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Cardini

Cardini, Master Magician, whose career span almost half a century, was the most imitated magician the world has ever known but his skill and talent could never be duplicated making him one of the world greatest magicians.

He was born in 1895, Richard Pitchford, in a coal-mining town in Mumbles, Wales, (same village as Catherine Zeta-Jones) . He joined the British Army during WW1 where he passed the time in the trenches by practicing his card manipulations. After being injured in battle was placed in a hospital were he continued to hone his magic skills.

First going to Australia to perform and then in Canada he entered the United States from British Columbia. While working his way across the U.S. he met Swan Walker in Chicago, who became his wife and life long assistant. In New York City, Cardini became an almost immediate success as audiences (and magicians) had never seen such an act. The act was not merely a magician performing tricks but an actor with strange and unexplained things happening to him. The sleight of hand, appearance and disappearance of objects, and gestures were all timed precisely and exactly coordinated to the music.

He played The Palace, Radio City Music Hall, London Palladium, Copa Cabana and other prominent nightclubs and Reviews. A command performance for the King of England in 1938. In 1957 at age 62, he appeared on one of the few magic television shows broadcast at that time. The Festival of Magic. This is the only known footage to exist of the master at work.

Among his many awards was the New England Magic Society's proclamation of Cardini as the "greatest exponent of pure sleight of hand the world has ever known".(1958 ) He was honored in 1970 with the Master Magician awarded at the Magic Castle, LA, presented but Tony Curtis. In 1999 he was named one of Magic Magazines Top Magicians of the 20th Century.

Although he has been dead for almost 30 years magician still recognized his creativity, innovation and originality. He perfected his craft with hard work and perseverance. It is easy to forget this Master's high standard he held the magic industry to.

Aspiring teenage magician Ehrich Weiss did not conjure the name "Harry Houdini" out of thin air. Following the hallowed tradition of his craft, the name pays homage to Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the French performer widely considered the father of modern magic. Adding the "i" followed tradition as well, as this was a common way that magicians invoked the name of the famous 18th century Italian conjurer Pinetti. "Harry," on the other hand, was merely a pleasantly American twist on "Ehrie," his boyhood nickname. But Houdini’s relationship with his famous predecessor was not as simple as their shared name suggests.

Jean Eugene Robert was bitten by the magic bug just as he was entering his family’s clock making business in the French town of Blois. The young man enjoyed entertaining his friends with sleight-of-hand tricks, but at first gave no thought to performing professionally. At twenty-four, he married the daughter of a prominent Parisian clockmaker, soon adding their family name to his own and opening his own clock making studio in Paris with the backing of his father-in-law. Living in the French capital allowed Robert-Houdin to more fully indulge his interest in magic, and he eagerly caught every performance he could while developing friendships with a number of amateur and professional magicians. Particularly influential were Comte, a favorite of the French Kings and owner of his own theater, and Philippe, whose utilization of electricity would have the greatest impact on Robert-Houdin. During these years the clockmaker made mental notes about what he would do -- and not do -- if he ever took the stage himself.

Perhaps inspired by the complex mechanical devices, or automata, demonstrated by Philippe and other conjurers, Robert-Houdin started building more than clocks. In 1844, a small android he had built for the Universal Exposition was purchased by American circus impresario P.T. Barnum for the handsome price of seven thousand francs. The timing was excellent, as it allowed Robert-Houdin time to finish the pieces he was building for a magical theater he would soon open in Paris. The public was enchanted by his elegantly appointed theater at the old Palais Royal, which featured numbers clearly inspired by Phillipe but with novel twists of their own. Even in this first endeavor, Robert-Houdin displayed a gift for presentation which would set him apart. In particular, his practice of appearing in normal evening attire, rather than elaborate robes, caught on and has led many to see him as the first "modern" magician.

