Free The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller Page B

downtown to see it, ignoring a mystery ailment that was burning his side. In terrible pain and perhaps suffering from appendicitis, Ray went to see the movie anyway. “I sat there thinking, ‘Next week, I won’t be alive, but I’ll be damned if I’ll leave the theater. I’ve got to see The Phantom one more time.’” Clutching his abdomen, Ray stayed through several screenings. That evening his father, Leo, arrived, marching down the aisle as the projector light flickered, and collected his son, who had been missing much of the day. Ray’s mystery ailment—the presumed appendicitis—vanished.
    There were a few more contributing factors in Ray’s early development. He continued to foster his wild interest in magic and magicians, and one afternoon that summer, his parents took him by train to Chicago and visited a magic shop, Ireland’s Magic Company. The glass cases were filled with magic tricks and Ray marveled at the elaborate accessories. Since Leo Bradbury was making just dollars a week, Ray knew there was no money, and was content simply to look. “When we walked in, all the store clerks looked at us instantly and knew that we had no money. We were no good. We couldn’t buy a thing,” said Ray. Still, Leo and Esther managed to buy one small item for their son, a quarter magic trick.
    When he was ten, after watching Blackstone the Magician many times and studying his tricks diligently, Ray made a silent pledge: to become the world’s greatest magician. He began by putting on shows at home. Uncle Inar; his wife, Arthurine; their daughter, Ray’s cousin Vivian; Skip; and Esther gathered in the small living room to watch the performances. “They had to put up with me,” said Ray with a laugh. His father served as magician’s assistant. “My father was quite wonderful. He was very patient. We hung a sheet across a doorway and we put on shadow pantomime shows. I would play a dentist and he was a patient and I would pull an immense tooth out of his jaw,” said Ray. His parents added to his cache of tricks by giving him new magic sets on his birthdays and Christmas. Very soon, Ray took his living-room show “on the road.” With two schoolmates—the twin Schabold brothers, who were themselves amateur magicians—Ray began performing at the Oddfellows Hall, the Elks Club, the Moose Lodge, and, just across the ravine from his house, the VFW Hall. Ray loved the sense of power and control that performing magic gave him; it was the reason, he claimed, so many young boys become interested in it as a hobby. Ray also loved being in the limelight as he performed for an audience.
    In the last week of 1931, Blackstone returned to Waukegan for a weeklong run at the Genesee Theatre. Of course, Ray was there. As part of the performance, Blackstone invited a few audience members onstage to assist him, and Ray was called up to help with an elaborate illusion. As Ray remembered it, a horse was brought onstage and a curtain was draped in front of it. “I helped Blackstone fire a gun and then when the curtain went up, the horse had vanished,” Ray said. Before Ray left the stage, Blackstone handed his apprentice a rabbit to take home with him. Elated that his hero had given him a gift, Ray held the animal to his chest for the remainder of the show. After the performance, Ray ran across the ravine all the way home. His new pet was promptly named “Tilly” and, within days, she had babies. Leo and Esther were not pleased with the new additions, so Ray gave the bunnies to his school friends, the twin brothers who had performed magic with him. “I kept Tilly,” Ray said, “until she started leaving rabbit pellets all over the house and my mother said, ‘This has got to stop.’” Reluctantly, Ray gave her to the Schabold twins, too. “They had a pen full of rabbits and I put Tilly inside,” Ray recalled