Thinking Over a Problem

I have not abandoned this blog, merely neglected it for a while. There are still plenty of things to share but i have to make a bigger effort to get to them. This entry does not really require that effort. I found this picture in a box in the house and it just struck me as exactly right. I saw this expression many times when working in the shop with my Dad. Any of you who knew him will probably recognize it as well. He is thinking it out and working for a solution.

Argosy Magazine Magic Spread

If you read the hyperbole in the article, you would agree my Father was the greatest Magician since Houdini. While I might think so, I doubt that there is consensus on this point. Still it is a very nice article and it is packed with a bunch of pictures that he used for publicity purposes for the rest of his life.

Orson Welles in Wonderland

As I posted last year, my parents worked with Orson Welles in Las Vegas in 1956. The Great one fancied himself as a magician as well as genius. That would be for others to decide. From the reviews it appears that his goals exceeded his grasp, which given his history seems appropriate. He did however lease props from my folks for his show and both of them assisted on a nightly basis for at least three weeks. I know that because here is the contract they had for their services.

The venture apparently started off a little rough. It was at first a seventy-five minute show, featuring big illusions and dramatic readings. It looks like it did not take long to trim it down to a more manageable length. Here is the first review in the Variety.

The girl assistant mentioned is of course the amazing Phyllis Kirkham. In case you have not seen the earlier post, here is another look at the effect featuring her.

I also found this second shot of Dad on stage in the background while Welles appears to be using the police in Vegas as part of the act. I think this might be a segment of  the mind reading routine that the review refers to. I can't identify the apparatus on the table, it could be a record player, radio or phone equipment. Anyway, this was just a little more of the stuff I found on the Vegas adventure with Orson Welles.

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.

Jumbo Sized Lobby Pictures/Thurston and Dante

My Dad had hundreds of posters and pictures at one time of classic vaudevillian magicians. He acquired some of them with his purchase of part of  the Thurston show from Magician Will Rock. Other items he managed to buy at actions or get from friends. Here are some of those photos that were large sized so the could be displayed in the lobbies of the theaters where the magicians performed.

 

My Dad had hundreds of posters and pictures at one time of classic vaudevillian magicians. He acquired some of them with his purchase of part of  the Thurston show from Magician Will Rock. Other items he managed to buy at actions or get from friends. Here are some of those photos that were large sized so the could be displayed in the lobbies of the theaters where the magicians performed.

 These first two are the older pair, they may have been from the Thurston show but they seem to focus in an Indian themed section. I wish I could say for sure, It does not look like Howard Thurston in any of the images, it may be some other performers relics. This is my younger brother Kirk, standing with the photos circa 1985.

 These two photos I know feature Dante. He was a personal friend of my Dad's and they may have come from his ranch out in the Valley in what is now Northridge. None of these is in my possession today. They were all sold to private collectors at one point or another. I especially liked the last photo featuring Dante's magic words (and the name for his show) Sim Sala Bim. I had to move it out of the way everytime we went to the garages my Dad rented for years in South Pasadena.

A Pause Not an End

I am still working on material for the blog. It has been a while since I posted and I just want to reassure anyone reading that there is more to come. Thanks.

Sea World 1973-1974

Some time in 1973, Dad agreed to produce a show for Sea World. The show was to feature penguins and sea lions in the stadium that their existing performances took place in. He needed to work out details for the show with the animal trainers and there were also rules to follow created by the park itself. For instance, nothing could appear to put the animals in jeopardy. That meant no swords, saws, guns, electricity or any other concept where it might look like an animal was threatened. Many illusions are designed to create a sense of danger to the subject that of course is not really there, so this eliminated a lot of possible options. The park clearly wanted to avoid any public perception that the animals were being maltreated.

In case you have not guessed, it is pretty much impossible to train a penguin to do anything but walk in a particular direction. So they cant be expected to operate a hidden device or respond to a command that would bring them out of a secret chamber. Sea World did need the penguins to be part of this show, and I remember how frustrated Dad was, he said they can only do two things "Walk and crap".  A production of the penguins had to involve them walking, they could not be pulled out of a tube or box or be handled like they were a dove or a chicken or duck in the usual way of a magicians use of live birds. The solution was to produce them our of a giant sized hat that was really a production box on casters. I don't remember exactly how the routine went but ultimately, two or three penguins walked out of this hat.

