The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  Thurston returned to the life of a tramp, riding freights and living in “hobo jungles” near rail yards. He scoured the newspapers to watch for the latest magicians and traveled to Louisville, Peoria, and Indianapolis just to see conjuring shows. He saw Herrmann again, studying his new tricks, as well as Harry Kellar, America’s own homegrown wizard. Hoffmann’s Modern Magic was the efficiently written textbook on magic that also whispered of impossible dreams; the chapters seamlessly transitioned from coin and card tricks to the costly, stage-sized marvels—appearing assistants, floating ladies—that were staples of Herrmann’s performances. The boy carried a dirty deck of cards with him everywhere, practicing the palm, the pass, and the force: the rudiments of a secretive art.

  As winter came, Thurston moved south, settling back in the fairgrounds and longingly visiting the racetracks. In Denison, Texas, he met an old horseracing friend and they decided to go into the program business—part salesmen, part newsboys. They followed the racing circuit across the East Coast, buying the program concession in each city and earning real money. Thurston bought a gold watch, a new suit, and some magic equipment. He easily learned to gamble, and naturally learned to cheat. His friends were amused by his magic but valued his skills at palming or false shuffling—it only took one or two good, fearless moves executed at the right moment to turn the fortunes of a game.

  Now fifteen years old and flush with money, Thurston circled back through Ohio. He was safely too successful and too large to endure his father’s threats. His mother was delighted to watch his magic and told him that she had a dream that he would one day be the world’s greatest magician. Thurston remembered the prediction with pride and some embarrassment, perhaps because he realized that he felt no such commitment to an honest life of hard work.

  He left Ohio to return to the races, but he quickly returned to his worst habits. Gradually his circle of friends had descended to a group of newsboys, derelicts, and thieves. His skills at magic seemed a natural complement to their world. He was taught to pick pockets in New York’s Bowery and joined a gang. The associates identified the victims, signaled to Thurston, and then jostled the mark as Thurston worked his magic, dipping his fingers deftly into pockets or purses, pinching watches and stealing wallets. It was the same type of misdirection and bold deception that he had been studying in Modern Magic. When he was picked up in New York and turned over to William Round, he realized that he had reached the very bottom. He had been lucky that he could still make a good impression, and be scrubbed clean to impress as a handsome, sincere young man. “My hard, early life had left no imprint on my features, and actually I don’t think it marked my personality very much,” he later admitted. “I always had a sort of inner conflict over right and wrong, especially when I was working with the criminals.” When William Round finally questioned “Willie Ryan,” asking if he were ready to behave and go to church, Thurston broke down, realizing that his life had been helplessly out of his control, and nodded his assent.

  ROUND TESTED HIM with menial jobs around the office. One afternoon he gave Howard a $5 bill and a package for the American Express office, telling him to deliver the package and return with the change. Thurston returned quickly, offering the change plus an extra nickel, because he had only taken the streetcar in one direction and walked for the rest of the journey. Round admitted that he had the boy followed, but now he was ready to offer his full trust. Thurston was made a janitor at the Prison Association building, and taken to the Rounds’ personal church, the Berean Baptist Church. Howard had told them that his mother, Margaret, was a Baptist but, anxious to find some blame for all his problems, explained that his father was not a Christian. For the first time in months, he corresponded with his mother. Fearing the worst, Margaret Thurston was now pleased to hear that her son had found important friends in the city and been led to religion.

  Through the Broome Street Tabernacle, Howard performed various missionary duties, preaching on street corners, quoting the Bible, and inviting other indigents back to the church. “He has lost no opportunity to lead his old comrades to Christ,” Round reported. After a hard day on the streets, he arrived one night with a ticket for the Mission Home, entitling him to a cot and coffee in the morning. He trudged up to the large sleeping room, filled with hundreds of beds and a collection of outcasts and criminals. Thurston began to undress, but suddenly remembered his new ritual, a nightly prayer. He realized how these toughs would react to his show of piety—just weeks before, he had been one of them. But he reasoned that the experience was some sort of test of faith. He knelt down and audibly mumbled a long, sincere prayer. The room grew quiet. The men watched the boy at prayer, and then quietly went to their own beds. This public prayer made a lasting impression on Thurston and convinced him that he’d changed his life for the better—he remembered it as a demonstration of the marvelous, mysterious effect of faith.

