Magic club hopes to reignite interest
Awe-filled wonder is a tight commodity in an age filled with special effects, smart phones, and 24/7 news cycles, but the Bowling Green Magic Club hopes to change that.
The group is hosting a series of classes on Sundays in June.
Free and open to the public, the classes — 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. — are for all ages, and children are encouraged to bring an adult with them. Held at the Maumee Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation, the classes will go over some of the history of magic and studies on some of the greatest magic tricks, like Penn and Teller’s “Impossible Trick.”
Participants will be able to look behind the curtain and learn tricks to perform on their own.
Cracking a mysterious green bound scrapbook, the 71-year-old man behind the Bowling Green Magic Club revealed the first brown page with expressive bubbled letters: “MAGIC ...” it said, carefully colored red and green with a black ink outline of the word and the ellipses, joined by an ampersand to complete the thought, “& ME.”
Sylvania resident Steve Israel leafed through his childhood performances of illusion and wonder catalogued in the cobbled memorandum of flyers, news clippings, and letters beginning with a comic featuring none other than “The World’s Greatest Escape Artist: Harry Houdini.”
Illustrated in color, the comic showed Mr. Houdini escaping from a crate tossed into the water, and on the opposite page was a July 17,1969, news clipping of Mr. Israel brandishing a wand and dressed in a tuxedo in front of a crowd of people.
The Sioux City (Iowa) Journal introduced Mr. Israel by saying, “Magicians’ tricks don’t need the glamour of a theater stage setting to be fascinating.”
Likewise, as a young boy, Mr. Israel had no problem finding the world around him fascinating and applied his curiosity to deconstructing an alarm clock his parents had given him.
“And I took it apart, because I was really curious how the hands moved and how the alarm went off,” he said.
“Magic is like that. You watch a magic show, you watch magic tricks, and the audience is left with, ‘Oh, my gosh! How did he or she do that?’”
After graduating high school, Mr. Israel said he was introduced to “other distractions” that kept him from a life of magic. “I discovered girls,” he said.
Working for television stations and in marketing the rest of his years, Mr. Israel slowed down at the dawning of the 2010s, when he retired, and found space to reincorporate a little magic into his life.
“I think it was probably the hobby that I missed the most,” he said. “I had happy memories of being a magician.”
Magic has always been a niche thing according to Greg Bordner, 72, of Abbott Magic Co. in Colon, Mich., an international hub for people who practice the art of performing live illusions.
“My dad started the company in 1934 with Percy Abbott,” he said, and Colon became a hub for magic mainly because Harry Blackstone, Sr., a competitor to Houdini, settled down in Colon.
“I’d say that it [magic] was never really popular,” he said. “There are several times they’ve tried to start magic clubs here, and it just, it’s just difficult.”
Before the pandemic Mr. Israel had been teaching some children magic, but when the pandemic began, those children moved onto other things like he had.
Trying to cultivate a new community through these classes, Mr. Israel is hoping to pass on the tricks associated with the spare room full of magic paraphernalia he’s collected over the years.
He said he faced a particular difficulty after the pandemic.
“It [magic] is slowly coming back, but people got online, and they got on their phones, and they’re not gathering like at churches,” Mr. Bordner said, talking about the online culture of today and also the internet’s demystifying of nature of the magic tricks.
But with sleight of hand, a performer’s excitement, and sparkling cape, Mr. Israel says enjoyment of the art is infectious.
He can be reached at RJP@bex.net.
Contact Stephen Zenner at szenner@theblade.com.