Lansing State Journal from Lansing, Michigan • Page 31

Today 3D Lansing State Journal Friday, Oct. 31, 1986 meowy if LHlou dlnmin Wanted to contact living after death tj 6 1 want to believe in (spirits) and I would be a fervent believer if I could find any justification for it. Harry Houdini mediums right through the last part of the final show he performed. That came Sunday night, Oct 24, 1926, on the stage of the now-vanished Garrick Theater in Detroit Houdini insisted on performing despite a 104-degree temperature. He collapsed after the final act an exposition of false mediums and their methods and was operated on the next morning for a ruptured appendix.

The organ had apparently been damaged the previous Friday afternoon in Montreal when' a young man, testing the 52-year-old Houdini's challenge that he could withstand blows to his firm abdomen, threw a series of unexpected punches as the magician lounged in his dressing room. Houdini had performed four 2'2-hour shows since that misadventure. Peritonitis, a post-operative infection now routinely treated, set in and he sank as the week wore on. Houdini died at 1:26 p.m. Oct 31, 1926, in room 401 of old Grace Hospital, sometime after telling an attending surgeon he considered himself a fake and calling out the name of Col.

Robert Inger-soll, an agnostic and popular lecturer of the late 19th century. He also, supposedly, renewed his vow to send a message, if he could, to his wife Bess. It was to be encoded in the cues of their old vaudeville mind reading act Bess participated in several seances, but, despite a couple of false alarms, Houdini never came back. Others kept trying, as recently as 1978 in Detroit, but no dice. At least, that is, until now.

This reporter stood on the main floor of Bob Lund's American Mu-sev of Magic in Marshall. There was Houdini's milk can escape set up with padlocks in place, water buckets all set to go. Overhead hung a 10-foot-high poster of the young Houdini, circa 1911. Lund and I put our hands on Houdini's milk can and shut our eyes. "Give us a sign, Harry!" Lund said.

Click! Clang! Behind us, a piece of metal was hitting the turned to retrieve it and found a commemorative coin, of the type magicians used to hand out. as souvenirs. It bore Houdini's likeness, and this quote: "My chief task has been to conquer fear." "Not a bad way to be remembered, Harry," said Lund. Tonight at 9 p.m., Okemos hypnotist Damon Reinbold will try to contact Harry Houdini's spirit The attempt will be broadcast on WLW (700 AM) in Cincinnati. ator of Sherlock Holmes and fervid believer in "spiritualism," or the ability of mediums to converse with the dead, was convinced that Houdini's powers were supernatural.

Houdini himself was a medium, but not in the sense understood by Conan Doyle. Early in his career, while with a road show called the "California Concert Company," Houdini put together an act in which he pretended to communicate with the dear departed. By reading tombstones, newspaper clip files and hanging out around the town barber shop, he discovered he could put together a convincing on-stage seance. But the astonishing thing, Houdini later recounted, was that even after he was out of memorized details, the seance was able to proceed. He could call out any name, any made-up detail, and some member of the audience would yell out: "That's Uncle Charley he's talking about!" This knowledge made Houdini a natural foe of the mediums who flourished after World War I.

Beyond that, though, there was something personal about Houdini's campaign against the mediums. Houdini's mother, to whom he was close, died suddenly in 1913. A stroke victim, she struggled but never was able to speak a word. Grief-stricken, he sought to contact her through mediums. He was bitterly disappointed when they produced facsimiles of his German-speaking mother chatting away in English, calling him Harry and not Enrich, and mouthing generalities about life in the Great Beyond.

He turned against them, his biographers state, and never believed. That was almost, but not quite all, the story. According to interviews published in the Detroit News within three years of his death, Houdini really wanted to believe in spirits he was just waiting to be convinced. "I want to believe in this thing and I would be a fervent believer if I could find any justification for it," he said. Despite, or perhaps because of, that feeling, Houdini flayed false Harry Houdini, the great escape artist, died in 1 926 on Halloween from peritonitis.

He vowed to send a message back from the grave. Many attempts have been made since then to contact the athletic escapologist; Damon Reinbold will try again tonight at 9 p.m. on Cincinnati AM station WLW. unproved lock-picking talents of another, Houdini, the wonderworker of the Temple theater, leaped from the draw span of the Belle Isle Bridge at 1 o'clock this afternoon, freed himself from the handcuffs while under the water, then swam to a waiting lifeboat He came up once for breath, and inside of a minute was free." "I wouldn't presume to speak for Houdini," Lund says, "but I think he might explain it (the discrepancies) with three words "good box And good box office Houdini remained, right up through his death 20 years later. When a rival escapologist caught on to one trick, Houdini would invent his way right into another.

