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My Magical Life
Chapter 2

 My first eight years were almost all  spent traveling with my parents. As I mentioned, my father was a wonderful salesman and a dedicated entrepreneur  and never really worked for anybody else during his entire career. There was one exception, the few years  when he worked for my grandfather, which is where he met the boss’s daughter, who turned out to be my mother. Now our visit to Indianapolis was during the height of the depression and, in spite of my father's  talents, our income was often not plentiful, which is  putting it mildly. We were always traveling and often stayed in a city for only a day or two. Then my father would drive us to the next town that night. We usually traveled in a Ford coupe, which had a large glass rear window. Under the window was a wide shelf that extended  back from the top of the narrow rear seat. I was small  enough to lie down on that shelf and my folks always had a pillow in the car for me to put my head on. As we rolled along those blacktop roads at night, when my eyes were open I could see the stars in the sky through that wide glass window before I would go to sleep. Often, when we would stop late at night and check in to an  inexpensive hotel, I couldn't go back to sleep. I missed the vibration of the car traveling down the road. I understand sailors have the same problem when they return to land, but hopefully not too many people have it from sleeping on the shelf in the back of a Ford coupe. I had no idea I would be reminded of those seedy depression hotel rooms some forty years later when I entered the hotel room supplied to me by the China Performing Arts Agency in Beijing, China. But then, as I have discovered many times, you never know where life will lead you.

We  didn't always travel every day, but we almost always lived in hotel rooms, sometimes for a day, sometimes  for a week and occasionally for a month or so. When we were in a city long enough, Teta, which I called my Mom, would take me to a park to play. Once we stayed several months in an apartment hotel on the Near North Side of Chicago, right across from an incredible zoo. It was the first time I ever saw a duck billed platypus or watched the monkeys play. It was there that I learned more about animals than I had ever known before. In Cincinnati we lived in a hotel very near a park, which had a metal statue of Abraham Lincoln. I remember that statue because once I threw the little glider airplane I was playing with and it flew completely around Mr. Lincoln and then came back to me. But, more often than not, I was restricted to the hotel and my playground was the hotel lobby. Occasionally, my folks would enroll me in a local grade school in the city we were in, but that usually lasted for only a few weeks. I actually started in school as a full-time student when I was eight years old in the fall of the same year I saw that  magician on stage.

When we were not traveling, we lived in an apartment somewhere in Dallas, Texas, which was where both my parents were raised. Since I saw the magician in Indianapolis, I had been spending all of my allowance, usually one dollar a week if my father’s sales were going well, on any magic tricks I could find. Finding that magic was often not easy. I was truly a happy boy when I discovered Douglas Magicland at 409 North Ervay right there in Dallas. On my first visit to Magicland I had a hard time believing what I saw. There were many amazing magic tricks on display in the glass counter right in front of me and larger tricks on the shelves behind. Having made this incredible discovery, I would spend as much time as I could at Magicland, which was every Saturday and every school holiday, no matter what, rain or shine. I was delighted every time Ed Watkins, the magic demonstrator, would demonstrate some of those baffling magic tricks for folks who happened to come in. In fact, I had seen some of those trick so many times, I began to figure them out.

Mr.  Douglas, the owner, had noticed when I first arrived at Magicland I was always out of breath. He asked me  why that happened? I explained that I always took the streetcar from Oak Cliff, which was the part of town where we lived, to downtown Dallas. I would get off  right by the main entrance of Neiman Marcus at the corner of Main and Ervay. This was 3 ½ blocks from Magicland and there was a traffic light at every corner on the  way. The lights were set in sequence so, when they turned  from red to green, cars traveling north on Ervay could  make it through all of those green lights without stopping. I figured out, if I ran as fast and as I could, I could  make it through all those green lights too and get to Magicland about a minute sooner. That extra minute in  heaven was certainly worth a little exertion on my part. Come to think of it, I've been running to magic shops  around the world ever since.

Not  only was Magicland heaven, it was also were I made my  first dollar performing a magic show. It was 1942, I was 13 years old and World War II was in full swing. Being a patriotic guy, Ed Watkins volunteered and went  into the Seabees. I was flabbergasted and delighted when Mr. Douglas asked me if I would like to take Ed’s  place as the demonstrator. Mr. Douglas explained he  had seen me there so often, he knew that I knew most  of the tricks. I could try out as Ed’s replacement.  

