Twenty years ago I saw Marshal Brodien selling a magic set on T.V. commercials. I was curious to what his secrets were. I brought one. I showed a few friends. I was more amazed than they were. I took it more serious as a hobby. Now it is my fun time job.

Abracadabra,

Dynamike

I was always fascinated with magic and I knew a couple of self working card tricks but nothing major. 10 years ago, a coworker performed coins across and hanging coins. The next day he performed Card Warp and Out of this World. I was hooked from that day.

I was five and at a friend's party, his mother hired a magician. To this day I can only remember him turning his handkerchief into a rabbit puppet, but whatever he did made me go out and get my first magic book. He changed my life... if I ever run into him again I'm going to punch him!
Greg

Truly interested in performing magic? The first WGM special. I set out to prove that not all magicians who perform have an overly large, inflated ego. Man, that looks so hypocritical when I look at it...

April 1975, "Doug Henning" appearance along with Bob Keeshan on Captain Kangaroo.....

Stringy hair, buckteeth, tye-dyed shirt, bellbottoms, goofy laugh...(Hey that sounded like me at the time)?

Poor Mr. Green Jeans though eh? Sam Kinison shared with me the sad behind the scenes story on that one.

hmmm I was 7 years old when I got my first magic set. But my interest was really kindled when I was 8 and saw Jeff McBrides mask routine and king of cards. From then on, I was hooked

Jonathan

I've been interested in magic for as long as I can remember (watched Copperfield on TV, got a few magic sets, checked out magic books from the library, etc.), but I got seriously into it in October 2001.

What happened was I had some money burning a hole in my pocket and I remembered the magic sets I had toyed with when I was younger. My father mentioned a magic shop in our town, and we went there the next day. I got a few simple tricks, and came back two weeks later. This time I got a book of sleight of hand, and that book is what started it all.

Since then I've been obsessed.

I was about three. I thought all you needed was a magic wand and POOF (Too many Bozo Circus shows). My uncle used to pop out his teeth. I thought that was magic! Then he did this trick of pretending to swallow a marble and "find it on his chair" after grunting real hard!

My dad noticed my interest and sent for a free catalogue from Vick Lawston in Florida. I looked at the pictures and funny cartoons and when I saw the "Miracle 5 in one Wand" I just had to have it. That was my first trick! Boy was I disappointed! It was just a trick!

But I kept the interest and by the time I was 5 I had several magic sets and tricks and was doing "walk around" stuff at the local bar where by parents hung out! The bartender hired a local magician for his birthday party there and he "took me under his wing." His grandkids hated magic and he wanted to pass it on.

He introduced me to the Abbott's get together where my eyes opened in wonder in town with people floating in the middle of the road and breathing fire on the sidewalk! He was good friends with Neil Foster and from there I got to know a bunch of the regular gang (Sid Lorraine, Jay Marshell...) and saw some wonderful performances. I was jaded to magic on TV thereafter!

When I was 11 we moved from Illiniois to California and I thought I'd lost all my connections.. but the first day of school I found my science teacher was a magician and he showed me how to build things! And so the story continues....

Around that time I witnessed his TV Magic Cards. If I were watching, you never saw the world come to a shreakin' halt! I was AMAZED.
Nothing mattered more than purchasing that deck.
Good memories indeed.

Randy Stewart

It's so true!

Kids think that it's just magic. I have even had some pipe up during a show 'You cheated, you used magic!". My niece (4 yrs) loves my performances and wants to do magic. My parents bought her a magic set for Christmas, she took one look at it and said
"no not pretend tricks, I want to be Magic!"

Anywho, back on topic, I got started when I was about 10, got a library book from the school library and performed my first trick soon after (the vanishing coin under the glass). It was spotted straight away which was when I learned my first valuable lesson. Practice, Lots.

I got interested in magic when my parents gave me a magic set for Christmas when I was 6 The set is now long gone.
Last week I found the same set for sale on E-bay and bought it for less than my parents paid 20 years ago. I don't think I'll be able to use any of the tricks in my act, though. I just bought it because I'm a sentimental, nostalgic, soppy, old muppet.

The place: Houdini's Magic Shop, New York-New York Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

The date: September 7, 2001

The hook: Demonstrator working the heck out of the UFO floating card.

Five hours later: Me, in the men's room stall, at McCarran Airport, reading the instruction book over and over.

Sixteen months later: Me, in the men's room stall, reading whatever magic book or instruction or pamphlet or side of the card deck I have with me.