The handcuffed bridge jumps were great for promoting live appearances, but Harry phased them out as the years went on. Eventually, he just filmed one and showed it as a pre- ice's underside until he could locate his escape route, marked by a rope which an assistant had lowered. When he was tugged to safety, Houdini asserted, more than eight minutes had passed. "Great story," says the American Museum of Magic's Bob Lund. "And if you get Harry to come back for your press conference, you'll have to question him about it.

Carefully." In the meantime, Lund suggested this reporter might do well to consult the Detroit News of Nov. 27, not Dec. 2, 1906. On that day's Page One, under a headline that read 'Handcuff King Jumps Manacled From Bridge': "Tied by a lifeline 113 feet long, handcuffed with two of the best and latest models in the, possession of the Detroit police department, nerved by the confidence of a lion in his own powers and goaded by the boasted but as yet TOM CRUISE rntvtwuTtom i By RICHARD WILLING Gannett News Service Even after he had hit on his breakout act, it took several seasons in Europe to put Houdini on the entertainment map. But once he broke out, there was no holding Harry.

He escaped from the best man- Focus: Harry Houdini acles Scotland Yard could supply. On tour in czarist Russia, he broke out of the dreaded Siberian prison van. In Washington, D.C., he got out of the prison cell that had held Charles J. Guiteau, assassin of President James A. Garfield.

And, answering challenges from dozens of manufacturers, Houdini routinely freed himself from barrels, boxes, coffins, vaults, safes and.packing cases. And there was that famous escape from under the ice on the Detroit River, on Dec. 2, 1906. As the tale is told in Houdini's authorized (if posthumous) biography by Harold Kellock, he was lowered in handcuffs, chains and leg irons through a hole in the ice off Belle Isle, as thousands crowded a drawbridge and shivered along in empathy. This was a big performance for the 30-year-old escapologist He was opening a two-week run at the Temple Theater in Detroit and a rival, Canadian Russell Grose, had already won favorable reviews for his handcuff escapes at another Detroit theater.

Grose himself had announced plans to break out of the Wayne County Jail later that week, so Houdini was on the spot He decided to risk it all literally. As he told the story later, Houdini, a superb athlete and an expert at holding his breath underwater, worked free of his constraints within a few minutes. By that. -time, however, the Detroit RiVer's current had pushed him past the hole in the ice through which he was to escape. Harry rose to the surface and located a tiny layer of air trapped between the ice and the water beneath it Houdini swam along the GENERAL CINEMA LANSING MALL WIST 931 WEST MALI DRIVE 321-1550 KB YOKO ORIENTAL HEALTH SPA Mon.

Thru. Sot. 10 A.M.-MIDNIGHT Sauna Massage 21 76 Cedar, Holt Ph. 694-5000 (2 blocks south of AvreM lude to his shows. The milk can trick in which Houdini escaped from a 314-foot high urn that had been filled with water and then padlocked slaughtered them when it was introduced in 1908 but had run out of gas by 1912.

Houdini then switched to spectacular underwater escapes from packing crates, tethered and bound with leather straps and weighted down with pig iron. When rivals such as Harry Black-stone Sr. donned bathing trunks and followed suit, Houdini came up with what is generally considered his piece de resistance the Chinese Water Torture Trick. Referred to as "U.S.D." (upside down) in Houdini's notes, the torture cell was a large glass box in which Houdini was manacled by the ankles and suspended upside down. A curtain was drawn, the band played and an assistant, (usually trusted aide James Collins) clad in raincoat and firefighter's hat and brandishing an ax, hovered nearby.

