Monthly Archives: February 2014

general

8♥ Week Eight

1 Comment

Week Eight will certainly go down as eventful. We had a plumbing disaster at the house and have had to move out for while well industrial fans and dehumidifiers dry everything out and at this point we are not sure how long we will be out of the house or the true extent of the damage, somethings will dry and be fine others not. It was clean water that was spraying for hours through the broken line and it didn’t ruin any thing of irreplaceable sentimental value and better that it happened now than when we have a newborn in the house. Look for the positive right.

My plan for this post was to tell how things finally fell apart for Milton Franklin Andrews but my notes are in the house and it sounds like there is an airplane engine in the hallway so that story will have to wait until next week.

imagesMy copy of Erdnase Unmasked arrived this week. It is a wonderful little volume put out by Magicana with a number of essays reprinted from Magicol. I’ve read through most of it and is very interesting and has a lot of info on old newspaper articles that I want to hunt down and read.

I have added the Diagonal Palm Shift into my practice sessions. I am starting to get the hang of it but it has also led to my first Edrnase injury. I am working on it exactly as described, which means in the opposite hands than I naturally would, and have done something quite painful to my left index finger. If you have ever been hit straight on with a basketball and jammed your finger it is a similar feeling. I also watched Jason England’s instructions on the shift and at one point he states that Erdnase says to curl your finger under the deck but this is not necessary. It is this curling actions that has mucked up my finger so I wished that I had taken Jason’s advice and not bothered.

I have brought my Mexican Turnover back to a passable level, it is a move to I learned years ago but it has been a long time since I have used it, and realize that I don’t think I have ever preformed a straight monte routine that people could actually ‘play’. I have done a number of ‘demonstration’ stye routines in the past, one of my all time favourite packet tricks was a set of cards with shells and peas and if I remember right an eight-ball kicker at the end and I have always loved Harry Anderson’s Wise Guys Monte but it is exciting to be working on a ‘fair’ game.

I have been in touch with Todd Karr of the Miracle Factory about his research into midwestern con-man E S Andrews being Erdnase and while I wasn’t about to convince him to send me his research it provided enough info to get me started on the E. S. path.I don’t think this will be as shocking to research as Milton but I haven’t gotten very far.

The Conjuring Arts Research Centre produced a free pdf of their ‘bible’ edition which I have printed out so I can have something lay flat in front of me instead of snapping the spine of my Dover edition. Also got a copy of Ghosts of Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak by Stephanie Waters which includes a story about the ghost of Bessie Bouton.

books, general, history

7♥ Week Seven

Leave a comment

On December 27 1904 newspapers began to relay the news that the body of a young woman found on Cutler Mountain with a gunshot wound to the head and face burned beyond recondition was Bessie Bouton.

Bouton had been staying with a man at the Albany Hotel during the spring and though the couple were registered under the name of G. Bouton. It was believed that the man was a gambler named Milton Franklin.

It seems that Milton Franklin was long gone by the time the body was identified (and if you are interested in how you may want to read this article in The Desert Evening News about how Bouton’s hairdresser helped with some turn of the century CSI work) and the next place we catch up with him is at The National Sporting Club in Sydney, Australia where Andrews, now using the name Brush and traveling with Nulda Petrie, a beautiful young French-Canadian woman, meet J. William Ellis.

image_612x817_from_0,1_to_6462,8621Ellis, Brush (Andrews) and his young wife board the Sonoma, a steamer headed for San Francisco, with a stopover in Honolulu, and eventually end up renting a house in Berkeley. This is where things go wrong and because these are real people I know the violence should not be glorified in any way but I can not keep myself from smiling every time I read Ellis’ account of the attempt on his life.

This is from the San Francisco Call November 7 1905

“I had just seated myself and was raising a spoonful of marmalade to my mouth when I was struck from behind. I fell off the chair. I was not entirely unconscious and got a glance of Brush standing behind me with a hammer in one hand and a dagger in the other. I attempted to rise, and as I did so he struck me two more blows, He then put his hands in my hip pocket and took five $100 American bills that I had with me. This seemed to bring me to my senses and I struck him on the jaw with my left hand. I then rose and found the woman standing and pointing a revolver at me. This I knocked from her hand with my right had and made for the door as fast as I possibly could in my dazed condition. Just as I arrived at the door he made a terrivle lunge at me with the hammer again.”

