Howard Thurston

THE MISSIONARY WHO GOT ON THE WRONG TRAIN— AND BECAME A FAMOUS MAGICIAN

One cold night, half a century ago, a crowd was pouring out of McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago. It was a laughing, happy crowd — a crowd that had been entertained by Alexander Herrmann, the great magician of that day.

A shivering newsboy stood on the sidewalk, trying to sell copies of the Chicago Tribune to the crowd. But he was having a tough time of it. He had no overcoat, he had no home, and he had no money to pay for a bed. That night, after the crowd faded away, he wrapped himself in news¬ papers and slept on top of an iron grating which was warmed slightly by the furnace in the basement, in an alley back of the theatre.

 As he lay there, hungry and shivering, he vowed that he too would be a magician. He longed to have crowds applauding him, wear a fur-lined coat, and have girls wait¬ ing for him at the stage door. So he made a solemn vow that when he was a famous magician, he would come back and play as a headliner in the same theatre.

That boy was Howard Thurston — and twenty years later he did precisely that. After his performance he went out in the alley and found his initials where he had carved them on the back of the theatre a quarter of a century before when he had been a hungry, homeless newsboy.

At the time of his death — April 13, 1936 — Howard Thurston was the acknowledged dean of magicians, the king of legerdemain. During his last forty years he had traveled all over the world, time and again, creating illusions, mystifying audiences, and making people gasp with astonishment. More than sixty million people paid ad¬ missions to his show, and his profits were almost two million dollars.

Shortly before his death, I spent an evening with Thurston in the theatre, watching his act from the wings. Later we went up to his dressing room and he talked for hours about his exciting adventures. The plain, unvarnished truth about this magician’s life was almost as astonishing as the illusions he created on the stage.

When he was a little boy, his father whipped him cruelly because he had driven a team of horses too fast. Blind with rage, he dashed out of the house, slammed the door, ran screaming down the street and disappeared. His mother and father never saw him or heard from him again for five years. They feared he was dead.

And he admitted that it was a wonder he wasn’t killed; for he became a hobo, riding in box cars, begging, stealing, sleeping in barns and haystacks and deserted buildings. He was arrested dozens of times, chased, cursed, kicked, thrown off trains, and shot at.

He became a jockey and a gambler; at seventeen years of age, he found himself stranded in New York without a dollar, and without a friend. Then a significant thing happened. Drifting into a religious meeting, he heard an evangelist preach on the text, "There Is a Man in You.”

Deeply moved, and stirred as he had never been stirred before in his life, he was convinced of his sins. So he walked up to the altar and with tears rolling down his cheeks, was converted. Two weeks later, this erstwhile hobo was out preaching on a street corner in Chinatown.

He was happier than he had ever been before, so he decided to become an evangelist, enrolled in the Moody Bible School at Northfield, Massachusetts, and worked as a janitor to pay for his board and room.

He was eighteen years old then, and up to that time, he had never gone to school more than six months in his life. He had learned to read by looking out of box car doors at signs along the railway and asking other tramps what they meant. He couldn’t write or figure or spell. So he went to his classes in the Bible School and studied Greek and biology in the daytime, and studied reading and writ¬ ing and arithmetic at night.

He finally decided to become a medical missionary and was on his way to attend the University of Pennsylvania when a little thing happened that changed the entire course of his life.

On his way from Massachusetts to Philadelphia, he had to change trains at Albany. While waiting for his train, he drifted into a theatre and watched Alexander Herr¬ mann perform tricks of magic that kept the audience popeyed with wonder. Thurston had always been interested in magic. He had always tried to do card tricks. He longed to talk to his idol, his hero, Herrmann the Great Magician. He went to the hotel and got a room next to Herrmann’s; he listened at the key-hole and walked up and down the corridor, trying to summon up enough courage to knock, but he couldn’t.

The next morning he followed the famous magician to the railway station, and stood admiring him with silent awe. The magician was going to Syracuse. Thurston was going to New York — at least he thought he was. He in¬ tended to ask for a ticket to New York; but by mistake he too asked for a ticket to Syracuse.

That mistake altered his destiny. That mistake made him a magician instead of a medical missionary.

At the floodtide of his fame, Thurston got almost a thousand dollars a day for his show. But I often heard him say that the happiest days of his life were when he was getting a dollar a day for doing card tricks for a medicine show. His name was painted in blazing red let¬ ters across a streaming banner, and he was billed as "Thur¬ ston, the Magician of the North.” He was from Columbus, Ohio; but that is North, if you are from Texas.

Thurston admitted that there were many people who knew as much about magic as he did. What, then, was the secret of his success?

His success was due to at least two things. First, he had the ability to put his personality across the footlights. He was a master showman, he knew human nature; and he said those qualities were just as important for a magician as a knowledge of magic. Everything he did, even the in¬ tonations of his voice and the lifting of an eyebrow, had been carefully rehearsed in advance, and his actions had been timed to split seconds.

And second, he loved his audience. Before the curtain went up, he stood in the wings, jumping up and down to shake himself wide awake . . . and he kept saying: "I love my audience. I love to entertain them. I’ve got a grand job. I’m so happy. I’m so happy!”

He knew that if he wasn’t happy, no one else would be.