cigarettes, and he was ready for the world. The world wasn't ready for him, tho, as an agent told him during an interview. There were literally hundreds of acts doing the same thing and there was no future in magic for Norm if he just delivered back what he had learned. He began to dream up an act based on his wide knowledge, but very, very different in its final presentation.
The draft was hanging over his head, and he applied for Special Services, but the draft came too soon and he was sent to Japan. He found he could manage to do magic even tho in the army, and learned enough Japanese to translate his brief patter. He played some Japanese night clubs and saw his name up in letters, if not in lights, and in Katakana - the language method used for spelling foreign words. Among other things he developed here was a vanishing beer bottle - a speciality not in his present act.
As happened with many other acts, after Norm left his old outfit in the States, they told him he had been called for Special Services, but the actual orders never caught up with him. In his sixteenth month in Japan, the Red Cross arranged for him to return to Kenosha for the funeral of his mother. His tour of duty was almost up, so he remained in the States.
Norm was a man now, able to make his own decisions, and there was only one way he wanted to go -- into show business. He went to work at the Robert's Show Lounge in Chicago, doing a manipulative act, lots of Chavez touches, but beginning to lean toward his dream of what an act could be like.
Heritage is a strange thing -- it is not to be denied. Norm came from a family who worked artistically with their hands - no matter what the medium they worked in. He began to feel stirrings of this need to create tangible beauty when he became acquainted with Okito, then living and working in Chicago. Okito made some of the most beau-
