American illusionist Harry Houdini escaped handcuffs, straitjackets, chained trunks and water tanks. Try as he might, he couldn’t escape fate.
The master magician and escape artist disappeared forever 90 years ago this Halloween.
He was 52 when he died Oct. 31, 1926, in a Detroit hospital, the victim of peritonitis and a ruptured appendix.
A mere six months before he passed, Houdini mesmerized Akron audiences with a three-night engagement at Goodyear Theater.
It was Houdini’s first and only headlining appearance in the Rubber City, a four-show bill — three evenings and one matinee — featuring “The Greatest Illusions Ever Invented” from “The Greatest Entertainer of All Time.”
Houdini billed his act as “three shows in one,” promising to deliver magic tricks, make great escapes and expose fortune tellers as fakes.
Spectators paid 50 cents to $1.50 for tickets to the performances Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, May 3-5. A private matinee was presented May 4 to the Akron Lions Club at the Masonic Temple at High and Mill streets.
To generate interest in his visit, Houdini wrote a provocative series of articles for the Beacon Journal in which he condemned fraudulent mediums, spiritists and clairvoyants for robbing “the rich, the poor, the halt, the blind, widows, orphans and children.”
He issued a challenge in which he promised a $1,000 reward in Akron to anyone who could prove having “the power to foretell events,” and a $5,000 reward to any medium who could prove “there is intercommunication with the dead.”
Naturally, there was a catch. The mystics had to perform their feats in front of a qualified committee featuring six magicians (including Houdini), six clergymen and six newspaper reporters.
Houdini said he would entrust Akron Mayor D.C. Rybolt, Police Chief John Durkin and Beacon Journal Publisher C.L. Knight with the money if anyone accepted the challenges.
“I would like very much to have one or all accepted, as I understand there are a number of mediums in Akron and vicinity,” Houdini wrote. “The time to accept and prove the genuineness of these claims is during my stay in the city and not hold indignation meetings after I have left.”
No one collected the money.
Crowd-pleasers
Houdini’s shows were crowd-pleasing affairs. In a review after the first Akron performance, Beacon Journal reporter Aubrey Williams described the act as “entertaining and mystifying.”
“He made the audience convulse with laughter or gasp with amazement at will,” Williams noted.
During one of his most famous tricks, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, a shackled Houdini was lowered head-first into a glass-and-metal cabinet filled with liquid.
“Suspended upside down in a large glass container of water with his feet in stocks, Houdini escaped while completely submerged,” Williams wrote.
A reviewer for the Akron Press newspaper was equally enthralled, pointing out Houdini’s East Indian Needle Trick as the highlight of the show.
“To say that Houdini is a rare round of evening’s entertainment is but a mild expression of what this man of mystery can do. Sleight of hand feats, illusions that baffle and other masterpieces in magic make this man Houdini a real puzzle,” the Press wrote. “F’rinstance, now there is the East India needle mystery in which he swallows 100 needles and 20 yards of thread — and then brings up the needles threaded! Black magic? Certainly. Any kind.”
Houdini concluded the show with a series of fake seances and fortune telling, demonstrating to audiences how he could ascertain personal information and make it seem otherworldly. Bells rang, tables rapped and words appeared on a slate. “Some of the information was given him and some of it was guess work,” the Beacon Journal noted. “It was almost uncanny how near right some of his assumptions seemed to be.”
After the first performance, managers in the shipping room at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. sent a note to Houdini at the theater, daring him to try to escape from a packing box that workers volunteered to build.
“If you accept this challenge, they will make up the box 12 hours ahead of time and send it along for your examination,” explained the note signed by division superintendent H.T. Gillen, general foreman Carl C. Stuber, Plant 1 foreman J.W. Plummer and box room foreman Walter Woods. “They must have the right to close you up inside the box, renail and rope it publicly.”
Houdini accepted the challenge with the stipulation that the wooden crate not be airtight.
For Wednesday night’s finale, Goodyear workers rolled the giant box onstage, put Houdini inside, nailed it shut and tied it with ropes. After they wrapped a screen around the case, the escape artist got to work.
Ten minutes later, Houdini emerged unscathed — and the crowd went wild! The Goodyear workers inspected the box and couldn’t figure how he got out.
The Great Houdini had done it again!
‘Mystifying performer’
“Summing up the entire performance, it is apparent that when the stage loses Houdini it will lose one of the most unusual and one of the most mystifying performers that ever entertained an audience,” the Beacon Journal wrote.
The end came sooner than anyone expected. While demonstrating his abdominal strength before an October show in Montreal, Houdini challenged a college student to punch him in the stomach. The blow arrived before the entertainer had a chance to tighten his stomach muscles.
Houdini, 52, developed peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdominal cavity, and suffered a burst appendix. He continued on to Detroit for his next shows, but died while receiving hospital treatment.
Houdini had promised his wife, Bess, that if it was possible to communicate from beyond the grave, he would find a way. The silence was impenetrable. Although seances have been held on Halloween for nearly 90 years, Houdini hasn’t stepped forward just yet.
Maybe he’s still trying to find a real medium.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of the book Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.