She remembered all the birthday parties and snowball fights.

And this was the stage the two older girls would sing duets and then save the finale for Baby Gumm.

This was their stage.

Everybody loved to come over in this little logging town.

- That creaky staircase landing of a stage was too small to hold Judy Garland for long.

Fortunately, her parents owned that theater downtown.

So what do you say?

Let's go put on a show.

- At Christmas time, 1924, she made her stage debut.

- At The New Grand, Judy joined her sisters for three numbers.

Then, as a solo act, she sang "Jingle Bells", and she sang it again and again.

- Would not quit, over and over, "Jingle Bells", "Jingle Bells".

Her dad had to literally march out there and throw her over his shoulder, kicking and screaming.

- For several years, Judy and her sisters went on tour all over the Midwest, but before she was five years old, they left Minnesota for good, moving to California where she starred on the big screen with her sisters in 1929's, "The Big Review".

♪ When you see blue skies and fields of whit ♪ ♪ And the sun is shinin' bright ♪ ♪ Yes sir - It was no "Wizard of Oz", that would come 10 years later for Judy Garland at the ripe old age of 17.

- You can see how tiny Judy was, four foot 11.

- But you don't care about any of that old tinsel town gossip.

If you're anything like me, you just wanna know one thing.

When does she come back to Minnesota?

We know of at least three return trips.

The first was in 1938.

- They decided to put her in a movie called "Broadway Melody" of 1938.

She sings, "Dear Mr. Gable, you made me love you".

The kids today would say it went viral.

MGM decided to send her on a East Coast appearance tour.

And on the way back, they convinced the studio to let them come to Grand Rapids.

Typical Minnesota, it's the end of March, blizzard conditions, just practically a white out.

- Judy made it as far as Aikin, where a delegation of Grand Rapidians braved the snow to bring her the rest of the way.

- Grand Rapids was a hard place to get to, and it still is.

- But totally worth it.

Have you seen this Judy Garland Museum and Childhood Home?

- She was scheduled to go on to Hibbing and Duluth, but because of the weather, the whole plan was scratched.

So she had only 24 hours in Grand Rapids.

Her first stop was at Dr. Binet's house.

Here he is.

And she wanted to meet the doctor who delivered her at the hospital.

There was a luncheon at the Pokegama Hotel, which is still standing.

She was taken to the high school.

Unfortunately, she was not allowed to sing because she was under strict contract with MGM Studio.

Her next stop was her dad's old movie theater.

And that night, Dr. Binet's son Bill, he organized a dance for her at a Cabin City tavern, and Bill got a kiss from Judy Garland.

Quite a handsome guy.

- Judy's second trip came later after "The Wizard of Oz", and "Meet me in St. Louis", and "Till the Clouds Roll By", and even after "A Star is Born".

How many years later was this anyway?

- Okay, it was 1958, so 20 years after her last visit, the governor asked her to come and sing during Minnesota's centennial, and she's on the cover of "The TV Weekly", and she sang at the old stadium.

- After that, she made at least one more trip to Minnesota in disguise.

- Well, Judy's son, Joseph Luft told us when he was a young boy in the 1960s, Judy Garland brought Joe here to see the town where she came from, but it was a secret visit.

It was incognito.

- Judy Garland died in 1969.

She was only 47 years old.

- Behind every cloud is another cloud.

- I think we should talk about Judy's troubles.

By the time "Wizard of Oz" was being filmed, she was essentially addicted to prescription drugs, deadly cocktails.

"Oh, you need to stay up for 72 hours, take some of these.

Oh, you need to go to sleep, take some of these."

Judy always said, "Well, if I hadn't gone into movies, I'd still be Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota."

- But if she'd stayed in Minnesota, we might not have "The Wizard of Oz".

And "The Wizard of Oz" is kind of a big deal, right?

- The Library of Congress says, "'The Wizard of Oz' is the most watched film in all movie history."

- So if you haven't seen it yet, you might wanna get with the program.

- We have three original artifacts from the movie, and this is the carriage that brought all the characters into the Emerald City, and then one of Judy's test dresses, then we have one of the Winky Spears that the guards held at the witch's castle.

Y'all remember that sequence?

- I sure do, "Oh, we oh."

But the prop I remember most from "The Wizard of Oz", and I do hate to be bringing this up at the scene of the crime, is the ruby slippers.

They're actually five pairs we know are used, and the Judy Garland Museum had one of those pairs on display off and on for years.

In 2005, a local ne'er-do-well named Terry Jon Martin, broke this window, came in this door, walked right through the museum without even stopping to admire the Winky spear and shattered the plexiglass covering the slippers.

- The actual white pedestal that you see there, that's the actual pedestal that was used during the crime.

- The aforementioned ne'er-do-well thought the slippers were made with real rubies that he could sell on the black market.

When he realized they were just sequins, he hid them.

It is okay to laugh at criminals when they're this dumb.

But the Judy Garland Museum, they weren't laughing.

- For many years, it damaged our museum, our credibility.

We were not able to borrow other artifacts that we could have over the years.

I mean, it was a nightmare.

- Fortunately, the ruby slippers were recovered in 2018, not by me obviously.

These are not the real ruby slippers.

- We were so thrilled that they were found in good condition, and not destroyed.

- Today, the museum offers true crime enthusiasts, a Ruby Slippers theft tour.

Thanks to those slippers and the movie, will Judy Garland's memory live on forever?

- Frank Sinatra, who was one of Judy's close friends said, "We will all be forgotten, but never Judy."

- So if Judy Garland lives on forever, then Minnesota lives on forever.

And a state that lives forever is gonna keep making history.

I mean, that's just job security for me.

(upbeat cheerful music) Thanks for watching "Minnesota Historia", your guide to all things quirky in Minnesota history.

Check out some of our other episodes where we go even further and deeper into the quirky, soft underbelly of this very weird state.

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