Growing Up with Houdini

Chapter Three: Setting Up The Museum

On September 29, Muller’s Meats made a delivery of a forty-foot tractor-trailer load of meat on 14th Street in Manhattan. In a unique display of corporate synergy, after the meat delivery the driver went and got the trailer washed out, and headed to Cliffside Park, New Jersey, to pick up the Houdini collection. Upon seeing what there was to load, the driver called Henry and said there was no way all of that would fit in one forty-foot trailer. Henry thus hired a second trailer which was there in New Jersey, and all thirty-six trunks were loaded onto the two tractor-trailers and brought back to Canada.

The trucks arrived to Niagara Falls on Monday, October 2. When the back doors were opened, each of the forty-foot trailers was filled to the roof, which were eight feet high. As soon as they began unload ing the trucks, it became obvious to Henry that without Dunninger, it was impossible to figure anything out. Many of Houdini’s greatest illusions had been disassembled for packing and were strewn amongst numerous trunks. One trunk would have a table top and another trunk in a different part of the truck would have the four legs.

Henry called Dunninger and asked him to come to Niagara Falls to help him make sense of what turned out to be over 5,000 items. The problem was, Dunninger did not fly. He would not travel by airplane, because as it turns out, several years previous, he said he had predicted a plane crash and in fact, the plane did crash. Since then, he would not fly. Henry arranged for first-class train tickets for Dunninger, his wife Billie, his daughter Josephine, and the future son-in-law Bruce, and they all came to Niagara Falls, New York, by train. Henry picked them up there and brought them to Canada.

Over the next few days, they sorted everything out and carefully catalogued and stored the collection in the building where Muller’s Meats had been, as well as the two adjacent buildings, one on either side, that Henry and Ferdinand had previously purchased. Those few days were exciting and action-filled, and the Muller family and the Dunninger family became close family friends.

On February 13, 1968, ground was broken on the renovations of the buildings. Henry hired a man by the name of David Hagarty to help him create the museum, and together they hired architects and curators to help put the museum together.

What they discovered was that in addition to all of Houdini’s effects, many of the cases contained other collections of Houdini’s. It turns out that Houdini was an avid collector of all types of magic-related items, including illusions used by his contemporaries. Thus, it was decided that the beginning of the museum would be dedicated to Houdini’s contemporaries.

One of the most important of these illusions was Alexander Herrmann’s Decapitation, but the reason it was so important was not because of its importance in the annals of magic history — although it was very important — but rather because Henry put the illusion in the front window of the museum facing the street. The front window was huge, about 30 feet in length. At one end was a chair with a woman sitting in it. At the other end was an empty glass cabinet. The magician approached the woman in the chair, cut off her head and then carried the head over to the other side and placed it into the glass cabinet. The head would then begin speaking. It was truly astonishing, scary, gruesome, and fascinating.

So as pedestrians walked by the window, they looked at the head on the cabinet, which was amazing in and of itself. Then suddenly the head would say “Hello!” Over the years, more than a few passers-by became so startled that they almost had a heart attack. People would scream on a regular basis. It got to the point where many people would hang around just to watch the reactions from others who had
not seen it before.

To make it clear, this was not a mannequin head on the cabinet; it was the head of a real person. What we did was to rotate the museum’s tour guides into one-hour shifts to take the place of the head on the cabinet. That kept it fresh, and guides were excited about their one hour of fame. Many got really creative about how and what they said, to the point of great hilarity. Some were quite skilled at turning the pedestrians into paying customers, and that was a learned skill in itself. What a great idea and it was terrifically executed!

There were trunks filled with illusions from other magicians, and a few of them were exhibited in the museum–for example, Count Beaumont’s Cylinder, Clayton’s Sword Suspension, Jarrett’s Sword Box, Blackstone’s Chair Suspension, to name a few.

One of the most important illusions in the history of magic was Kellar’s Psycho, the most famous of a series of Automatons used in magic acts since 1770 and improved upon with each generation. This piece also generated a lot of fun and enjoyment. It was a doll seated on a clear glass pedestal, with spectators seated all around the doll; in other words, it was not “connected” to anything, no cords anywhere, and of course batteries were not in use when Psycho was invented in 1875. In front of the doll were nine cards, each with a single digit on them. A visitor would walk up to the doll and say “What’s 15 minus 9?” and the doll’s hand would move to the 6 and pick it up. In real life, it was truly amazing. Of course, the generations of Automatons that have appeared since 1875 have become increasingly sophisticated.

The main part of the museum contained illusions that Houdini performed, trunks that he escaped from underwater, other items that he escaped from like milk cans, strait jackets and mail bags, selections from his collections of keys and locks, and hundreds of close-up effects that he used over the decades. Also displayed were some of his correspondence and selections from his notes on his tricks. Huge floor-to-ceiling posters adorned the walls. There were large cabinets filled with displays of his playbills, advertising, posters, throw cards, business cards, cabinet cards and on and on.

Although the museum was fairly large, in total it held less than 20 percent of all the artifacts purchased. The rest of the collection, including literally thousands of pieces of Houdini’s correspondence, films, photos, and a collection of thousands of locks and keys remained in storage.

The grand finale was the Water Torture Cell, which was the grand finale because of its fame in the last scene of the Tony Curtis movie, which (falsely) proclaimed that it was the cause of Houdini’s death, which, as everyone knows, it was not.

Before the guests exited, they entered the Blue Room Illusion, which The Amazing Randi helped Henry create. It was an illusion in which a person stepped into an upright coffin at the end of a corridor. Another person pushed a button, at which point the person in the coffin disappeared. A voice played over saying, “Tired of your wife, your husband? How about your mother-in-law? Well, now you can make them disappear!” It was a source of much joy and laughter for museum visitors. I estimate that the number of times I heard that tape play is definitely in the five digits, maybe more!