The routine that turned Robert-Houdin into a major attraction was not mechanical at all, but a number called "Second Sight," in which his son, blindfolded on stage, correctly identified objects held by his father in the audience. Again, Robert-Houdin cannot take credit for originating the act, which worked through an elaborate verbal code, but for improving it with consummate skill and showmanship. In this way, he resembled his future namesake: both Robert-Houdin and Houdini grew famous by adding their own genius to the work of those who came before.

It may have been this very similarity which led Houdini to turn on his legendary predecessor. In 1908 he angered many in the profession with the publication of "The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin," a scathing attack in which he called the legend "a mere pretender, a man who waxed great on the brainwork of others." Besides detailing the origins of most of his routines in an effort to set the record straight, Houdini challenged Robert-Houdin’s assertion in his celebrated memoirs that his presentational reforms represented "a complete regeneration in the art of conjuring." Houdini also assailed Robert-Houdin’s "supreme egotism" and habit of exaggerating his exploits, charges often made against Houdini himself.

Houdini’s overzealous attempt to unseat his celebrated predecessor probably had several sources. From one perspective, it can be seen as part of the lifelong war waged against his own imitators, for whom he felt nothing but contempt. It can also be seen as a manifestation of his substantial ego, and the need to elevate himself at the expense of any competitors, even those from the past. But given that the two men shared so much more than a name, perhaps it was Houdini’s way of responding -- in a way his ego and psyche would allow -- to the very criticisms so often leveled at him.

Few performers have ever captured the public imagination like Harry Houdini. From his breakthrough in 1899 to his death in 1926, Houdini was one of the world's most popular entertainers, a true star of stage and screen. Time and again, his escapes from seemingly impossible predicaments thrilled audiences, who found in him a metaphor for their own lives, an affirmation of the human capacity to overcome adversity. Escapism in both senses of the word. But while nearly everyone is familiar with Houdini's stage persona, his little-known personal life is equally revealing. Taken as a whole, the public and private views make "The Elusive American" a uniquely powerful window on his times.

His love of America was such that he always claimed Appleton, Wisconsin, as his birthplace. But the man known as Houdini was actually born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary. He would not arrive in Wisconsin until four years later, when he, his mother Cecelia, and four brothers joined his father, who had become rabbi of a small Reform congregation there. Although an educated man, Herman Mayer Weiss (Weisz was changed to Weiss courtesy of immigration officials) was not destined for success in America. His life-long struggle to provide for his family would make a lasting impression on his son "Ehrie," who was forced to work from an early age to help make ends meet. Still, the boy was drawn to performing, making his debut in a neighborhood circus as the nine year old trapeze artist, "Ehrich, The Prince of the Air."

In 1887, after a series of failed rabbinic appointments in the Midwest, Herman Mayer Weiss brought young Ehrich with him to New York, where they lived in a boardinghouse and found what work they could. When he wasn't working, Ehrich excelled in sports, particularly swimming, boxing, and running, developing the natural athletic gifts which would be vital to his future act. He also rediscovered a childhood interest in magic, and in 1891 teamed up with a friend named Jacob Hyman in an act they called "The Brothers Houdini." After his hard-luck father died in 1892, eighteen year old Ehrich left his mother and brothers in New York and took to the road. The Brothers Houdini performed their act -- an unremarkable collection of card and other magic tricks -- in dime museums and small theaters throughout upstate New York and the Midwest. They performed on the Midway of the remarkable 1893 World's Columbia Exposition in Chicago. In 1894 Harry's younger brother Dash replaced Hyman, but not for long. That summer, Harry met and married a fellow performer, a petite eighteen year old from Brooklyn named Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner. "Bess" was made Harry's assistant, and the Brothers Houdini became simply, "The Houdinis."