So my first magical dream was coming true. Now I could  actually go behind the counter and check out all those wonderful magic tricks myself and even those more mysterious larger props on the shelves behind. The most expensive  trick in the store was the Lorring Campbell Checker Mystery, which cost twenty dollars. WOW, Twenty Dollars! I knew, deep down inside, if I could ever buy a trick  that expensive, I would be a very successful magician.

An interesting aside, over 30 years later I met Lorring Campbell for the first time when we both happened to  be waiting outside the Magic Castle for our cars to be returned. We happened to strike up a conversation and I was delighted to learn I was talking to the legendary Lorring Campbell. I explained how the Lorring Campbell Checker Mystery had been the most expensive trick in the Magicland catalog, and, when I was younger, I had  dreamed of owning one. That's when he told me of his  experience with the Checker Mystery. One day in the  late1930s, Mr. Lyle Douglas, Delbert Douglas’s brother and the original owner of Magicland, had called him on the phone and explained that he had a new magic trick he was introducing and asked if Lorring would mind if it was called the Lorring Campbell Checker Mystery. Of course, Mr. Douglas would give one to Lorring the next time he stopped by the store. But somehow, when Lorring did come by the shop, he and Mr. Douglas would forget about the trick. It was most interesting for me to learn, although I never owned a Lorring Campbell Checker Mystery, neither had Lorring Campbell!

But back to my employment as the demonstrator at Magicland. Mr. Douglas had explained he could only pay me $2.50 per day. But I didn't care, because he also said he would discount any magic I wished to buy. I just couldn't believe it. My total operational overhead in my first  job consisted of 14 cents per day for streetcar fare, (seven cents each way to and from Oak Cliff). I always  brought my own lunch, which Teta fixed for me every day. This left me with almost all of that $2.50 to purchase discounted magic tricks, which is exactly what I did.

I was surprised after I had been working in Magicland for only a few weeks, when Mr. Douglas gave me a raise to five dollars a day. Unbelievable! Now I could buy twice as much magic. (I still have most of those props  and books I bought.) Years later, Mr. Douglas told me  that my demonstrations were selling so many Amazing Sponge Bunnies and Super Antigravity Tricks, which each  sold for a dollar and cost Mr. Douglas almost nothing, that I had been largely responsible for the new home he had built for he and his wife.

I had been working at Magicland for about a year, when I performed my first commercial show, for which I was paid five dollars. The gentleman that printed the Magicland catalog asked me to perform for his Lions Club in Terrell, Texas. He paid me five dollars and my bus fare too! Sitting in that bus on my way back to Dallas was when I realized I had made as much money performing that one 30 minute show, as I did for a whole day of work at Magicland. Now if I could find some way to perform four or five shows in one day, that would really add up.

For  the next five years, I worked at Magicland every Saturday, every school holiday and during the entire summer, all  the way through high school. I was still being paid five dollars a day. But then, miraculously, this new  thing called "television" appeared in Dallas. By that time our family was finally living in a house, which was my first. It had taken quite a few years for my Dad to get us there. He had been doing quite well with his business and, not only was it a nice house, we were one of the first families in our neighborhood to buy one of those new television sets. I hope you can understand how amazed I was when, right there in our den at home, I could turn on that television set and on that small screen I could see a black-and-white geometric design pattern with a drawing of an Indian in the middle, which had traveled, invisibly through the air, all the way from downtown Dallas some 10 miles away! As you read this today, this sort of thing has become an everyday occurrence. Now, we see pictures from all over the world in color on giant television screens, which seem to be everywhere. We can see those  same pictures on our computers and even on our cell  phones. But then there were no computers or cell phones and this was the first time I had ever been able to  watch television right there in our own house! Knowing  that picture was being sent all the way from downtown Dallas, was really hard for me to believe.

A few weeks later actual moving pictures began to appear. That first television station in Dallas was on the air only a few hours a day, but soon I could see the news, weather and sports everyday. It wasn't too long before television started becoming, not just informative, but also entertaining. Hey, I'll bet a magic show would  work on television! It was then that I realized that  the next part of my magical dream would be to have my own television show. What I did not know is that the  combination of magic and television would shape the  rest of my life.

If  you'd like to know what happened next, please let Nani and Greg know.  Join the Wilson Entertainment Group, and write us a note!  We'd love to hear from you.