Word: houdini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harry Houdini, prestidigitator, handcuff king, foe of charlatan spiritists: "As I was about to perform my 'Chinese water-cell trick'* on the stage of the Capitol Theatre at Albany, N. Y., faulty stage tackle let the ponderous wood-and-iron stock fall upon my left foot, crushing it. Though my supple feet and ankles constitute great assets to me in my escapes from fetters, piano boxes, safes and other receptacles, I risked swelling and infection, stayed on the stage, did other tricks. Afterwards one of my staff said something about a 'jinx,' whereat I rebuked...
Rahman Bey, fakir, recently submerged himself for an hour, asserted that he owed his life to his ability to fall into a cataleptic trance. It was magic; until the trance was at an end he did not breathe. To Fakir Bey, Harry Houdini, trickster, gave the lie, donned blue trunks, a white shirt, a luminous wrist watch, entered an airtight tin coffin equipped with a telephone and electric pushbutton, was lowered to the depth of the Shelton Hotel Pool, Manhattan...
...half hours six strapping men stood on the coffin lid, held it at the bottom of the pool until Mr. Houdini telephoned that he was getting numb. Extricated, too weak to move, he explained that he had conserved his air supply by taking little breaths. His comparative conditions were as follows...
...wave and that his ministrations upon the persons of five young women derive from Jack the Ripper. We infer, that is all. Yet that is ample to earn this Turk several graduate and honorary degrees in murdery. From the barest hints he becomes a lurking presence whose actuality Mr. Houdini could scarce disparage. He and his dirty crew begin ostensibly as figments in the imagination of a marriageable young Connecticut authoress of our time. Then they make it clear that as she has conceived, so shall she bear. No fair telling the end, shocking though it is; Miss Macfadyen...
...this Mr. Houdini exclaimed: "Jesus was a Jew, and he did not charge $2 a visit...