While they gained some notice with a trunk escape they called "The Metamorphosis," life on the dime museum circuit was grueling for the young couple. Though barely twenty-five, in 1898 Houdini was so tired of it he thought seriously about quitting, and even sent out a catalogue for "Harry Houdini's School of Magic" while staying with his mother in New York on an extended break. But he and Bess went back on the road, and in the spring of 1899 Houdini finally caught his big break. The reversal of fortune came when Martin Beck, a rising tycoon in the new world of vaudeville theater, saw the Houdinis in a beergarden in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ignoring the rest of the act, Beck saw something in Houdini's handcuff escapes, and challenged him the next day with his own cuffs; Houdini escaped easily. A few days later, Beck -- who was with the Orpheum circuit which dominated vaudeville in the West -- cabled Houdini from Chicago: "You can open Omaha March twenty sixth sixty dollars, will see act probably make you proposition for all next season." As Houdini later wrote, "This wire changed my whole Life's journey."

By the end of the year, Beck had the Houdinis playing in leading vaudeville houses from the Midwest to California; by early 1900, they were also a hit on Keith's East Coast circuit. Displaying a talent for publicity to match his abilities as an escape artist, Houdini performed jail escapes and other public stunts to lure people into theatres. Houdini, known variously as "The Celebrated Police Baffler," "The King of Handcuffs," and a host of other names, developed the basic routines which would make him a legend. After nearly a decade playing dime museums and circuses, vaudeville must have seemed like a different world. The Houdinis performed fewer shows -- before upscale audiences in lavishly appointed theaters -- and made far more money. At the turn of the century, vaudeville was the top of the entertainment pyramid, and Harry Houdini became one of its stars.

But as wonderful as this was, no amount of success in America, which had barely begun to emerge from Europe's cultural shadow, could compare with acceptance across the Atlantic. Already bickering with Beck, he arranged his own tour of Europe, where he would spend the bulk of the next five years. Tirelessly crisscrossing the continent and British Isles, Houdini delighted crowds just as he had in America. He also continued the practice of staging public exhibitions and taking challenges. One such memorable challenge came from the London Mirror newspaper, which commissioned a special set of handcuffs for Houdini. After more than an hour -- and several theatrical flourishes -- Houdini emerged free of the "Mirror Cuffs," setting off pandemonium in the music hall. In Germany, he caused an even bigger stir when he ran up against the Kaiser's formidable police force. When a Cologne policeman accused him of fraud, Houdini charged him with slander rather than backing down. Even though he had to reveal some of his tricks to the court in order to prevail, the resulting windfall of publicity only reinforced his status as Germany's "König der Handschellen."

After conquering Europe, Houdini returned to America in 1905 and put down roots, buying a small farm in Connecticut and a stately brownstone in Manhattan. Although being an entertainer meant constant travel, the brownstone became home base for his family, particularly Cecelia Weiss. Houdini had always been close to his mother, but since his father's death had demonstrated a fierce devotion rivaled only by his love for Bess. When word of her death reached him in Sweden in 1913, he reportedly fainted, then wept uncontrollably when he came to. "I am what would be called a Mothers-boy," admitted the man hailed around the world as a real-life superman. He would grieve for her the rest of his life.

This devotion, along with a fierce desire to succeed as his father never had, led Houdini to drive himself relentlessly, and helps account for his incredible career. When others would have retired to enjoy their success, Houdini reinvented himself time and again, finding new ways to maintain his public appeal. In 1908 he introduced the famous milk can escape, reminding audiences that "Failure Means a Drowning Death." Around the same time, he staged a series of "manacled bridge jumps" which drew large crowds and a great deal of publicity. In 1913, he added the elaborate Chinese Water Torture Cell escape, which he usually referred to as "the Upside Down." Some consider it Houdini's greatest trick, and it certainly had all the elements of a Houdini performance: brilliant technical conception, great physical strength, and highly dramatic presentation.

After almost three decades of public performances, Houdini eventually found a new and powerful way to reach people: the motion picture. He made his first film, a serial called "The Master Mystery," in 1918, just as the movie business was about to take off. Although his acting was wooden and screen magic held none of the mystery of live magic, Houdini became one of Hollywood's first action heroes, and his movies delighted audiences around the world. Now in his mid-forties and physically worn-out, he was thrilled to be able to perform an escape once and have it preserved forever. And in typical fashion, Houdini jumped into the new medium with both feet: not content just being a star, he started his own production company and several other movie-related ventures, all of which lost money.

