Karl Slover

Karl Slover, who has died aged 93, was a member of the "Singer Midgets" vaudeville troupe and played several roles as a Munchkin in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz.

In the film, Slover appeared as Herald No 1 – the first of the three trumpeters to herald the arrival of the Munchkin mayor. He also played one of the Munchkin soldiers; was one of the singers who prompted Judy Garland to Follow the Yellow Brick Road; and he was the only "Sleepyhead" boy in the nest of eggs.

Karl Slover

 

Born Karl Kosiczky on September 21 1918 in Prakendorf, Hungary (now in Slovakia), he stopped growing at the age of four and was diagnosed with pituitary dwarfism.

"My father tried everything to make me grow," he recalled. "He took me to Budapest where I was placed on a stretching machine with one doctor pulling at my legs and another my feet until I screamed with pain. They tried other things too – there were gold injections; I was once placed in a barrel full of coconut oil; another time I met with a witch doctor in Hawaii – I was seen as a punishment for something that perhaps my father had done in a previous life."

On his ninth birthday his father sold him to the impresario Leo Singer, who ran a travelling vaudeville troupe of "midgets" based in Berlin: "My father was glad to get rid of me," he recalled. "Even at that tender age I knew I'd be better off with Singer than with my parents."

In 1928 he travelled with the troupe to America on forged documents "proving" he was 16. Bookings flooded in, and the Singer Midgets toured extensively – they stopped in Hawaii for three years and played at the Roxy Theatre and Hippodrome in New York. At just 4ft 4in, Kosiczky was the smallest member of the troupe and, later, the shortest of the male Munchkins.

After The Wizard of Oz he continued to perform for three more years in the "Original World Famous Singers Midget Show". Then, when the show broke up in 1942, he found work with an entrepreneur called BA Slover, who owned several rides at the Royal American Carnival in Tampa, Florida, and, with his wife, ran a company that leased mobile carnival rides to shopping centres and other venues. Kosiczky sold tickets for the rides and changed his name from Kosiczky to Slover when he became an American citizen in 1943. Subsequently he performed with trained poodles.
As well as The Wizard of Oz, Slover appeared in They Gave Him A Gun (1937), starring Spencer Tracy; Bringing Up Baby (1938), with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn; Terror of Tiny Town (1938), a film with a midget cast in which he played the town barber and a saloon bass player; the Laurel and Hardy comedy Block-Heads (1938); the Humphrey Bogart thriller Crime School (1938); and Magic Trio (1938). In 1945, at the age of 27, he donned a bonnet and played a baby in a pram in The Lost Weekend, with Ray Milland and Doris Dowling.
In 1963, on his only return trip to Europe, Slover was reunited with his mother: "Father was long dead and to see mother and my sisters again was the happiest day of my little life," he recalled.
In 2007 he was one of seven Munchkins at the unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame dedicated to the little people in the film.

Karl Slover, born September 21 1918, died November 15 2011