Ellis was very nearly killed but there is something about the marmalade and even though he had been hit in the head with a hammer three times being robbed of $500 was enough to ‘bring him to his senses and allow him to fight off two people armed with a hammer, a knife and a gun that put the story in to the better than fiction category.

I’ll wrap up the murder story next week and may even have my copy of Barton’s book by then so can start to discover the links between M. F. and EATCT.

I’ve spent the last week focused on The Mexican Turnover, for those familiar with the move I am sure you can agree this is almost as exciting to practice as dealing cards with your wrong hand. If you don’t know the move it is one of the reasons you can never win a game of Three Card Monte when the big money is on the table.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that a first edition of EATCT was up for auction in Chicago. It was expected to go for $3000 – $4000 according to the catalog. The final bid came in at $13 000!

Uncategorized

6♥ Week Six

Leave a comment

In this post I begin to look into some of the research and theories about who S. W. Erdnase was and it involves names of other magicians that you may not be familiar with. I have begun a ‘People’ page which can be found above that will give some brief biographical info on names as they come up. Like everything else here it is very much a work in progress and I will try to expand on it as I go. The page contains a link to a wonderful documentary on Dai Vernon. I highly recommend you make a coffee/tea/scotch and take 45 minutes to watch it.

I have fallen deep down the rabbit hole of Erdnase. It is agreed upon that S. W. Erdnase is a pseudonym but even now, more than a hundred years later, it is not agreed upon who that pseudonym belonged to. I had never really understood the appeal people found in conspiracy theories, I’ve been a bookseller for more years of my life than not and have sold countless books about who shot JFK or which aliens built the pyramids and never understood why it would matter to people but I am starting to be able to relate at least a little. We shall see if that is a good thing or not.

In trying to decide where to start digging into the mystery of Erdnase I took the obvious route today and punched some keywords into google. One of the the links turned up a simple list of references in books and magazines. Part way down the list was Linking Ring May 1989. If you are not familiar with the Linking Ring it is a monthly magazine that is sent to every member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. As it happens I have boxes of them in the basement, including the May 1989 issue.

For more than 400 issues John Booth wrote a column titled Memoirs Of A Magician’s Ghost, a history column, and in May ’89 it was sub-titled Hunting For Erdnase In Copyright Records.

Dai Vernon by John Helvin
Dai Vernon by John Helvin

Booth credits Dai Vernon with keeping EATCT from slipping into obscurity, when the greatest close-up magician ever treats a book like a bible others are bound to be interested. Booth goes on to say that he is not going to repeat details from his recently published book Dramatic Magic that reveals the actual identity of Erdnase. I was momentarily disappointed, you can find a lot of things in my basement but a copy of Dramatic Magic was not going to be one of them. However the rest of the column deals with ‘the tortuous and meticulous research’ done to prove that one Milton Franklin Andrews was Erdnase.

Booth then mentions the horror story that unfolded on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in 1905 dealing with the murder-suicide of M. F. Andrews and his young lover. Now in a perfect world I would move on from the Linking Ring article to reading Booth’s book and then The Man Who Was Erdnase by Barton Whaley, who also points the finger towards M. F. Andrews and then move on to the newspaper stories about the violent end to his life. It is not a perfect world and well I am trying to do as much of my Erdnase journey with physical books curiosity got the best of me and I started tracking down copies of old newspapers online.

Booth mentioned specifically the San Francisco Examiner which unfortunately was not easily accessible but I did manage to find a scan of the The Call which turned out to be my favourite read of the four or five papers I have now seen (a text chat with a librarian was all it took to have scan from the micro-fiche emailed to me). Until a couple of books work their way through various postal systems I can’t tell you why Booth, Gardner, and Whaley were convinced the Erdnase was M. F. Andrews but like they sometimes do in the movies we can start at the end with the Police at the door, his French-Canadian lover turning them away and Andrews hiding in the closet. You know this isn’t going to end well.