Another great passion of Houdini's emerged in the early '20s, when he became a leading critic of the Spiritualist movement sweeping Europe and America in the wake of World War I. Perhaps embarrassed by his lack of formal education, Houdini had always worked hard to educate himself; his great passion was the history of magic, and he amassed one of the greatest collections of such material in the world. Thus when Spiritualist mediums gained considerable attention by claiming to be in touch with the spirit world, the world's most famous illusionist felt compelled to reveal them for what they were: highly skilled performers. Houdini's crusade, which he approached with characteristic passion, led to two particularly revealing episodes. One was his friendship with English author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a leading advocate of Spiritualism. Although Houdini was eager to remain friends with the noted man of letters, their differing views eventually led to a falling out. The other episode was his very public battle with the most noted medium of the day, Mina Crandon, a.k.a. "Margery," the wife of a prominent Boston surgeon. As part of a committee organized by "Scientific American" magazine, Houdini helped expose Margery as a fraud after a series of combative seances. He even published a forty-page illustrated pamphlet entitled "Houdini Exposes the tricks used by the Boston Medium 'Margery'" at his own expense. As generous as he was with family and friends, Houdini made an implacable foe.

Houdini began 1926 on a high note, reaching the height of success with his own one-man show on Broadway. The two and a half hour "HOUDINI" featured a bit of everything that had made him a legend since the dime museum days: small-scale illusions, blockbuster escapes, and a Spiritualism expose. The show was such a success he took it on the road. But during a stay in Montreal in October, Houdini was assaulted by a young man in his dressing room. The stomach blows -- which he had invited as a test of his legendary strength -- aggravated a case of appendicitis, and he soon became seriously ill. In a final display of stamina and willpower, Houdini performed the next day and again in Detroit. His appendix was removed on October 25th, but the delay had allowed an infection to set in, and he died in Detroit on Halloween.

Banner headlines, long obituaries, and a crowded public funeral in New York marked Houdini's passing. These were but a few of the signs that the world knew it had lost one of the most original and beloved entertainers of all time.

Edward Malkowski was a profoundly influential force in the crazy field of card magic. As Ed Marlo, he wrote over 60 books on every conceivable aspect of cards, contributing over 2000 tricks and subtleties to the art form.

To say that Marlo was obsessive about cards is an understatement. For example, on night, two magicians and their wives took Marlo and his wife to dinner to celebrate his birthday. During the drive to the hotel restaurant, one of the magicians told Marlo about having seen a new card trick. Marlo whipped out a deck and began figuring out a way to perform the trick he'd just been described. While in this frenzied state, he shut out the world. By the time they arrived at the parking garage, Marlo's cards were all over the back seat.

The driving magician handed his keys to the valet, and the group piled out of the car. Shortly after entering the hotel, however, one of the magicians suddenly stopped and asked: "Hey - where's Ed?"

The group ran back to the garage to find the valet who had parked the car. "Excuse me - did you see the older gentleman who came with us?" The valet nodded. "You mean the guy with the cards? Yeah - he's upstairs in the car. I left him in the back seat playing with his cards!"

The magicians ran up two parking tiers and found the car. There was Ed Marlo, hunched over the cards. They opened the door and cried, "What are you doing, Ed?!"

"Working on the twentieth method," was all he said.

John Scarne was born Orlando Carmelo Scarnecchia in Steubenville, Ohio, on March 4, 1903, and soon moved with his unemployed Italian-born parents to northern New Jersey. In The Odds Against Me, his 1966 memoir, he admits that his first dream was to become a boxer. He tells how he would spar with -- and lose to -- a boy named James J. Braddock. When the two played checkers, however, Scarne consistently beat the future heavyweight champion.

