Free Jim Steinmeyer by The Last Greatest Magician in the World Page A

small show to another, performing magic in the sideshow or working as a pitchman with another new product. First, he tried selling hot dogs (a delicacy that had just become a fairground favorite) and carpet cleaner, which could be mixed in big batches in a hotel bathtub. But he was always more comfortable working with a partner. He teamed up with a showman named Sam Meinhold, who played the zither to accompany the magician. The partners headed south for the rest of the winter, first with Colonel Routh Goshen’s Circus (Goshen was one of Barnum’s giants), and then on their own.
    When Thurston and Meinhold presented their sideshow in a small Georgia town, the local constable assembled a list of fines and charges, designed to extort money from anyone who stumbled through the community. Thurston couldn’t pay the fine. Howard and Sam were marched into court that morning, and Howard began addressing the judge with a long, impassioned plea, detailing the unfair way they were treated. He concluded:
    We are strangers to you, and I know you want us to leave your beautiful city feeling that we have been fairly treated and that your honor and the honor of your fair city have not been debased by the actions of unscrupulous officials. Who knows, your own boys may be in similar positions sometime.
    He paused, noticing that everyone in the courtroom was speechless. They stared back at him, awaiting his next words, apparently blindsided by the sideshow worker’s unexpectedly pure rhetoric. Thurston pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and continued with a voice that trembled with theatrical emotion.
    I am glad this thing has ended so happily for us all and that we can leave the city feeling we have your friendship and good wishes. I want to thank you for your kindness. I want to bid you all good-bye, and I hope to see you all some day.
    He and Sam pushed their way through the court and out the door. No one raised their voice or attempted to stop them. “I had been the accused, I opened the case, did the pleading, closed the case, returned the verdict and acquitted myself,” Thurston later wrote. “To borrow an expression from my own profession, I had forced a card on everyone in that room.”
    It was another incident in a small, deeply segregated Georgia town that left the strongest impression on the young magician. As they were preparing their show in a small hall opposite a train station, Thurston and Meinhold heard a train rumble through town, and the sudden screams of a boy. The magician dashed across the street to the station as a crowd assembled. There, an adolescent black boy lay screaming on the tracks. The train had run over his legs and nearly severed them completely.
    The assembled crowd, a group of mostly black faces, was horrified by the scene. Thurston admonished them to pick up the boy and carry him to the drugstore. “I’m a magician. I’ll put the magician’s curse on all of you unless you help at once!” A few volunteers carried the boy across the street; he was bleeding profusely and sobbing. There was nothing that the local doctor could do for him. Thurston knelt by the side of the boy. He tried to comfort him with a showman’s trick, simple suggestion, telling him that he would take away all his pain. “Rest and sleep,” Thurston repeated. They were the same lines he would use, years later, while performing the Levitation Trick. The boy looked into Thurston’s face, and asked, “Are you Jesus?”
    Thurston hesitated, and then answered quietly, “Yes.”
    He told the boy to close his eyes, repeating that the pain would leave. As he looked up, he saw the stunned crowd outside the drugstore kneeling in prayer. “The boy was dying,” Thurston remembered. “With a feeling I hope I shall never experience again, I walked slowly through the praying Negros and awestruck whites, and climbed the stairs.” He walked back into the little hall and then performed his magic show.
    It was a story