This first-year student engaged Houdini more or less continually whilst my friend Mr.
Houdini was facing us and lying down on a couch at the time reading some mail, his right side nearest us. What then occurred was later described by Jack Price and included in a book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: They followed Houdini to his dressing room, and a few minutes later another McGill student named Joselyn Gordon Whitehead knocked on the door. Smilovitch took Houdini up on his offer, bringing along his friend Jack Price to meet the magician in the lobby of the Princess Theater the morning of Friday, 22 October. Smilovitch approached Houdini with a sketch he'd made of the escape artist Houdini was impressed with the drawing and invited the young man to come backstage after one of his shows and do a full portrait. The following day Houdini delivered a lecture at McGill University about exposing fraudulent spiritualists and mediums, and afterwards he stayed around to chat with various faculty members and students. Despite having broken his ankle while performing his famous Water-Torture Cell escape in Albany several days earlier, Houdini, ever the trouper, kept his engagement at the Princess Theater in Montreal and opened there on 18 October 1926. The chain of events leading up to Houdini's final passing began in mid-October 1926, while he was undertaking a series of shows in the northeastern part of North America.
The stomach punches caught Houdini by surprise before he had time to prepare himself, however, resulting in a trauma that ruptured his appendix and ultimately caused his death a few weeks later.Īlthough some of the basic facts of this narrative are correct, its assumption of the cause and effect that led to Houdini's untimely demise likely is not.
As legend has it, Houdini was fond of explaining to his fans that by tightening his abdominal muscles he could withstand the hardest punches to the midsection a man could deliver, and one day a college student who was present when Houdini repeated his boast decided to test the claim by raining blows to the magician's midriff. Nearly everyone familiar with world-famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, no matter how little they know about his life, knows one thing about his death: That a boastful Houdini died from trying to impress some college students with his toughness.
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