Scarne had a sharp mathematical mind, but he never finished high school. His education came from observing "broad tossers" (three-card monte men) at the local carnival grounds and from a novelty shop owner who milled imperfect dice and marked up decks of playing cards. Mechanical aids fascinated Scarne, but not as much as sleight of hand. From an early age he devoted countless hours to practicing prestidigitation. By the age of 13, he could toss the broad like a professional, much to the chagrin of his Catholic mother, who believed cards and dice were the devil's tools.

Mrs. Scarnecchia's concerns cannot be considered entirely religious. In the early 20th century, gambling in America was not the regulated, advertised combination of state lotteries, Indian reservations and family-friendly Nevada oases of today. Rather it was the shady province of racketeers and policemen paid off to ignore their parlors.

Gambling could be perilous, even in small-time situations, as the 15-year-old Scarne learned when he tried his luck at a neighborhood card table. A fellow called Lutzie was dealing "banker and broker," a game decided by who cuts the high card. As Scarne tells it in his memoir, he ran through his entire weekly salary (he worked in an embroidery factory) before noticing that something was amiss. Lutzie would pick up the cards at the center of the deck to cut for Scarne, but for himself he would cut from the end. Scarne asked Lutzie if he could shuffle, and as he handled the deck he could feel it was uneven; some cards had convex edges, others concave. In gambler's argot, these cards are known as belly-strippers.

"You're all a bunch of crooks and this deck is just as crooked!" hollered Scarne, who then demonstrated to the other players how Lutzie could cut a high card at will. Lutzie reached for the belly-strippers, then pulled a switchblade. Another man grabbed a bottle. Scarne, trembling with fear, fled just before the cops arrived.

"If you like to play with cards so much, practice to do tricks with them," Mrs. Scarnecchia told her son when she heard what happened. So he developed skills in the slightly more respectable realm of magic. A playing card would mysteriously appear in someone's wallet, a dollar bill would emerge from the inside of a lemon.

At 19, Scarne gave a half-hour magic show at the Park Central Hotel in New York. For the finale, he performed what would become his signature feat: cutting all four aces from an unmarked, unstacked deck of cards. At the hotel that evening was Arnold Rothstein, the gangster infamous for fixing the 1919 World Series. Night after night Rothstein paid $200 for a private show so his cronies could observe Scarne cutting the aces. No wiser at the end of a week, Rothstein had an associate offer to bankroll Scarne on a card-playing junket to Hot Springs, Ark. With Scarne's gifts, it would be possible to earn $100,000 in a week without resorting to belly-strippers. Rothstein's boys offered Scarne a 25 percent cut, but he turned them down.

Throughout his life Scarne walked a fine line in his contacts with the underworld. Scarne lived in what might now be dubbed "Sopranos" country, and he wasn't shy about claiming to know figures like Willie Moretti and Frank Costello. Yet Scarne didn't want to shorten his life expectancy by playing cards with mobsters -- even the mighty Rothstein met his end as the result of a high-stakes poker game -- and he bailed out of more than one business venture after his partners brought in unsavory characters.

As careful as Scarne was about staying clean, his interest in gambling meant hanging out with criminals and keeping abreast of new schemes employed by card mechanics, or cheats. Scarne won their trust.

What's more, Scarne lived for impressing the people who best appreciated his handiwork with cards and dice. In addition to the racket boys, this audience included the fraternity of magicians who congregated at Hornmann's magic shop in New York. Magicians used different techniques than card mechanics, and Scarne's brand of legerdemain made an impression. At Hornmann's he befriended the already legendary Harry Houdini. Scarne learned a trick or two at Hornmann's, perhaps none so useful as Houdini's advice: "No one will ever be a better press agent for John Scarne than John Scarne himself." In vaudeville, Scarne billed himself as The World's Greatest Card Manipulator and The Magician Who Fools Magicians.

