October 31, 1926, 100 years ago: Harry Houdini could escape from anything. Except death, the one thing from which no person escapes.
Erik Weisz was born on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Austrian Empire. When he was 4 years old, his family took him to America, to Appleton, Wisconsin. To fit in with the largely German population, his name was re-spelled Erich Weiss, although pronounced the same way.
The family moved to New York, where little Erich became a trapeze artist and a competitive cross-country runner. In 1890, he read The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, by the Frenchman regarded as the master of modern magic, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin.
Incorrectly thinking that adding a letter I to the end of a French name meant "like," he wanted people to think he was "like Robert-Houdin." He also admired an American magician named Harry Kellar, and so he took the stage name "Harry Houdini."
By 1908, his own reputation solid, Harry had lost his respect for his forebear, believing him to have taken credit for others' innovations. Much like later magician James "The Amazing" Randi, he took to debunking famous people he considered frauds, especially in magic, and published The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin.
Although he mastered many magic tricks, he became best known as an escape artist. All over the world, over the 1st 2 decades of the 20th Century, he challenged police forces to keep him locked up. Soon, he extended his repertoire to include chains, ropes slung from skyscrapers, straitjackets, being locked in trunks, and having to escape from and hold his breath inside a sealed milk can with water in it.
In 1894, he married Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, a Brooklyn-born daughter of German immigrants. She became known as Bess Houdini, and assisted him in his act. They never had children, and Bess' niece, Marie Blood, believed that Bess had a medical condition that prevented it.
On October 22, 1926, before a show at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, Houdini was in his dressing room, with some students at nearby McGill University. One, Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, asked Houdini if it was true that punches in the stomach did not hurt him. He said they didn't. However, this was only true if he was properly braced for them. He had recently broken an ankle, and was sitting down, and getting up would have been painful. Whitehead began punching Houdini, and did so several times before Houdini told him to stop.
The show went on as scheduled, but Houdini was in pain throughout. For the next 2 days, the pain was bad enough that he couldn't sleep. Finally, in Detroit for a show at the Garrick Theater, he saw a doctor, who diagnosed him with appendicitis and a fever, and told him to have immediate surgery. (With a fever, this would have been a bad idea.) He went onstage that night, anyway, and his fever reached 104, and he passed out. He was taken to Grace Hospital, and died there from peritonitis on October 31, at the age of 52.
Did he already have appendicitis before the punches? It's been suggested that he didn't take the pain as seriously as he should have, since he thought it was from the punches. But after taking statements from the other McGill students, his insurance company concluded that the death was due to the dressing-room incident, and paid Bess a double indemnity.
And so, the Master of Magic was dead -- perhaps appropriately, on Halloween. Bess operated a tea house until her own death, in 1943. Whitehead was not charged with any crime in connection with Houdini's death, and lived in obscurity and poverty until 1954.
To this day, when asked to perform a seemingly impossible task, some people ask, "What do you think I am, a magician?" Some take it a step further, and ask, "What am I, Houdini?" And any seemingly miraculous escape is called "pulling a Houdini" or "a Houdini act."
In a 2015 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Houdini, while his wife Josie Ahlquist played Bess Houdini. His opponent, as played by "Nice" Peter Shukoff, was more recent magician David Copperfield.
October 31, 1926 was a Sunday. British entertainer Jimmy Savile was born. Meaning this day stunk in two ways: We lost the greatest magician of all time, and gained a cruel sex fiend.
