In the Anacortes American of April 11, 1940, a story appeared about Harry Smith and a miniature house he built and displayed at the Nelson grade school hobby show. While Mrs. Geisler exhibited “a collection of 242 sets of salt and pepper shakers, coming from every state in the United States, with the exception of the one state of Wyoming,” we read:
“Also attracting much interest was a miniature house built by a high school student, Harry Smith and completely furnished, even to pictures, mirrors, and chandeliers. The furniture was of a size in proportion to a one-half inch square piano.”
It is cool to read that hobby displays were community news, yet what stands out is how this miniature house might connect to and substantiate stories of Harry’s construction of the Land of Oz.
Until early in the 21st century I had no knowledge of Harry Smith until a friend called to ask about some strange guy who grew up in Anacortes and built models of the Land of Oz on the cannery grounds where he lived. This question was the start of research that culminated in Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences.
In 1965, Harry told P. Adams Sitney, “I built Oz a number of times:”
“...and then the Emerald City is in the middle. That is where the wizard’s balloon had landed. I had built that thing many times as a child. I had fairly severe hallucinations, and I had built something called my Fairy Garden for many years. I actually used to see little gnomes and fairies, and stuff until I was seven or eight. It’s a typical psychic phenomenon, I mean, I wasn’t nutty or anything. All children see that stuff. Up until I was 18 or so, I worked hard on my Fairy Garden and then started building Oz. It was a fairly large place, because we had blocks and blocks of property in Anacortes.”
Harry’s Oz interest predated the 1939 film, and likely relied on checking out Frank Baum’s books from the Anacortes Public Library. Librarian Tempa Dodge observed:
“About ’33 ... when (the Children’s Library) moved downstairs, circulation picked up because they had their own room. It was in the basement and they had the side door and they’d come through the hall. Oz books have always been popular, always.”
It may be that Harry’s interest in Oz was inspired in 1934 when the Cornish Puppeteers brought their Wizard of Oz production to town. The Anacortes American wrote: “What a delightful thing it is to be a child—and how little do we realize it until we are way beyond that happy realm! Then to be given the chance to go back for an hour and a half to the very land of Make-Believe itself.”
Before the Smith family moved to Anacortes, Harry’s hands-on autodidactic genius was certainly cultivated at the Bellingham Normal’s Campus School for teacher training. It is not too far a leap from an elaborate student-built playhouse on Sehome Hill to the construction of Oz at the Apex Cannery. “The theory of teaching by projects is one of those tried out in practice by student teachers when they are in the training school,” the Klipsun, Bellingham Normal’s magazine, reported in the school’s transformative ’20s.
Harry Smith would become “one of the flames of the 20th century,” in the words of Ed Sanders. One Campus School alumna later reflected:
“As students we were respected by our teachers as individuals and were recognized for individual and group abilities and accomplishments. Constantly watchful for sparks of creativity, intellect, interest and/or talent, our teachers were experts at spotting those sparks and at incorporating a child’s spark into an individual or class project. In this way we gained self-confidence and self-esteem through validated achievement and effort. Thinking, itself, was respected, recognized and appreciated. I remember having one “brilliant idea” after another beginning in third or fourth grade. No idea was laughed at or discouraged; I was encouraged to try.”
“About 1931 I was going to school ... it was an interesting school,” Harry recalls. “The whole place was later busted for communism,” an awareness he may have come to in adulthood. “I liked it. They had a glass beehive in the middle of the classroom that had ...like... a chute right out the window so you could study the bees at work.”
Photographs and descriptions of these progressive classrooms suggest that Harry replicated this earliest educational approach throughout his life and found support for his intellectual and artistic endeavors at home, in school, at community hobby shows and with unique collaborators.