Kirkham Magic: February 2013

Welcome to the Calvacade of Magic Presented By Kirk Kirkham

My Father was the Magician known professionally as Kirk Kirkham, his real name was Charles and many folks called him Chuck. He lived from 1926 to 2001. He was an active professional performer from the time he was sixteen years old. Magic was the only living he ever had. He toured with the USO after World War II, did the spook show circuit and television extensively in the 1950's, did thousands of club dates, school shows, and more television in the 60's, continued performing in the 70's but also became a well regarded prop maker who produced equipment for other magicians and attractions around the country.

Currently, David Copperfield has the largest private collection of illusions in the world, but prior to his success and collection, my father may very well have been the previous holder of that title. He owned parts of Thurston's Wonder Show of the Universe and Mysteries of India. He acquired much of the core of his collection from Will Rock back in the early 50's but continued to add to it the rest of his life. He knew and worked with Harry Blackstone Sr., Percy Abbot was a mentor to him. Dante was a personal friend, and he owned famous illusions that belonged to all of them.

My goal is to keep his legacy alive here in cyber space, and provide some historical context to the Southern California Magic scene in the 60's and 70's. I have had virtually no contact with the Magic world since my Mother passed away in 1994. My Dad suffered from Alzheimer's in his last years and he could not write the book that he always said he would get to someday. I don't know enough about magic to write competently concerning history, practice and technique. I can however provide an historical context for my Father, a man who knew almost everything about magic during the 20th Century. He had a huge library, subscribed to dozens of magazines, and had met every important magician of the second half of the century. He was consulted by many of the experts that now make up the intelligentsia of the magic community. He was also a mentor to many fine magicians and scholars of magic. I hope to hear from some of those people as a result of this blog.

Welcome to the Magical World of Kirk Kirkham.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Theater Fantastique

It has been a while since I posted anything and I do want to keep the blog active, but I am waiting for some material to come back from on loan, and some help in digging out more stuff from the shed. meanwhile, I had scanned these photos for a post on the Summer show at Lake Gregory in 1971. I do have additional material on it and I will put it together at a later time but for now, here is a preview of our Summer adventure.

My Dad always wanted what today's Vegas performers have, a long term venue that is mostly under their control. At one point he had talked to the owners of the old Rialto Theater in South Pasadena, and considered turning the warehouse at the old location of Owens Brothers into a Theater Annex for the steakhouse next door. In 1971, he and a group of investors tried a Summer Season show in the local mountain resorts near Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead. They scouted locations and were impressed with the numbers of visitors to Lake Gregory and the local village. They rented a tent and turned it into a venue for evening entertainment and weekend matinees.

This is a publicity shot in the local paper, mentioning the show and the slogan that they had used to promote it:

"Back Again for the First Time, Family Entertainment In Nostalgic Tent Show Surroundings."

I remember when we first set up having some passerby asking what time the meeting was. They thought we were a revivalist church.

The show was promoted with two big banners across the main street through town, one near the narrow road that lead to the village and one right outside the back of the theater.

The shows were supposed to be nightly with Saturday and Sunday Matinees. Lake Gregory had their worst tourist season in years that summer. The crowds at the Lake were small so the crowds at the shows each night were also sparse. Some evenings we played to 40 to 50 people. The busiest nights were the three days around the July 4th weekend. We had between 300 and 400 each night, but it was not enough to sustain a large continuing operation. After the holiday, we dropped down to Thursday through Sunday shows. We also finished in July rather than the end of August which was the original plan.

The "Magic Circus" tent was fronted by a nice entry with a beautifully lettered sign.
At night it was lighted with floodlights to direct people to the main entrance of the theater.

In this next shot my dad is showing the set up to a couple of magic friends. Harlan (Torchy) Towner is on the left, and I don't remember for sure the name of the guy in the middle, although he does resemble Bill Keeler, I can't sat for certain that it is him.

Also in front of the Entryway were several large photos blown up from the shoot done for Argosy Magazine back in the 1960s. These were mounted on 4 X 8 sheets of plywood and stood up with triangular leg stands. I have not been able yet to find a shot of them. All of this was across the parking area for the lake which was just North of the location.

We had a pretty good sized group working the show that summer. My Mom, younger brother and I all worked. There were two Japanese Students that I think were connected to the magician Shimada in some way, who also played assistant and stayed on the property for the summer in tents behind the theater. They were both very nice but did not speak a great deal of English. Tina Cosko, the daughter of one of my Dad's friends in the IBM Ring 21 or Los Magicos, also worked the show. She was three or four years older than I was and she had done some of the other big shows that we did earlier that year at the Ebell theater. I think that is her walking across the lot in the daytime hours in the shot on the left. She of course was sawed in half and levitated on a nightly basis. I think her Dad was one of the backers of the show as well. All of us hung out quite a bit at the A&W stand on the corner west of the location.

The interior of the tent looked like a regular theater. We had taken the shopping center stage and adapted it to the front of the house. In the back there were risers that were supposed to be inexpensive seats for the crowds but since the theater was not usually packed, most people ended up down front close to the stage on show nights.

At some point during the run my Dad had severe sinus and back issues. He was often bed ridden during the day and managed to get up for the shows at night. For the family and Tina, we had a cabin that we had rented for the summer at the top of the hill just up the street from the grounds of the show. It was very convenient. When we stopped working every night of the week, we commuted back down the mountain to the apartment in Alhambra, usually Sunday after the show and then returned Thursday mornings.

We posted handbills and posters all around the town. Some had the rainbow spectrum background without any graphics. There was also a peach background poster that had some nice graphics used in other promotional material. Here is what that looked like.

