Jay Marshall and The Zombie Ball

When I was young growing up in Chicago, when other kids were making extra money raking leaves, shoveling snow, or mowing lawns, I was performing magic shows for children's birthday parties, village fairs, and other events. Yeah, I know: How could Hank, the epitome of Cool, the Poster Child Of Hipness [1] , have been a geeky kid magician? It boggles the mind, doesn't it? ;-)

Anyway, the best part of being into magic and living in Chicago was visiting one of the best magic shops in the country, Magic, Inc. It was (and is) located on the North Side on Lincoln Avenue, and I lived in Oak Park, a suburb that abuts Chicago on the West Side. If I'd lived in Dallas like I do now, I'd have been out of luck since Dallas has no real public transportation to speak of, but that wasn't so in Chicago. The El went right through Oak Park, and every street was a bus route. It wasn't really practical to take the El to Magic, Inc, but I'd take the bus.

At first I'd beg and plead with my parents to drive me there on Saturdays, but they'd only do this perhaps twice a year. However, I memorized how to get there (Austin to Montrose to Western to Lincoln... I think) . After first hiding some money in my shoe, I'd just hop on a bus at North Avenue and Austin, ask for a transfer, and an hour and several different busses later I'd walk the last couple of blocks to the shop.

Magic, Inc was a real magic shop, not one of these stores you find now where 90% is gags and games and practical jokes and maybe costumes, and 10%, represented by a small shelf in the poorly-lit corner, is actuall devoted to magic tricks. No, Magic, Inc had the dusty, dark cherrywood shelves filled with interesting looking apparatus, many with Japanese characters painted on them to prove they were magic tricks. You'd also have the display cases with various props and tricks laid out to tantalize you. There'd be signed 8X10 glossies on the walls of various magicians, too... sort of like the magic version of those pizzarias of my youth that had the signed glossies of various hockey players like Stan Makita or Tony Esposito. The people in these photos, however, had all of their teeth.

The best part of the whole Magic, Inc experience were the presenters... the guys who would show you a trick:

Stupid gawking kid drooling over apparatus: "Hey, what's this thing, 'The Peanut Trick'? Can you show it to me?"

Jaded fifty-something guy behind counter: Sigh. "Yeah, kid, hold on". Grumble, trudge.

See, now if you happen to find the small corner in some store selling magic stuff, you're lucky if you'll get some teenage twerp with acne and dirty nails demo something for you. And that's if you're lucky. Usually you don't even get that.

But what's more, often real live semi-famous magicians would be in the shop. Sometimes they'd demo the trick for you, especially if it was their creation. One Saturday I wanted to see the "Knife Thru Handkerchief" trick, and the guy who "invented" it (really he just "improved" on an old method using a frame) demo'd it for me. Another time a guy who'd recently published a book on making balloon animals tried to get me to buy his book. I told him I didn't understand what balloon animals had to do with magic, and he sighed while he trudged off, grumbling.

Other times a semi-famous magician would just be shopping to see what new stuff was out. I saw Mark Wilson this way, for what it's worth.

However, the best demo I ever had was when Jay Marshall, the owner of Magic, Inc, and a semi-famous magician himself (he was of course full-fledged famous amongst the magic community, and at one point in the 50s and 60s he was full-fledged famous with the American public at large).

Did he demo some nifty new trick, or one of his own invention? Sadly, no. That Saturday morning he demo'd "The Zombie Ball" for me. For those of you who might have seen this old chestnut, it's basically that "floating silver ball trick", where the ball floats under and behind this large foulard (you get to use words like "foulard" when you do magic tricks).

Anyway, I wanted to buy it, but wanted to see it first. There was just Jay there, doing some paperwork or filing something or other right in the back, and this other guy. The guy asked Jay to get the Zombie Ball out of the back, and he did, and then shrugged and decided to show it to me himself. The guy was sort of taken aback, said "are you sure?", and that sort of thing, and Jay said sure.

The guy tried to tell me what an important event this was, that I'd better appreciate it, did I know who Jay Marshall was, yadda yadda. But of course I really didn't know who Jay Marshall was. All I cared about was whether or not The Zombie Ball looked convincing. The old bald guy with horn-rimmed glasses holding the foulard didn't matter to me.

I bought The Zombie and performed it many times during my "career" before I "retired" from stage magic and just did close-up stuff, more for my own amusement than for anyone else. It was years later, when I became a student of the history of magic and started collecting books, etc, that I finally realized that that guy was right... I was given a treat that day.

Jay Marshall performed the Zombie Ball for an eleven-year old kid with a $20 bill in his shoe and an expired bus transfer in his pocket.

[1] It's transient, you know.