Scarne was already pushing 40 when the United States entered World War II, and he initiated his own campaign on the home front. The way Scarne saw it, the war brought together millions of strangers in isolated places with few leisure activities other than gambling. Scarne estimated cardsharps and dice cheats were earning $75 million a month off enlisted men. On military bases and in the pages of Yank, the Army Weekly, Scarne undertook a crusade to educate the young and naive. When he couldn't warn soldiers off gambling altogether, Scarne tried to level the playing field by teaching them how to identify rigged equipment and distributing a crib sheet with the correct odds in craps, which Yank printed under the headline "Paste This in Your Hat."

Scarne's hands and occasionally his face appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times Magazine. He demonstrated cheating methods to the FBI, and at a 1944 banquet at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington entertained the commanders of the U.S. Army Air Forces and Britain's Royal Air Force.

Building on his wartime efforts, Scarne set out to supplant Edmond Hoyle, the 18th-century Englishman associated with gaming manuals as closely as Noah Webster is with dictionaries. He was helped along by the birth of television and the rise of Las Vegas. Scarne did his anti-cheating act on the variety shows popular in the early years of TV. In Vegas, he met Bugsy Siegel, already familiar with Scarne from illicit gambling parlors, at Siegel's pioneering Flamingo Hotel. Scarne taught Siegel the fly-and-sugar game, in which players wager on which of two sugar cubes a fly will land upon. The game is rigged; one face of each cube is treated with DDT, and the cubes are rotated so only one pesticided face is exposed. With the help of a fly, Siegel won $10,000 off Willie Moretti.

Scarne became a consultant to the Hilton hotel chain to ensure its casinos in the Caribbean were run honestly. For a while he ran his own magic-themed nightclub. Every few years he produced a new book. Scarne on Dice, Scarne's Guide to Modern Poker and Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling remain in print decades after the original editions appeared. Scarne appeared with Merv Griffin and Jack Paar, and served as a technical adviser on "The Sting." When the con man played by Paul Newman contrives to deal himself a winning poker hand, the dexterous hands you see in close-up actually belong to Scarne.

"All of my adventures and exploits . . . will, of course, be forgotten soon enough," Scarne writes at the conclusion of The Odds Against Me. "Gamblers and magicians come and go, but these truly great all-skill parlor board games are what I feel is my contribution to history." When he died in 1985, newspapers eulogized him as an international gambling expert, though there was no mention of his favorite game.

Slydini was born in Italy as Quintino Marucci. Slydini was the son of an amateur magician who encouraged him to pursue sleight of hand at an early age. Slydini was attracted to the psychological of the art that most appealed to the young Tony in the beginning, which would later manifest itself in his magic in the form of precise and expert use of misdirection. He was also taken by the relationship between the magician and his audience, which fueled his desire to be a close-up artist.

While still young, Slydini and his family left Italy to live in Argentina. It was there that Slydini began to experiment more seriously with magic. "In Argentina,", he says, "I created my own magic. There were many ways to go. I went the right way. I created magic."

Slydini worked in South America's vaudeville in South America for a time, but soon the Depression hit and work became scarce. In 1930, he moved to New York City, where work was also scarce, especially for a young man who spoke no English. Finally, Slydini found work in a museum on Forty-second Street. From there, Slydini found work in carnivals and sideshows.

Once Slydini went to visit his sister in Boston, and began looking for work. Thanks for a lucky break, Slydini managed to impress an agent there and landed a job for $15 a day for a three-day job. His skill was apparent to those who saw him on those three days, including another agent who offered him another contract. This contract continued for some time; Slydini ended up performing in Boston for seven years. But New York called to the now successful Slydini, and he moved back to there.

It's important to note that, at this time, close-up artistry didn't exist as it does now. Back in those days, close-up was used merely as an introduction to platform or stage shows. Slydini was breaking new ground, but only he seemed to realize it. In 1945, in New Orleans, he began to see the new land on which he was treading.