It was a great experience but not a big money maker. The really nice part of it was that we did the show so regularly that things moved pretty smoothly and the show never lagged because of some problem with a set up. Everyone knew what they were supposed to do and they were well rehearsed. If we had taken the full evening show on the road, it would have been a burden on the family. This was another case of Dad making a decision to do the show in one spot so that we could have a fairly normal life. He had come back six months earlier from traveling with my older brother Chris on a Circus tour. They had to caravan with the troop and sleep in a trailer. I think my Mom laid down the law and said no to that kind of tour. Kirk and I needed to be in school. So the summer at the lake was a compromise.

A Life in Magic: Here in Southern California

As a kid, I’d imagined myself following in my father’s footsteps and becoming a performer. I had magic kits, and puppets and a variety of equipment readily available. What I lacked was discipline. Someone once told me that the difference between your current status and expertise in a field was 10,000 hours of hard work. When I got to high school I discovered girls and debate, and suddenly, spending time on the technical craft of performing magic seemed less desirable to me. My father was never disappointed in my choice. He allowed me to stay a part of his world even though that part was on the sidelines. He was one of those people who understood the level of dedication that was required to be really good at your craft.

From the time he was a kid he wanted to be a magician, and that is what he worked his whole life at doing. He practiced and performed and read and dreamed. He talked with everyone who was interested in magic about everything connected to performing. When I was young my friends thought it was strange that my dad would still be asleep at ten or eleven in the morning. They did not understand that some people simply thrive at night. When he came home from a show or an evening with his friends in magic my father did not sit in front of the television; he read. He was a sponge when it came to magical knowledge. He listened to friends like Percy Abbott, Harry Blackstone, Bill Larsen Sr., and Dante tell stories and share secrets. He sought out magicians of all stripes to answer questions and to ask them. He acquired books and articles and lectures and blueprints and anything else he could lay his hands on, that dealt with magic and performing. When we needed funds to provide for his care in his last years it pained me to have to sell his library: I knew it was one of the most unique in the world.

He was more than just a fountain of knowledge though; he was a performer. Being on stage is where he came to life and made his mark. While he was an accomplished illusionist and a talented close-up performer, my father’s greatest strength lay in interacting with an audience. He loved having the little kids come up from the audience to do the hats and pants routine – just playing a silly, wonderful game. When they laughed and smiled, he was in his element. Lots of magicians do a guillotine trick, but Kirkham did ten minutes of audience participation, comedy and drama. The trick was the climax of the segment but it was hardly the highlight. His byplay with the two brave boys who volunteered to be onstage was where most of the fun was. When the curtain opened and an illusion was performed, my dad was as good as anyone else. In front of the curtain, setting up the scene or doing a small effect with patter he was better than everyone else.

We worked all kinds of shows and venues. Club dates at nightspots, corporate picnics in parks, high school auditoriums and legitimate theaters for full evening extravaganzas. When he did TV, I always felt special and made sure to tell my friends to watch ABC on Saturday night or CBS Wednesday afternoon. My older brother worked on my father’s show, along with my mother, for years before I was much help.

From 1965 to 1975, I went on all the state fair shows and company Christmas parties. My younger brother was in the act as well but by the time he was able to do some of the things I got to do my dad had slowed down a bit, so I can safely say that I was the only reason he could offer $10,000 to anyone who could prove he used two girls in the Thurston sawing a woman in half act. And so I got to discover that the smell of sawdust did a lot to minimize any claustrophobia I might have experienced as a kid. Speaking of sawdust, one year my Dad and my older brother, Chris, ran away with the circus; when it came to town, my younger brother, Kirk, and I joined for a couple of days – Kirk sold programs alongside the kid in the circus who was a fantastic juggler – so Kirk and I got the experience but did not have to caravan in a trailer for six months like Chris and Dad did.

In the fifties Dad and Mom worked in Vegas with Orson Welles. In the sixties Phyllis Diller asked Dad to come to Vegas and work with her. He had lots of chances to be a pioneer in sin city prestidigitation, but after all the issues he had with my troubled older brother Dad thought that relocating to Vegas, which was not the corporate tourist friendly spot it is today, was not a good idea. With two young boys at home, he sought a more traditional upbringing. We were kids of the suburbs, but show business and Hollywood were the office that Ward Cleaver went to each day instead of the insurance company. We got to meet movie stars and eat in fancy restaurants. We saw the eccentrics on Hollywood Boulevard before it filled up with drug users and homeless people. And then aside from the mundane Hollywood insanity, there were all my parents friends.

We had close friends who practically lived with us and helped out with the shows Dad was putting together. There were young performers from the Long Beach Mystics who came and milked my Dad’s brain for information and exchanged time working in the show for all of the encouragement they got. We had old timers from vaudeville sit down at the dining room table and regale us with stories of the past. Business associates visited, ate and became our friends as well as our parents friends. We had the star of the Moscow circus, at the height of the Cold War, sharing secrets even though he spoke little English. One time my Dad got into a fistfight with another magician in Baja California while we were down there to see a magic show. My mother had to go out and pay off the cops in the middle of the night to get him out of custody, leaving my younger brother and I at the hotel. Later, he and the other magician became friends again and did business together on several occasions. So while we had the trappings of a fifties family, the reality was often far different.

My Dad was always up for a confrontation, so his relations with some of the other elements of the magic world in Southern California were terse at times. I don’t know what feuds and rivalries were important and which were minor. I just know he loved the life he led in good times and tough ones. When my Mother passed away in 1994, we lost all connection to the magic world because my Dad needed her to keep track of his memory. His decline was accelerated by her absence. Those of you who knew my parents know how much that was true. Those of you out there who are meeting them for the first time through this article, welcome to the real history of magic in Southern California. My family would like to thank everyone involved in putting this material together. It is good to have a legacy, but it is better to have friends who remember you fondly.