Jul 12, 20213 min read

There’s No Place like Home

Good Monday Morning!

No, this post isn’t about Glinda the Good Witch and her spell sending Dorothy back to Kansas. But the phrase is most assuredly, unequivocally hijacked from the spell. Those words, There’s no place like home, written by L. Frank Baum over a century ago get to the heart of many a good Kansas man or woman. Looks as if Glinda was truly a ‘good deed doer!’ I’ll bet Glinda wouldn’t screw up the Pythagorean theorem like the scarecrow who proclaimed, “in an isosceles triangle, the sum of the square roots of two sides is the square root of the third side”. The Wizard set the bar real low. Not that I can snap off the Pythagorean theorem even at my best moment: ‘in any right-angle triangle, the sum of the squares on the two sides is equal to the square on the hypotenuse.‘

Duh…

The Wizard of OZ-MGM-1939

OH———-

The Wizard, who worked with the hot air balloons at the Kansas fair, didn’t even know how the thing worked.

Hold everything… this post is not about the Wizard of Oz. It’s about a short story I wrote when I was in California and is contained in the book Compilation with other short stories and novellas. A successful young man comes back with his fiancé to a part of his childhood that is best left in the shadows. Don Murdock has made a fatal mistake. Murdock insists that his fiancé return in a week while he gets Aunt Greta’s old house up for sale. What Don Murdock doesn’t know is that he has merged into the shadows where reality becomes past, present and future in an instant.

Wonder what I was watching on Los Angeles TV back then. Hmmm….. No place like Home fits the Twilight Zone format of entering an area beyond time and space. Letting our imaginations go wild is also the hallmark of the Twilight Zone. After meeting with old friends Murdock returns to Aunt Greta’s house. To his shock he sees his late Aunt Greta in one of the upper windows. Murdock searches the house but finds nothing. He hears noises around the house as he tries to sleep. But nightmares begin a cue as he nods off.

Through the week Murdock repairs the house, meets with his old buddies the Crandall boys, and enjoys being back. He would call the realtor tomorrow.

When Don Murdock wakes up the next morning something has happened. He soon realizes from the radio report it’s 1963 inside the house. November 22, 1963. Aunt Greta is alive and telling him to take his medicine as if he were a little boy. The situation is that unexplained confrontation with reality. Here’s how Rod Serling opened the first season of the Twilight Zone in 1959.

Rod Serling

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man … a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.”

Mark Lane

November 22, 1963–the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas. I had begun studying the Kennedy Assassination after listening to Mark Lane at UMass and viewing the Zapruder Film. I walked out of the Campus Center realizing that Kennedy’s head and body was thrown backward-hardly the actions of a lone gunman.

Dealey Plaza

Today, after a congressional investigation and the AARB thousand of documents indicate a well orchestrated plot with elements of the CIA, portions of the anti-Castro paramilitary, and upper levels of government. And there was a massive and pervasive cover-up as Don Murdock will soon understand. The end for President Kennedy and Murdock is not good.

J. Edgar Hoover

Simply put in my short story the FBI has the info and does nothing. Since I wrote the story a teletype was found and dated before Dallas, warning of an assassination attempt on President Kennedy.