  If his conversion had been less than sincere, less an act of passion, it was becoming an act of logic: Thurston was sincerely humbled by his change of fortunes. “Possibly I would have soon tired of this, and looked for another fast train,” he confessed years later, “but [then] I received a telegram that my mother had died.” Margaret died on his eighteenth birthday, July 20, 1887. Howard was thrown into a deep depression. “His condition seemed to me such a forlorn one that I felt as if I would like to be a friend to him in some way,” Round wrote to an associate. He suggested that Thurston be sent to Mount Hermon Academy, Dwight Moody’s Christian school for boys in Northfield, Massachusetts.

  Round was not a philanthropist and couldn’t offer the funds to send Howard to school. But Round’s mother-in-law, Ellen E. Thomas, had come to know the boy and offered to pay the $53 for each half-year term, board and tuition, for “three or four years.”

  On August 10, 1887, Thurston sent a letter filled with misspellings:Dear Mrs. Thomas,

  I hav thought a grate many times of wrighting to you but little did. I think my first letter would bear sutch sad news that is my mother is dead. She died on the 20th of July my birthday, but I did not hear about it until the 4th of August. It was a very hard trial but then I know that it is all for the best for it says in the Bible that All Things work together for the best for them that love God. Then I know that she is in a far better home than this wourld could afford her and so it doesn’t worry me mutch for I know that I shall see her soon, where we shall never part. There is nothing on earth that I care about living for now but to sirve God and do his work whitch I hope he will give me power to do so. I think God has got some thing for me to do on this earth for he has worked so mysteriously since my conversion he has provided a way for me to go to school where I may learn to do his work so far and I will trust him in the future....

  I remain sincerely yours,

  Howard Thurston

  “He needs the school,” Round admitted. “This letter is a vast improvement on those previously written.... He is not advanced in studies, but has been studying hard all summer. He is about as far along as boys of ten or twelve normally are.” In the application, Round confessed that the boy “lacked push,” and now had a certain shyness that seemed to put him at a disadvantage.

  Mount Hermon rejected Thurston’s admission, complaining that the information on his parents and background was unclear. Round responded with a letter-writing campaign, forwarding messages from ministers attesting to Thurston’s miraculous conversion and strength of character. When he heard that the school was already filled for the next term, he wrote directly to Reverend Dwight Moody. “Can’t we send him to live in the village where he can have the advantages of the school and enter regularly when there is a vacancy? I think the boy would be glad to sleep on the bare floor and would think it a privilege to do so, for the sake of the advantages of the school.” He hoped that Moody could meet him, “see his face,” and know that “he is born in Christ.”

  Moody relented and Howard Thurston was sent to Mount Hermon on September 15, 1887. He was student number 50
7. Considering that Thurston had been feeling the itch to run from New York, his admission to Moody’s school was an astonishing second chance for a boy who had been holding on tightly but, much like poor Reddy Cadger, was ready to tumble onto the tracks.

  “THERE IS SOME MISAPPREHENSION abroad for the plan of the school,” Professor Henry Sawyer, Thurston’s first headmaster, explained at a Mount Hermon building dedication in 1885. “It is not a reformatory; the fact that a boy is bad is no reason he should be sent to Mt. Hermon. It is not an orphan asylum. It is a school for earnest Christian young men who want to round out their education so that they can become of use in the world.... If we are going out into the world, the head, heart and hands need training.”

