In 1920, Houdini first met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, most famous for his Sherlock Holmes series. “With a beating heart, I waited, hoping that I might feel once more the presence of my beloved mother.” Harry’s mother was already dead, and no magic trick could bring her back.

Houdini broke all his upcoming performances in order to return to America as quickly as possible, but unfortunately that meant two weeks of transoceanic ship travel until he reached the U.S. It was 1913 and Houdini was 30 years old, giving a press conference in Copenhagen, when he was handed a telegram: Cecilia had suffered a stroke. Even in adulthood, Cecilia dressed him, and it’s been said that every now and then, when he was an adult and needed to be calmed, Harry would sit in his mother’s lap.Īnd then she died. Houdini referred to Cecilia as “his angel upon earth” and the “guiding beacon in his life. It’s been said that as an infant, whenever baby Erik would bellow, the instant Cecilia pressed him to her chest, her son would immediately soothed to a silent calm. The fourth of seven children, Harry had always had a profound bond with his mother, Cecilia. Born in Budapest in 1874, Erik Weisz grew up to become a magician, escapologist, stuntman, aviator, actor, film producer, and superstar known to the world as Harry Houdini. The man spearheading the bill? No one other than the magician Harry Houdini. A bill that sought to make psychic-mediumship illegal and punishable by six months’ incarceration.

8989, the cumbrously-titled bill amending “Subchapter 5 of the Code of Law to the District of Columbia, as Amended to June 7, 1924, related to Offenses against Public Policy.” Simply put: a bill that sought to make it a crime for a woman to speak from her intuition, her gut. Langston Hughes and his “Weary Blues.” And on this year, on one particular February morning, one man stood in front of the 96th US congress, which had gathered that day to discuss H.R.

Instead, forward movement: the African American Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. It was the age of miracles and there would be no going back. The year that brought the births of Harper Lee, John Coltrane, and Hugh Hefner, along with the deaths of Annie Oakley and Robert Todd Lincoln.

Harry houdini cecelia weisz