Jim Steinmeyer Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning, had just foreclosed on their house.
    Howard and Charles continued selling the pounders for pennies, or even better, trading them for bread or meat to support the family. One day Howard had his earnings, a princely eighty cents, converted to nickels. That night, he dug into his pocket, telling his mother that he’d found a nickel, and then another, and another, slowly piling silver coins on the table. This bit of showmanship resulted in one of Thurston’s rare memories of laughter and joviality around the dinner table.
    William Thurston liberally beat his sons, and was probably abusive to his wife. In a lightly fictionalized story written many years later, Howard recalled being beaten for hopping a train car and dropping $2 on the siding. He was beaten for riding, and then losing control of a horse that his father was using for a sales job. He was even beaten, inexplicably, when his younger brother broke a window. His mother interceded in these punishments, and Howard adored her. “Ma, I hate to see you cry. Has Pa been mean to you again?” he recalled asking her. “I like to sit in your lap. You know, Ma, when you die, I want to die, too.”
    When they were a little older, Charles and Howard found jobs as bellboys at the American House in Columbus. At twelve, Howard was working as a newsboy on the trains between Columbus and Akron, or the more prestigious business line from Columbus to Pittsburgh. One of Thurston’s earliest memories of magic was, as a boy, when he saw a school performance of the Ink to Water Trick. The secret was then explained to the audience of children, and Thurston was fascinated by the deception.
    It’s not a surprise that Howard Thurston was looking for various means to escape his childhood—first opportunities to bring money to his family, and then escapades that allowed him to avoid his dreary Columbus home. It was around this time that he discovered the most delicious escape of all. It was customary for newsboys to work in pairs. On the trains, Howard was teamed up with a large, dull boy nicknamed Tugger who could be trusted for the heavy lifting. As a reward for a successful day, Howard and Tugger decided to treat themselves to their first magic show. Today the record of this event has been muddied by Thurston’s many official accounts, interviews, and adjustments to the legend. It may have been at the old City Hall Theater in Columbus, or at an unnamed theater in Cincinnati, where the newsboys were working. Tugger was satisfied to see it once. Howard insisted on returning on the following two nights, spending his dimes lavishly on seats in the balcony and marveling at his first “Arabian Night’s dream,” as he later recalled it, where the “footlights were fairy lamps and the stage was peopled with wavering shapes, with fairies and elves, with witches and demons, for [all] I knew. Magic had gripped me in its spell, and its hold never has loosened.” If the legend is right, Howard Thurston was twelve or thirteen years old, and he saw a performance by Herrmann the Great, a wildly popular American magician who had a sophisticated comic, devilish persona. Thurston recalled that the matinee was a “gift show,” in which cheap novelty gifts were awarded to children in the audience. He patiently stood in line to obtain his wrapped bundle, which contained a brass collar button. Thurston treasured it as if he had received it from the master magician himself.
     
     
    WITH A LITTLE extra money earned from selling newspapers, Thurston was drawn to the fairgrounds, then the races—he was just small enough to fantasize about being a jockey. Together with a friend, he found work as a stable boy and secured assurances that he could learn to ride. When the racing circuit left Columbus for Cincinnati, Howard left home without telling his parents. He knew that his decision would crush his mother. He pictured her standing by the window, waiting, sobbing. But he had come to fear his