NY TIMES OBITUARY (excerpt)
Mr. Raabe, who was also a wartime aviator and the first Little Oscar, the mascot of the Oscar Mayer meat company, died Friday in Orange Park, Fla., at 94. Bob Rigel, president of the Penney Retirement Community in Penney Farms, Fla., where Mr. Raabe had lived since 1986, said that the cause had not been officially determined but that it was presumed to be a heart attack. Meinhardt Raabe was born on Sept. 2, 1915, in Watertown, Wis. Though he never surpassed 4 feet 7 inches at his tallest (he continued to grow till he was in his 30s), he did not hear the word dwarf, or even midget, until he was a young adult. No one in his community had seen a person with dwarfism before. Growing up, he later said, he assumed there was no one else in the world like him. That changed in 1933, when the young Mr. Raabe visited the Midget Village at the Chicago World's Fair. There before his eyes was a world of men and women just like him. Thrilled, he took a job as a barker there the next summer.Mr. Raabe received a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1937, and an M.B.A. from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1970. A skilled aviator, he served stateside in the Civil Air Patrol in World War II, by all accounts the smallest pilot in uniform.
On graduating from Wisconsin, Mr. Raabe was turned down for one corporate job after another. As he recalled in his autobiography, "Memories of a Munchkin" (Back Stage Books, 2005; with Daniel Kinske), one recruiter told him he belonged in a carnival. He eventually joined Oscar Mayer as a salesman. After the company made him Little Oscar, "the World's Smallest Chef," he spent nearly 30 years touring the country in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, promoting the company's hotdogs.. At his death, Mr. Raabe was one of a handful of surviving Munchkins from the film.