Crushing a Woman

This illusion is something that my Dad and Jim Sommers built. I never saw him perform it, or at least I can't remember it. It seems that a Magician named Chang was coming to the U.S. and wanted to lease equipment. He apparently called Ed Smith who believed my Dad had Dante's version of the prop. I guess he did not but was familiar enough with it that he was able to reproduce it along with Jim. Ed Smith provided them with sufficient funds that they in fact were able to make two sets of the illusion. Since Chang did an Oriental Act, they painted it with characters and made the tubing look like bamboo. I spoke with Jim Sommers and he tells me that he found the Japanese characters for the seasons and used them on the prop. The lady who lived next door to us on Hope Street was a Japanese woman and she saw the doors when they were drying and made a comment about how, yes it really was Spring out.

 This was taken at the house we rented in South Pasadena on Hope street. We were only there three or four years and left in early 1963. You can see the five garage structure behind the props, I'm sure that was one of the big attractions. There was a lot of storage space. When we moved to East Los Angeles, my Dad had to rent garages two doors down and a block down from neighbors, to accommodate the props we had no room for in the garage behind our house.









This is a shot of Jim Sommers posing with both props. One of these was leased to Chang and then Ed Smith sold it to another South American Magician, I thought we may have kept the second one but I don't really know. My Dad had an idea for a version of this that used a fish tank instead of two other girls to occupy the crushing boxes. With dramatic lighting and music it would have been spectacular. There were several times he spoke to possible backers of a in residence illusion show and mentioned this as one of the new attractions, but we never built it.