It has been a century since arguably the most famous entertainer the world has even known passed away. Even for younger generations, the name Houdini is known in households across the globe. Harry Houdini passed away on Halloween night in 1926 from peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix. While the famed performer took his talents to all corners of the world, he has a trip to the Maritimes in 1896 to thank for his success. “This was not the huge name of Harry Houdini that we know now, this was quite the opposite” says Andrew MacLean, author of Backyard History, who wrote a pair of pieces detailing Houdini’s trip to the Maritimes. “We have a 22-year-old, extremely unsuccessful Harry Houdini. He had been touring through New England but the tour collapsed in bankruptcy, and he met this guy from Halifax that called himself Marco the Magician, who was not very well known either, but he was heading off to the Maritimes to do a tour. He invited the bankrupt Harry Houdini and his wife Bess to go.” MacLean says Houdini was about to give up on magic and go back to New York City to work in a men’s necktie factory. He says the tour visited many small towns throughout the region before making their first big stop in Saint John. At this point in his career Houdini struggled to retain audiences. MacLean says the travelling show Houdini was a part of booked the former Saint John Opera House but filled less than 10 per cent of the 1,100 seat venue. “He called himself the King of Cards, which was a very generic name even for 1896, and people weren’t super into it,” MacLean says. Houdini used the slower shows the master his craft and further explore the art of escape acts. MacLean says that’s when Houdini began experimenting more with publicity gimmicks, including going into the Saint John Police Station and escaping a set of handcuffs placed on him by a police officer in front of local news reporters. He also met his industry idol Samri Baldwin, who was in the Port City at the time, which motivated him to find his niche. In many of those later stunts, Houdini would be garbed in a straitjacket. While historians debate the matter, Houdini himself says it was in Saint John where he first discovered it. “The story that he told, and he told this many times, was that he was in Saint John and he had seen a local person that was put in a straitjacket that was invented to try and be a more humanitarian way of confining suspects,” MacLean says. “He couldn’t get this out of his mind, he tossed and turned all night in his hotel. “It stuck with him, it was in his brain, and then he went to the what was called the Saint John Lunatic Asylum at the time the next day in order to get one of these and try it out and then add it into his act. It became something else that was carried on across the world.” Mark Greene is a co-host of the podcast Saint John: Nothing Happened Here, which will have an episode coming out on Nov. 10 diving into Houdini’s Saint John stop. He says the straitjacket topic is a contentious one among historians. While Houdini himself said he first discovered the jacket in Saint John, Greene says he was notorious for making stuff up as part of his character. “Once he became Harry Houdini, he disappeared and it was all a character,” Greene says. “It was hard to know when he was in character, when he was not in character, when he was building up these stories. However, 20 years after the fact, he just so happens to remember Saint John, New Brunswick. He just so happens to remember the name of the asylum, and just so happened to remember the name of the doctor, Doctor Steeves. “So, you know, sometimes you just don’t know.” While details around the straitjacket are up for debate, historians agree Houdini wouldn’t have become who he was without Saint John. “Saint John got nothing from Houdini, but Houdini got a lot from Saint John,” Greene says. “Sometimes our worst failures lead to our greatest successes, and what he ended up doing in his downtime, and what he experimented with on stage, really drove his future career.” “I think that Harry Houdini would tell you that he wouldn’t be who he was if he hadn’t come to the region,” MacLean says. “He was quite clear in his own words that this was an inspirational, pivotal moment in his life.” Houdini would later travel to Halifax as part of the 1896 tour before returning to the United States. For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