At that time, in New Orleans, there was a magic convention that Slydini used to show his own special brand of magic. "The world didn't recognize the close-up art then," he says. "No one knew I had this beautiful thing. Even magicians didn't know what it was. When I went to New Orleans, I had a standing ovation for twenty minutes. "Slydini's magic is different," they said.

Slydini, of course, didn't invent close-up magic; that had been around for centuries. But Slydini's style of close-up was something that had never been seen before. Slydini was one of the first to show close-up magic as an art rather than as a lead-in to bigger and grander illusions. Slydini's magic was impromptu; rather than follow a set sequence of tricks, he allowed his audience and the situation to dictate his show. "I do a trick better," he said, "if I like the trick, but if they like it, and I don't like it, I will do it for them anyway."

But to Slydini, magic was more than just tricks. "You have to know all the details. Something is happening all the time. You have to understand every moment. You have to hold people, how to entertain them. You must be aware of the common sense of things, the movements of the body, where to look and how to sit or stand."

A man of continental charm, sharp wit, undeniable skill and subtlety, Slydini delighted in performing, whether for laymen or magicians. Bringing precision, grace, and intelligence to the table, Slydini could baffle them all as well as he entertained. Dick Cavett once asked Dai Vernon who could still fool him. Nobody, the Professor replied almost regretfully, then added with a smile, "Of course, Tony can."

Dai Vernon (David Frederick Wingfield Verner) was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on June 11, 1894. He got the nickname of "Dai" when a typo in a newspaper gave him Dai instead of David. His last name "Vernon" came from the dancer, Vernon Castle, who with his wife was a dancer in the 1920's. While in New York, his name Vernon was carried over since most New Yorkers could not pronounce it correctly. Vernon is, without doubt, the most influential conjuror of the 20th century.

Magicians know him affectionately as ‘The Professor’ and as 'The Man Who Fooled Houdini. Harry Houdini boasted that no one could fool him if he saw a trick performed three times in a row. In 1919, in Chicago, Vernon took up his challenge. He performed an old version of 'The Ambitious Card' eight times in a row, and Houdini had no idea how it was done. As a result in the 1920s and 30s, Vernon used the line "He Fooled Houdini" in his advertisement. It was later that Vernon's friend Garrick Spencer gave him the name 'The Professor'. Vernon didn't care for it, but it stuck with him.

If you mention his name to any conjuror, amateur or professional, and you will immediately have their undivided attention. Vernon improved known tricks and created new ones such as Twisting the Aces. He was a smart man, knew old magicians like Max Malini and Harry Houdini. He had friendship with magicians like T. Nelson Downs, Allan Shaw, Manuel, and Welch Miller to name a few.

In 1963, Dai Vernon came to see Jay Ose, visiting the Magic Castle for the first time. Vernon is probably the most notable resident magician of the Magic Castle. Magicians from all over the world came to the Magic Castle to learn from the him. His clinical mind was responsible for many modern classic routines adopted by numerous magicians today. He set new standards, and elevated the art of conjuring more than almost any predecessor. He is probably the greatest contributor to the art of close-up magic. However, he was a modest person blessed with indescribable charm. He was a true gentleman and everyone loved him. It was very rare to hear Vernon say anything unkind about anybody. Even if the person deserved it, he would always find something positive to say about them. He had the rare ability to fill anyone in his company with renewed enthusiasm for their art, magic. There was only one conjuror that he spoke of negatively, and that was Harry Houdini.

Many of today's great magicians (Michael Ammar, Bruce Cervon, John Carney, Larry Jennings, Ricky Jay, just to name a few) came to learn from Dai Vernon. In October 1965, journalist, and amateur conjuror Richard Buffum recorded a series of interviews with Vernon. This amounted to seven miles of tape. An edited transcript of these interviews appeared in the book, The Vernon Chronicles - Dai Vernon a Magical Life, published in 1992, and edited by Bruce Cervon and Keith Burns, both very close friends of Vernon. Sadly ‘The Professor’ passed over shortly after the publication of the book. He died at the age of 98, in Hollywood, California in 1992.


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