I am a magic-a-holic, and I'm not ashamed.

Jay

I was around 12 when I saw John Scarne on the old Jack Paar show. I know, all the young people out there saying, "Who's Show"?

O.K., so I have been around for awhile. Anyway, it was the forerunner to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and of course now Jay Leno. Scarne appeared several times in a couple of years on this show. I was hooked and have since then only performed with cards. I love all close-up magic and enjoyed being fooled. But cards remain my favorite.

Jim Molinari

I've had a leaning towards the occult ever since I can remember. I've been doing palmistry and Tarot readings for people since I was 12. Later on I found some information on magic and was hooked .

A gift from Santa

Matt

I was interested in juggling after a fair in my school. Magic came along with it and got a higher interest (although I still do juggling).

One of my relatives/friends (can't remember which) got me interested in magic... He showed me a few tricks and I was hooked on it. I eventually got some books to read.
-THE END-
-K.J.

I don't know.

I really just don't know.

I don't mean that I don't remember. I just mean I can't put my finger on anything that made me decide I wanted to do magic WELL instead of just fooling around with it.

Hey, maybe somebody used magic on me.

I've been thinking about this one for a few days now. Maybe ten years or so ago I would have said that there were these magic books at the library, my brother and sister and I held a charity carnival in our backyard and I did a magic show with some homemade props. We made about $15 (a lot of money to us!) and gave it to the animal shelter. But now that I think about it, it goes way back before that.

Every summer we would go to the fair. I remember that there was a company selling water softeners, and to get people to stop, they had a giant faucet floating in midair with a big gusher of water coming out of it and falling into a barrel. The faucet wasn't hooked to anything either. Years later I figured out that there was a clear glass pipe in the middle of the stream, and that the fake faucet was mounted at the top of the pipe. But to see this thing in full sunlight, floating there, water gushing out, you'd stop to look at it even as well versed as you are in the mystic arts.

The first time that I saw the thing I was five years old. I guess that I just froze solid and stared, and in the thick of the crowd my family walked off and left me. I had heard the drill beforehand, so I calmly made my way to the announcement stand some distance away and informed them that my parents were lost (not me, I knew where I was)!

I suppose that they were pretty worked up by the time that they found me, but all was soon well again.

This fair also had sideshows. I remember the brightly painted banners gleaming in the sun, freak shows, lobster boy, fat lady, dwarves, everything. We occasionally went into one of the milder ones. I remember wanting to see the giant rat from South America, depicted on the banner with razor-sharp teeth dripping blood as it snarled over human remains. Inside the show they had a capybara (I didn't find out that's what it was for at least a decade). It was just nosing around inside its pen with a bowl of water and a bowl of what looked like dog food. But they sure had our money, and it was in fact the world's largest rodent.

Decades later I told people about this stuff, and they said, no way, the freak shows were all over in the 1940s. But I was in Ohio! It turns out as a kid in the 1960s I had seen the very last of them, not counting modern attempts to revive the form without exhibiting people with medical conditions.

Lately I have made some sideshow banners for my act to go with the medicine show (way earlier than carnival sideshows, but what does anybody up here know). I have researched the patter and the look of the banners. I do the ballyhoo before the glasswalk, and I have had these real old guys come up to me and tell me stories of what they saw when they were kids.

So what I am saying, in my longwinded way, is that despite my exposure to a lot of slick magic in the decades since, the core of my interest is in these marvels with straw on the ground around them, in the hot sun of August in Ohio. I think that as I have found this, I have found a true source of all magic in my heart, the cheap wonders of the amusement park and county fair, before movie special effects, before corporate theme parks, before Las Vegas magic shows with fog machines and stage lighting.

I bought a Svengali deck at the fair once, from one of the pitchmen. Who could resist these guys!

For those of you who really can't remember what it was for you, keep looking. It took me decades to figure this out. Sometimes before doing a show I get stage fright pretty bad and worry about the props, will I be able to remember everything that they throw at me (no I can't just rehease it, I memorize stuff as my show). To calm myself I think about my remotest ancestors, standing in a circle of bare earth by torchlight with a clay mask on. They could open their hearts, transform themselves and enchant their audiences with nothing more than their personal energy and shared mythology. I have read all these books, but it always comes down to that in the end.

Keep searching!

Yours,

Paul

http://www.memoryelixir.com

Doc, You killed me with that story!
Just priceless...

Randy Stewart