One day last summer, pert, freckle-nosed, sixteen-year-old Darlene Gillespie bounced out of the Walt Disney Productions office with news that she had just been cast as Dorothy in the feature motion picture, "The Rainbow Road to Oz." Darlene was bursting with excitement, for it had been a short three years which had taken her from a small part in the ABC-TV Mickey Mouse Club, through a featured role in "Westward Ho, the Wagons," to co-starring roles in the "Margaret" and "Spin and Marty" serials. Now, Dorothy, the plum role of the studio, was to be hers! Darlene remembered it was not so long ago that she had dreamed of becoming a singing-dancing actress. When Darlene was eleven, her entire family, with faith in the girl's ability, had all worked together in her dad's part-time nursery to help finance her dancing lessons. During the summer of her twelfth year, Darlene and her mother were up at six A.M. and out in the lath house cutting the bottoms out of empty Coca-Cola cans which her Dad had brought home from the Douglas plant where he worked. The nursery behind the lath house held row after row of cans, doubled one on top of another, filled with rich, black earth and each containing one of Mr. Gillespie's prized avocado trees.
[…]
