In Wisconsin: a Magic Spirit

By J. MADELEINE NASH

Appleton, Wis., is a midsize city in the heart of Middle America, as homespun and unpretentious as bread pudding or apple pie. Like other such cities, it has collected some singular claims to fame. Appleton, residents like to note, is the home of Lawrence University. It nurtured Novelist Edna Ferber and Senator Joe McCarthy. It also boasts the first house in the nation to light up with hydroelectric power. But what an outsider finds chiefly remarkable about Appleton is the ordinariness that spreads over the place like the warm October sunshine.

Appleton's leading citizens are the sort of folks one expects to bump into at a bridge party, a church service, a Rotary Club meeting. They are not the kind of people likely to show up for, say, a seance. Yet, on Oct. 31, the night souls of the dead are said to roam the earth, that is just where a visitor found the chairman of Lawrence University's psychology department, the president of a local construction company, the CEO of a large paper company, the executive director of the county's Outagamie Museum, the city's director of planning and development and about 200 of their friends, neighbors and out- of-town guests.

Under other circumstances, the vacant downtown storefront where the seance was held might have managed a sedate sort of spookiness. But any potential eeriness was quickly overwhelmed by the mob of cheerful Appletonians, sipping wine, munching on cheese and -- zounds -- even joking. "I see his shoes," giggled one onlooker, peering at the floor as the medium began his performance. "But where are his feet?"

Ignoring such distractions, Medium William Monroe managed to groan, grimace and hiccup his way into a trance. In the process, he took on an uncanny resemblance to Rock Singer Elton John. In front of Monroe was a black- draped table laden with miscellaneous memorabilia: a manila envelope containing a letter from Arthur Conan Doyle, two pairs of handcuffs, a selection of lockpicks, a yellowed photograph. Monroe's task: to contact, on the 60th anniversary of his death, the ghost of Harry Houdini, master escapologist, prestidigitator and Appleton's most celebrated son. While Monroe writhed and jerked, it must be noted, a block away the sign outside the Valley Bank effortlessly blinked out the message: WELCOME HOME HARRY HOUDINI HAPPY HALLOWEEN.

To no one's surprise the seance flopped. No handcuffs opened. No lights dimmed. No furniture levitated. No unearthly dust blew through the room. What is more, the Houdini contacted by Monroe bungled the answers to questions posed by members of the inner circle. "What was your favorite dessert?" Marie Blood, the great magician's niece, wanted to know. "Strawberry," gasped Monroe. "Wrong," chided Mrs. Blood, who traveled all the way from Pinehurst, N.C., for the occasion. "It was bread pudding," she informed the audience, "with Bing cherries on top."

Bread pudding. That's about as exotic as Appleton, Wis. This lack of sophistication may be why some historians insist that the great Houdini was born in Budapest. Still Houdini always said he was born in Appleton, observes Outagamie Museum Curator Mary Mergy, and that's what she likes to believe. "It adds," she says, "a little zest to life."

Whether he was born in Appleton or not, Houdini did spend the first nine years of his life there. His real name was Ehrich Weiss, and he was the son of Appleton's first Reform rabbi, a Hungarian immigrant. Everyone in Appleton has heard about young Ehrich Weiss and how the night clerk at the Waverly Hotel taught him his first rope trick. Gus Zuehlke, today the chairman of Valley Bancorporation, remembers listening to his father spin tales about young Ehrich's daring escapes from the Fox River, which meanders its way right through the heart of town. "My father used to help him," asserts Zuehlke, and who's to say whether or not such stories are true?

To a youngster growing up in the 1870s, Appleton was probably a pretty interesting place. "Wisconsin had so many circuses back then," observes Oscar Boldt, president of the Boldt Holding Corp., "and when they unloaded the elephants, there was excitement, real excitement, the sort of excitement you could feed off for months." Today some kids in Appleton still feed off the excitement evoked by the name Houdini. Thirteen-year-old Bill Brehm, an aspiring magician, is one of them. "I'd like to know how he did some of his tricks," confides Brehm, who has started practicing Houdini-inspired handcuff escapes. "Like when he was handcuffed and got into a box and was thrown over the side of a bridge into a river. How did he get out? He was just an amazing person. Anyone who is a magician and dies on Halloween has got to be amazing."