  Reverend Dwight Lyman Moody was a nineteenth-century celebrity in the world of evangelism. He was born in 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded the Northfield Seminary for girls there in 1879, and in 1881 he opened Mount Hermon Academy for boys, on a separate campus across town. Mount Hermon offered classes at high school level. Unlike the Moody Bible Institute (opened as the Chicago Evangelization Society in 1901), it was not intended to produce ministers, but to give a well-rounded education. In fact, in the 1890s, Mount Hermon dropped the Bible course study, as the school felt it was attracting an inferior grade of student. Moody felt that society needed “gap-men,” good Christians who testified, worked in the world, and served between the laity and ministers. The application form to the school asked about signs of piety and pointedly inquired if the student wished to attend. “He has made it a daily prayer for months,” Round explained in Thurston’s application. Although the school was never intended as a reform school, it often accommodated hard-luck cases. Moody himself impulsively wrote on some applications, “Take this boy before the devil does.”

  The sprawling, new campus was beautiful and bucolic, with redbrick buildings surrounding the lush, hilly grounds. It was more idyllic than anything Thurston had seen in Ohio, more inviting than the city tenements or train yards that had served as his homes for the last six years. Still, he admitted that he “suffered at Mount Hermon. The change from the nomadic life to the prosaic life of a student seemed unbearable at times.” He had already calculated the train schedule. “Night after night I debated with myself whether I would quietly leave the dormitory and catch the midnight freight that stopped at Mount Hermon. I attribute my resistance to the same comfort and strength that gave me the courage to kneel at my bed in the Bowery lodging house.” Professor Sawyer once showed him a letter in his file from William Round, which had detailed Thurston’s criminal career in New York. Sawyer was grandly making the point that no further punishment was necessary, but the memory of that letter, and his status as an outsider, haunted Thurston.

  At Mount Hermon, he made a little extra money by cutting his fellow students’ hair and shaving them (a skill he learned from his father). He earned average to good grades. For example, his Bible courses began with excellent marks, but then faded to middling grades. Perhaps that was a sign of his expanding interests. He did poorly in singing (his voice had little modulation), but excellently in elocution (following the examples from Moody’s soaring sermons, he learned to add pauses or draw out his words for emphasis). He failed geometry and struggled with algebra. He learned to juggle Indian clubs, heavy wooden pins that were swung in graceful movements around his body. He was a star on the track team and intramural football team. He was also elected vice president of the Junior Middle Class (the equivalent of sophomore year).

  During a special Christmas dinner at the school in 1890, at which young ladies from the Northfield Seminary joined the boys, Reverend Moody was on hand to join the small group for holiday toasts. After dinner, the students entertained themselves with songs, games, and recitations. There, Thurston performed his first public magic show. He grandly exaggerated this premiere, recounting later how he sliced off a student’s head and enhanced the illusion with a large knife dripping with red ink. “Four women in the audience fainted.” He also claimed to have reached into the pockets of Will Moody, the son of the evangelist, withdrawing handfuls of playing cards.

  He didn’t do these tricks. “The sleight of hand performed by Thurston added greatly to the evening’s pleasure,” according to the school newspaper, the Hermonite. There was no knife, no blood, and certainly no playing cards on the Mount Hermon campus. Thurston probably performed several discreet, polite coin and handkerchief tricks.

  He attended the school until 1891, where he was officially designated “class of ’93,” meaning that he was two years from full graduation. He was twenty-one. More than likely, Mrs. Thomas had exhausted her funds after paying for Thurston’s four years, and Round had now found a new project for the young man. His was not an unusual case. At that time, only ten percent of Mount Hermon students graduated. Thurston had endured a slow start with his academic work and many of his basic courses, like mathematics, elocution, and spelling, were necessary to his education but hadn’t counted toward graduation.

  On June 10, 1891, Thurston sent a note to Professor Cutler, the new headmaster.