The concept that was developed, made one of the sea lions the "magician", and he would wave a wand or pull a foulard off of a prop and then "perform" the illusion. Of course the sea lion had to have the help of the trainers and there was a patter that was created to make their interaction funny. Three main illusions were created for the Sea Lions to use in the show. One of these was a version of the dove thru glass effect that my dad did for a full evening show. I saw a similar prop being offered by other manufacturers and I think I may even have seen it done on a TV show where a girl penetrates the glass.

My Brother Chris playing the part of a sea lion .

Chris providing some scale for the glass penetration as it was being completed

 My brother Chris worked with my Dad on this project quite a bit. It required two men to move and operate some of the effects so his being there was very helpful. I remember cutting and painting the gold trim on the props, and I also helped cut the plexiglass mirrors for this so I know we were all on the project together at one point. Some of the other props I had a little less to do with. I don't remember doing anything on the drum suspended production and I only helped a little in painting the levitation stands. I suspect most of this work was done in the fall while I was an high school classes.

Creating a table with a slide for a girl to be pushed thru a glass wall is relatively easy compared to trying to do the same for a sea lion. That was one of the many issues that had to be worked out with the park and the trainers. The prop on the other hand was straightforward and actually pretty clever.

Earlier I said there were three big effects, but as I looked at the photos I remembered that there was a appearance of a sea lion in a previously shown empty drum. The drum was moved over the water, and at the right moment, the sea lion would burst through the side and dive into the water. This was one of the tricky parts of the show because the sea lion had to load itself into the drum and then wait for a signal to make an appearance. My Dad spent quite a bit of time working with the trainers on this effect. He was down at Sea World in San Diego several times to help in the process. I remember spending a day with him and the trainers going over the cues and mechanics of the prop. One of my personal fond memories of dad was going to a seafood restaurant called the Jolly Roger on the way home late one Saturday night. My Dad was not a fan of seafood but he let me choose the place we stopped and I remember having crab cakes for the first time, while I think he ordered a hamburger at a fish place.  You can see the base the drum sat on in one  of the  shots above, at the moment i do not have a complete version that includes the drum but I am sure it will turn up at some point.

The sea lion magician would also levitate a sea lion assistant. This was basically a modified version of a Super X suspension illusion.  The animal would lay still on a surf board and the supporting brackets would be removed leaving the board and sea lion suspended in the air. This was another effect that was complicated because the trainers had to do things that the sea lions could not and that meant that the show had to be tailored a bit to accommodate the humans as well.

The design on the brackets feature some very pretty seahorse figures. I don't remember if we made these but it seems like something my mother could have drawn. I don't know where else they would have come from.


The final main illusion was an escape from a steel cage that the sea lion would do under water. This was an effect that created some problems because it suggested that the animal might drown if it could not get out. During the process of production, my dad and the trainers went around and around on this. When I saw it performed, the cage was not entirely submerged and that may have been the compromise that they finally worked out.

One of my favorite stories about my brother Chris involves this prop as it was being moved back and forth from our apartment to the workshop in Pasadena. They had the cage on a flat trailer bed and at a stop light, my brother rolled down his window and asked a little boy about eight or nine if he had seen a tiger in the area. The kid looked at the empty cage and screamed. Chris told us this story and I remember vividly the voice he used and the expression of worry that he put on his face and then the same kind of description of the kid's response.

This was an especially big project because the show was being produced for all the Sea World parks. In addition to all the completed illusions for the San Diego Park, we were building props for Orlando Florida and a pack in Ohio. Unfortunately during the time we were in the process of staging the show down in San Diego, the guy who was the entertainment producer for the Sea World Parks was killed. I think his name was Larry Sands (I hope I am not conflating it with the TV show character). He was scouting locations for a TV show or movie and his helicopter crashed. I remember it being on the news and that was how my Dad found out about it. He was heart broken because Mr. Sands was a friend and a long time business associate. Sea World took delivery of the props but as far as I know never finished them or produced shows at the other parks. The death of Mr. Sands let the wind out of all the sails on this show. I do remember that Dad and Mr. Sands had to show the park blue prints of the props Dad was going to build. Dad told Larry that he usually did not do blue prints until he had actually constructed a prop to begin with since he constantly had to make adjustments as he went along. The park was adamant and Dad, who did have some training in drafting, put together blue prints as part of the pitch for the shows.

I don't know what happened to any of these props. If anyone out there acquired any of these effects and you come across this post, please let me know your story. This last photo is a grouping of the props in progress at one point.

You can see two sets of mirrors and two drum bases in this shot. I know we did a total of three for the three Sea World Parks.