My first experience of Colon in August was at the Get-Together that wasn’t. Both Neil Foster and Duke Stern had suggested I would enjoy attending the annual summer shindigs, but I was a teenager at the time so a 250 mile journey to a village without hotels and —as I recall back then— only one restaurant was both exciting and a little scary.
But, a buddy of mine at the time and I decided we’d figure it all out and then learned the annual formal festivities had been canceled due to health issues faced by Abbott’s owner, Recil Bordner. I presume that some annual stalwarts exerted pressure and prevailed in creating a one-time-only Open House over the same four-day period. It was 100% free, but, of course, there were no shows. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t any entertainment however.
My buddy and I set out from Milwaukee very, very early in the morning. I’ve always been a railroad buff and so I insisted we take The Milwaukee Road’s flagship train, The Pioneer Limited, from Milwaukee to Chicago. It was an overnight train between the Windy City and the Twin Cities in Minnesota. It only required about ninety minutes to cover the eighty-five miles between Milwaukee and Chicago’s union station, but that was enough time for me to settle down in the diner for a railroad breakfast on real china with silver flatware and starched linens on the tables. In Chicago we hiked to the somewhat-seedy Greyhound depot for a much longer ride to Sturgis where Abbott’s kindly sent an older woman to pick us up.
We stayed directly across the street from Abbott’s building in the upstairs bedroom of an aging widow’s home. I think she requested six dollars per night… total. All day long there was lots of activity in the showroom (there were no bleachers back then). Duke, Neil, Jerry Conklin, Gordon Miller, Karrel Fox and others madly demonstrated the Abbott’s line and the cash register was kept very busy. At night, as always, the Legion filled up just as it still does.
I had a great time! It was natural I’d return for a real Get-Together in 1968 and I did, but my buddy and I drove. In 1969 my best friend’s sister professed interest in this Michigan event and she accompanied me. She was not my girlfriend, but she occasionally assisted me onstage. She stayed with one family in Colon and I with another. But, as an attractive teenage girl she received lots of attention from the younger magicians.
I secured summer-long employment in 1970 and ’71 and so I missed those Get-Togethers, but I remained in the Milwaukee area in 1972. I gently inquired what it would take to appear on a Get-Together show and I was surprised how quickly I was invited to be on the Friday night bill. As an illusionist I was to close the show because, naturally, I had “the big stuff.”
In lieu of cash payment for my appearance Abbott’s Glen “Arturo” Babbs built a very nice Mummy Case Illusion for me from some Owen Brothers schematic plans. I had an idea for a “space-age” presentation and so I requested they decorate it with the same stencils used for their Head in Orbit prop.
We put together a short presentation in two parts. The opening was a very fast-paced sequence of prop magic and illusions that I am somewhat embarrassed by now although it was well-received in lots of shows I presented in the first half of the 1970s.
The curtain would open to reveal all these props on stage and ready to go: Chests of Mystery, Abbott’s Classic, Temple of Benares, Florabella, Blooming Bouquet, Super Botania, Goofus Plant, Chinese Idol Illusion, Where Do They Go? and Girl Vanish. We might have had my Flash Appearance, too, as the opener. So, the high school stage just looked like they had moved the dealer room over! There were lots of silk scarves and streamers from the Classic and a Changing Bag for a Blendo effect, a Far East Silk Cabby for the Mis-Made Flags and a Crystal Silk Cylinder to ‘grow’ the 12”x18” flag up to a 3’x5’ one. All of this gear was on an Abbott’s Case N Table.
I may have looked like Hans Klok at a Colon rummage sale as I rushed from prop to prop.
After this whirlwind routine, all set to Broadway show tunes and the venerable “Sabre Dance,” I spoke and introduced the second part of my act which was simply my presentation of The Modern Cabinet. It is essentially the same routine I continue to do and that many of you have seen. As ‘tacky’ as the opening amalgam of mysteries seems to me now, The Modern Cabinet routine remains a very strong feature for me. I’ve replaced the original Abbott illusion, the costumes and added a complete scenic backdrop, but my patter and music are unchanged after almost four decades.
This show required three female assistants and a couple of males (including, of course, my ‘double’ for The Modern Cabinet). I attended the Get-Together from its beginning, but almost all my assistants were coming over just for the show on Friday. And, because of their individual schedules, they wouldn’t be departing Milwaukee until the mid-afternoon!