"Houdini," reflects Dr. Thomas Loescher, Appleton's chief emergency- room physician, "was probably the greatest magician who ever lived: the drama, the presentation, the superb physical ability, the personality. I've always felt proud he was from Appleton. It's living in reflected glory, I guess." It wasn't until 1985 that the city finally got around to honoring its most celebrated citizen, dedicating its new downtown plaza in his honor. The house where the Weiss family used to live stood just to one side, notes William A. Brehm Jr., a card-carrying magician who is also the city's director of planning and development. "Our plaza," beams Brehm, young Bill's father, "is really Houdini's backyard. It's where he was stringing up clotheslines to practice as an acrobat."

The plaza's most striking feature is a large abstract sculpture that sits atop a raised brick platform as though it were on a stage. The piece bears the title of one of Houdini's most famous tricks: Metamorphosis. Re-enacted time after time, the routine by now is familiar. The magician's assistant is handcuffed and placed in a sack, which is tied and put into a trunk. The trunk is in turn secured with locks and chains. The magician, standing atop the trunk, briefly raises a curtain. Abracadabra. Suddenly, the magician's assistant stands in the place of the magician -- and when the trunk is unlocked, it is the magician who pops out of the sack, hands tightly manacled.

The speed of the change is what enraptures. Magician Doug Henning and his wife Debby observed Houdini's birthday by paying Appleton a visit last spring. Performing Metamorphosis right in front of the sculpture, they made the switch in a dazzling third of a second. Sculptor Richard Wolter, who lives in Appleton, was thrilled. Says he: "Magic brings to life the wonder our age somehow has lost."

While designing Metamorphosis, Wolter immersed himself in Houdini literature. He even learned one of the Master's cornier routines. "What I do is I take a banana and hold it up to my brow, and I say, 'This banana is going to break into three pieces.' Lo and behold, when you peel the banana there are three pieces inside. It's a silly trick." Understandably, Wolter is a lot prouder of the sleight-ofhand that went into his sculpture. "See, I took this four-ton cube, and I set it on one corner, which was a trick in itself. Then, because I wanted people to use their imagination, I gave it only four sides. The next thing was to put this chain around it and at one end of the chain, a lock. So the lock is open. The box is open. The chain is flying. Houdini is free. Now, where did he go?"

The answer to that question, of course, lies buried with Houdini. Sidney Radner, the Massachusetts magician and escape artist who helped organize the seance, thinks no medium will ever succeed in contacting Houdini. At least one reason, says Radner, is that Houdini was no friend of spiritualists, offering a $10,000 reward to any medium whose tricks he could not expose. At the age of 52, dying of a ruptured appendix caused by the blows of an overzealous fan, Houdini made his wife Bess promise to hold an annual seance on the anniversary of his death. She did so for ten years; Houdini's fellow magicians have since continued the tradition. "Houdini would have loved it," reflects Radner, "because in challenging the mediums, we are doing what Houdini himself would have done."

The odd thing, muses Historian of Magic Morris Young, is that Appleton's seance did manage to conjure up the spirit of Houdini. "It was as though he was there, and he wasn't. At the very moment he didn't come back, his presence was felt very strongly. Everyone in that room was thinking about the man, trying to visualize him." Young found himself looking at an old poster portrait used to advertise Houdini's performances. After all these years, the eyes stare out at the world with a strange and startling intensity. "Looking at those eyes," says Young, "one still senses the force of Houdini."

Of all his tricks, perhaps Houdini's greatest was to transform Ehrich Weiss, the boy who lived in Appleton, Wis., into an enduring legend. And transformation, dear friends, is the essence of magic.