As coroner, I must aver

I thoroughly examined her.

And she’s not only merely dead,

She’s really most sincerely dead.

When Meinhardt Raabe, an unknown 23-year-old from Wisconsin, sang those lines in his first and only Hollywood feature film, he little suspected that they would shape the course of his life for the next seven decades.

The lines, of course, belong to the Munchkin coroner in the classic 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz.” Raabe’s brief appearance in the film — about 13 seconds of uncredited screen time — made him an internationally recognized pop-cultural figure, if not precisely a household name.

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 Raabe had lived since 1986, said that the cause had not been officially determined but that it was presumed to be a heart attack.

At his death, Raabe was one of a handful of surviving Munchkins from the film.

With his high-collared indigo cloak and curly brimmed hat, Raabe’s character was known to generations of moviegoers for his official proclamation: The Wicked Witch of the East was dead, the victim of blunt force trauma from an errant Kansas farmhouse.

At 4 feet, Raabe (pronounced Robby) was among the taller little people hired for the film’s Munchkinland scenes. Though more than 100 Munchkins appeared on screen, his role was one of just a few with dialogue — lines he obligingly repeated, month in and month out, for the next 70 years as a motivational speaker before school groups and Oz conventions.