Finally, as Collins made ready to smash his way into the tank, Houdini stepped from behind the curtain wet, grinning and bowing to the furiously applauding crowd. The truth was he had made his escape in the first few seconds of the confinement, and had been reading a book backstage as he waited for the excitement to build, taking care not to rustle the pages and alert the audience. So how did Houdini do his tricks, anyway? Amazing physical dexterity for the strait-jackets, a knowledge of locks, not to mention sets of tiny, easily concealed for the handcuffs and padlocks. For the bridge jumps, wife Bess was often able to pass him a tiny key as their lips met for a long, lingering and who knew? possibly final kiss. During his shows Houdini issued a routine disclaimer "Everything I do is done by natural means." But he found, to his dismay, that many of his admirers were inclined to disbelieve him.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, cre- '10" on a scale of O-IO Lansing State Journal IN THE SWEET BYE AND BYE by Donald Driver starring Carmen Decker John Peakes bcwshead NOW THROUGH NOVEMBER 16 For tickets 484-7805 mchgah PubtC THEATER theatres PEGGY SUE (fat Tftanniect Kathleen Turner A TRI-STAR RELEASE DAILY AT: 1:00, 3:00. 5:10 7:15, 9:15 ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (R) JUMPIN' JACK FLASH AT. SAT.AT1:15.3:15.5:15.7:15.9:15 FERRIS BUELLER'S I fri DAY OFF "0 (P0-13) SAT. AT 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30 FRIDAY THE 13th VI (R) FBI. SAT, at 9:30 "LOVED IT! 'THE MEN'S CLUB' BOASTS A FINE CAST WITH MATCHING PERFORMANCES!" -NEW YORK POST 25TH BLOCKBUSTER WEEK! r( BARGAIN MATINEES DAILY! $2.50 ALL SEATS UNTIL 6 PM "A GREAT CAST! A REAL EYE-OPENER ABOUT THE WAY MEN THINK AND TALK.

'THE MEN'S CLUB' IS WORTH A LOT OF MEMORIES? David Shcdum, NBC-TV Children qfa lesser wod PARAMOUNT PICTURE DAILY AT: 1:15, 3:30, 7:00. 9:30 NO $1.00 TUESDAY Hilac Health Spal 5 OFF Sauna, Rub Down Thro Oct. 31 42K8 W. Samnan ldtw Phone fl71fr27-0f JOT Open: 9 a.m.-Midnifht7 STARRING IN ALPHABETICALORDER DAVID DUKES RICHARD JORDAN -HARVEY KEITH FRANK LANGELLA ROYSCHEIDER CRAIGWASSON TREAT WILLIAMS In THE MEN'S CLUB IS HARD TO DO. Entertainment Group.

from A AS Ufa Reserved. GKC THEATRES 407 E. GRAND RIVER 337-0271 IP.1 I (1:15. 3:30, 5:40 $2.50) in The NAME daily at: Of The ROSE 1 SEAN CONNERY gUn F. MURRAY ABRAHAM TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX lJ THE MEN'S -CLUB' GROWING UP MIBMTE LAZER FUCKS! JOIN SPARTAN 3 FRIDAY FOR A HALLOWEEN PARTY COSTUME CONTEST WITH GREAT PRIZES -AND-SATURDAY FOR ROCKY HORROR'S 11 TH ANNIVERSARY BASH MANAGEMENT WILL ALLOW A LIMITED AMOUNT OF RICE, ETC.

FOR THIS ONE TIME FUNGI ALL SEATS $2.00 Atlantic Releasins Corporation Presents A Howard Gottfried Production Starrin3 in alphabetical order David Dukes Richard Jordan Harvey Keitel Frank Lan3ella iRoyScheider GaigWassbn Treat Williams in The Men's Club Stockard Channins GinaGallego Ondy Pickett Gwen Welles Penny Baker RebeccahBush Claudia Cron AnnDusenberry Marilyn Jones Manette La Chance Jennifer Jason Leigh Ann Wedgeworth Screenplay by Leonard Michaels based on his Book Music by Lee Holdridse -Director of Photography John Fleckenstein Production Designer Ken Davis Executive Producers Thomas Coleman Michael Rosenblatt and John Harada it i i i.rtuAu..lWMiiA9l. Produced oy nowara ouuuieu -unia-vcu uy miti nun, NOW THRU SUNDAY Tue-Fri 8pm Sat 4pm 9pm Sun 2pm 7pm WHARTON CENTER GREAT HALL Public: $20 Student: FOR TICKETS CALL 355-6686 Sponsored in part by HfHuttOn STEPHAN KING'S (R) PINK FLOYD THE WALL(R) 1986 Atlantic All Rights mm mm buamui $2.50 All Shows Before TUESDAYS -Special CHILDSENIOR Prices STARTS TODAY 7:00 9:00 I.