Wilma Casper remembers standing on the wooden staircase landing inside the Frank and Ethel Gumm home in 1925.
Her father, who had come to pick her up from her job as a live-in maid, sat at the piano with Ethel Gumm. Three-year-old Frances "Baby" Gumm was sandwiched in the middle, belting out perfect tunes.Casper knew little Frances was destined for stardom. The world came to know the girl as Judy Garland.
"I remember Baby," said Casper, 87. "She was the smartest child that I've ever seen."
Casper and three Munchkins from the 1939 classic "The Wizard of Oz" helped kick off the 20th annual Judy Garland Festival on Thursday by opening her restored childhood home.
It was 26 years to the day after Garland, whose portrayal of Dorothy in "Oz" won her an Academy Award for Best Juvenile Actress, died of a drug overdose at 47.
The Gumms, both vaudeville entertainers, bought the two-story house in 1919. Garland, born three years later, lived there until the family moved to California when she was 4 1/2.
When preservationist Jim Sazevich began the ongoing restoration in December, he drew on the recollections of Casper, who now lives in Newton, Iowa, to provide authenticity.
On Thursday, Casper recognized the house's interior: The French doors to the parlor seemed right, as well as the staircase, but the dining room table and piano needed to be rearranged.
Sazevich started research on the house in December and interviewed dozens of people. Workers stripped away decades of remodeling to restore the white clapboard house to its 1920s state.
"Judy's bedroom - little Frances Ethel Gumm's bedroom - was the only room that had not been altered in the whole house," Sazevich said.
The still-gutted upstairs level was not open to the public. But that didn't matter to those who traveled from around the country to see the home that Garland only returned to once, in 1938.
Mike Siewert, 29, drove to this northern Minnesota town of 8,000 from Louisville, Ky. "I'm a big Judy fan," he said, wearing a denim shirt with Dorothy's likeness embroidered on the back.
The crowd-pleasers were the Munchkins, who signed autographs.