“Senator” Clarke Crandall was the emcee that night and he was a bit of a scary figure to me with his blustery character. I had spent the day assembling all my props with a multitude of bolts, washers and wing nuts.
Just about dinner time Recil Bordner came backstage to tell me that they’d received a phone call that my traveling assistants’ car had broken down on the Illinois Tri-State Tollway.
Please understand that, at age 21, I was already very nervous. But, now I was at the brink of a coronary thrombosis. The situation called for someone with a cool head. That eliminated me totally.
But, luckily I was surrounded by Colon ‘regulars’ who were accustomed to pitching in whenever and wherever required. In short order I had Dennis Loomis as my double… easily a full head shorter than me! Dick Oslund said he’d become an onstage assistant and shepherd illusions on and off for me. Cindy Conklin was quick to get into my Temple and try to learn my routine with a big live rabbit. She secured two more female volunteers and we tried to teach all this material in the backstage band room.
The assistant who was at the wheel of the car had some limited experience as an auto mechanic. I seem to recall he needed a screwdriver to affect some sort of adjustment. They were able to walk to the nearest oasis and “borrowed” a screwdriver by leaving a twenty dollar deposit. Then they walked back and got the car going. To retrieve their deposit they made two illegal U-turns.
Once back on their way the posted speed limit became an ignored limitation.
Of course this was decades before mobile phones and text messaging so I had no idea of their status. The show began promptly at 8:00 pm after Wilma finished her organ overture of well-known melodies.
Backstage, we were still rehearsing. I shuddered as I thought of all the things that could go wrong. My new assistants were all trying their best, but this wasn’t just asking someone to bring me a tray with a prop on it or strike some apparatus after I’d completed using it.
Silk scarves, feather flowers, multiple rabbits, swords, canes and more all tightly routined together and they were going to have to do it all without a real complete run-through rehearsal.
Intermission came and went and the flop sweat must have been pouring out of me in the blast furnace of backstage August heat where there is no air conditioning.
To facilitate the set-up of all my gear they had put emcee Crandall’s ‘spot’ on in the next-to-last position. He was performing ‘in one’ as we rolled the illusions out and placed everything in the wings.
I believe he announced he was going to pass some playing cards magically through a dinner plate and into a tobacco jar that the plate was resting upon. He seemed to have some difficulty with the requisite number of playing cards needed for this demonstration. He counted too many and then too few. It was, of course, his clever variation of the venerable Six Card Repeat.
My new assistants had donned costumes that did not really fit them. Strangely, I do not recall them seeming nervous, but, of course, any negative perceptions wouldn’t settle on them; they’d be leveled at the brash Wisconsin illusionist who thought he knew everything.
It was at this point that my Milwaukee staff burst in the backstage door. Crandall was winding down. But, after their harrowing journey they demanded to go on and Dennis, Dick, Cindy and her friends wasted no time in shedding their outfits and my people got dressed just in time to take their places.
In the published “review” that appeared in The New TOPS Magazine of the show several months later my appearance garnered only one brief sentence that ran something like “Divad (my then-stage name) closed the show with plenty of illusions and the best transpo act of all.”
This review, I believe, was written by Crandall and probably was based on someone else’s observation since he could hardly be expected to have critically watched me himself having just completed his turn.
I can assure my readers here that whatever drama I was able to create onstage on that hot Friday night in August of 1972 was nothing compared to what the audience had NOT seen or even been aware of.
I had a daytime engagement in Milwaukee on Saturday so we packed up immediately and headed home overnight, my tired assistants doing the five hundred mile roundtrip with no rest and then performing with me the next day. Consequently, I received no feedback from attendees.
The next summer I returned to my summer-long job at a resort in northern Wisconsin. It wasn’t until 1980 that I could next attend the Get-Together. I returned to perform again and close the Saturday night show.
This time my assistants arrived up front and I was the one coming in just for the performance. I was in the middle of an engagement for Ohio Bell at the Ohio State Fair in Columbus. In order to work the fair on Saturday and close that night’s show I had to charter my own aircraft and pilot to fly me to Sturgis. That’s another amusing story, but it will have to wait for another time. I know it went well because I flew back to Columbus with the Jack Gwynne trophy!
It will be nice to be at 2010’s Get-Together and just sit in the audience to take in all the shows, but I cannot help but wonder what might be going on backstage.
