Lenore Peters, More Than a Chorus Girl

The autobiography of Lenore Peters.

Once in a while, during my writing of All Wound Up, I ran across lovely surprises. One such instance was the case of Lenore Peters (1890–1984), chorus girl with The Tik-Tok Man of Oz.

Research led me to interviews with Lenore Peters and her daughter and others involved in the 20th century modern dance scene. I learned that following Peters’s stint with The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, she developed an influential modern dance career as director of the Peters-Wright School of Dancing in San Francisco. I discovered that Peters had published several books, including an autobiography, Looking Back While Surging Forward.

I wondered whether Peters’s autobiography included information about The Tik-Tok Man of Oz. I doubted the book would contain much, if anything, about the show. Peters didn’t discuss her chorus girl days in interviews. Her few years as a chorus girl seemed to be a minor blip in the landscape of her subsequent celebrated dance career. If she mentioned The Tik-Tok Man of Oz at all in her book, such mention might easily consist of no more than a footnote or one title in a list.

I could only find one copy of her autobiography for sale—at $200. I wasn’t about to spend so much money on a book that might yield nothing useful.

The power of interlibrary loan came to the rescue just in time. For nearly two years, Covid restrictions had halted interlibrary loan at my city system. So frustrating! I’d finished writing the text of All Wound Up and was well into book design when, at last, the restrictions dropped and interlibrary loan returned. I requested a copy of Peters’s biography through my local library branch. When I received notice of the book’s arrival, I hurried to the library and checked it out. I didn’t bother about driving home first—I sat in my car in the library parking lot, flipping through the pages, searching for any mention of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz.

Lenore Peters in 1940.

Jackpot! Lenore Peters didn’t simply mention the show, she devoted several pages to it. She wrote about auditions, touring, lyrics, and gossip. She provided new details. She confirmed conjectures I’d made about the show from piecing together clues gathered elsewhere. She even gave a cogent analysis of why the Broadway-bound show never reached New York. Lenore Peters’s autobiography became a valuable resource for my book All Wound Up, and I’m grateful I found it.

A sidenote of interest: Peters began writing her autobiography, Looking Back While Surging Forward, during a week in 1958 while teaching dance to a convention of Unitarians meeting at Asilomar, California, a well-known retreat center on the Monterey peninsula. Asilomar is also where Oz Con International, the longest-running annual celebration of Oz and L. Frank Baum (then known as the Winkie Convention), met for nearly thirty years. I attended that convention at Asilomar many times, never suspecting that I was walking in the footsteps of a cast member of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz.

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