  Professor Cutler,

  I come to bid you good bye and thank you for all that you have done fore me. I leave school to night but shall come for my baggage tomorrow morning. Prof one of the chief desires of my life is to prove to Herman that all I have received here has not been without effect. And that some day Herman may be proud that Howard Thurston was ever under its care. Very respectfully,

  H. Thurston

  The misspelling of the school’s name was not just odd or careless, but may have been telling. His four years at Mount Hermon had given Thurston a taste for real education and respectful camaraderie, but he still longed for adventure and was anxious to try his hand in the tawdry, delicious world of show business. He actually found his life’s work through the effect of a very different “Herrmann.”

  THREE

  “THE MOTH AND THE FLAME”

  Throughout his life, Thurston’s press stories encouraged the idea that he had trained for the ministry or actually graduated as an ordained minister. Neither was true. His career in the ministry probably consisted of a few days of street corner mission work, in the Five Points district, when he was trying to impress William Round and Reverend Dooly with his piety. He certainly heard Dwight Moody preach. At Mount Hermon, Thurston took a course of Bible studies—perhaps planning to become a preacher—but gradually his choices shifted to other areas. When he left the school, Round may have suggested that he continue his education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, studying to become a medical missionary. But this next step would have depended upon Round’s continuing largesse as well as Thurston’s academic achievements—failing to graduate from Mount Hermon, he would have needed to pass entrance exams in Philadelphia.

  William M. F. Round had moved on to a different project. In 1887, while serving the New York Prison Association and petitioning for Thurston’s education at Mount Hermon, Round had also served as the corresponding secretary for the Burnham Industrial Farm in upstate Canaan, New York. Burnham was a reform school for adolescent boys, a project perfectly suited to Round’s theories about rehabilitation. In 1891, William Round was the superintendent of Burnham Farm. A flyer boasted of the institution’s success:Burnham Industrial Farm is no longer an experiment, but an entire success. Boys from slums, from county jails, and from families of wealth and position who could no longer control their erring sons [have been] trained to earn an honest living as respected, honest boys. Firmness and love and careful training have won the boys to better lives.

  When Thurston left Northfield, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1891, he stopped in Canaan to visit William Round, who promptly recruited the young man to his cause. Round had introduced a new program to accept younger boys, aged nine to twelve. They were organized in a special “family” called the Lambfold and housed in a loft above the dairy on the Burnham grounds. He asked Thurston to become a charter member of a new fellowship called
the Brotherhood of St. Christopher, and asked him to take charge of the Lambfold. Perhaps Round appealed to Thurston’s Christian charity, or perhaps he simply mentioned the considerable investment he, and his mother-in-law, had made toward Thurston’s education. Thurston realized that his future was still tied to Round and that he was obliged to repay the loan.

  In December 1891, after he had been at the Burnham Farm for over six months, he wrote to his old headmaster at Mount Hermon, Professor Cutler, “I came to the Burnham Industrial Farm when I left the school last June. I have joined the Brotherhood of St. Christopher, an organization to train young Christian men for institutional lives, that is, to work or take charge of other institutions. The time of service is three years. The brothers receive no salary, only a small fee for necessary things. Most everything is furnished us by the Farm. I suppose you are somewhat acquainted with the Burnham Industrial Farm.”

  He later remembered that he earned five dollars a month at Burnham, and his time there was productive, as he helped obtain a herd of cattle for the boys and raise funds for a new silo and gymnasium. But the duties at Burnham Farm satisfied him only in that he had no other plans for his future. As he wiled his days in Canaan, New York, weeding the onion field or driving the horse cart, he decided that he’d had enough of the peaceful, institutional life of the country.

  He lasted eighteen months at Burnham, certainly not the three-year term that he had pledged. It seems that Round’s tenure at Burnham, and the Brotherhood of St. Christopher, were slowly unwinding. Thurston had reached an elevated position within the hierarchy, but, “being sort of an independent individual, I had an idea how things should be run and I tried to run the institution,” he later recalled. “Anyhow, I didn’t agree with the rest of them, so we decided that I would leave.” When he departed on January 5, 1893, a cold, snowy day, all the boys lined up. Thurston bid them an affectionate good-bye, then climbed into a sleigh and was carried to the train station.