At the beginning of nineteen forty-three, the one thousand blocks of Jefferson Street and John Street were teeming with children my age. Arnie Zagar, Mackie Macintosh, Chuck Whine, Charlie Meyer, Ken Meitz, Donny Williams, and Tommy Crowther were just a few of the boys.

Chuck Whine was an only child with piles of toys and a mother that catered to his every wish. Perhaps it was because of jealousy that the relationship between Chuck and the rest of us was frequently strained. On one such occasion, we met in the absence of him and decided to form a club. It would be called "The Black Hood Club" and Chuck Whine would be excluded. Frankly, I don't remember any other purpose for the club. My older brother, Ernie, attended JJC at the time. He was my role model and mentor. He alone started me in the direction of my life's work. Anyway, we had just finished replacing the linoleum in our kitchen and had a few pieces of the floor covering left over. Upon telling my brother that Mackie had received a toy printing press for Christmas, Ernie said that he would show me how to print using the spare linoleum. With a knife, he cut a two-inch square and began to carve an indented skull and crossbones into the surface. He pressed the linoleum square onto an inkpad and then a piece of white paper. The process resulted in a white skull, surrounded by black, on the paper.

I immediately set out to find Mackie and show him our printing invention. He was impressed and we both decided to further advance the frontier of printing technology. Using his toy printing press, we set the type for the following pamphlet:

BEWARE! YOU HAVE BEEN VISITED

BY THE BLACK HOOD

LEAVE A NICKEL UNDER THIS

ROCK AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED

We printed about twenty copies on small sheets of yellow paper that came with the toy. At the bottom of the page, we carefully impressed my brother's skull and crossbones. Our day's work done, I went home.

The next morning, at breakfast, my father had stern look on his face. He showed me a piece of yellow paper with a skull at the bottom. "These were found on the porches of several John Street houses last night. One lady called the police. She thought it had something to do with Nazi spies." I had to admit that Mackie and I printed them, but vigorously denied putting them on people's porches. Dad talked to Ernie and established that his only involvement was the carving of the skull. He knew nothing about the extortion message or the Black Hood. Dad told me to warn the other kids that the next time we did anything like this, we would be arrested.

As soon as possible, I went over to Mackie's house and told him that we had been caught. He said that he had given the printed sheets to Arnie, Tommy, and Jack Markley. They waited until dark and then distributed all of them to the porches on John Street. Mackie promised to pass my father's warning to everyone involved. After that, as our contribution to the war effort, the Black Hood Club was disbanded.

Early Years in Joliet Illinois

I will talk about Dick’s life prior to 1962, the part that I know best. Dick was born in Joliet Illinois, at the end of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, and near the beginning of the Great Depression. It was a small town of 40,000 and, while located only 40 miles southwest of Chicago, was culturally a thousand miles from that city. The depression, World War II, and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt were the backdrop for his pre-school and grade school years. He went to Joliet Township High School, was a member of the Junior ROTC, and worked part time in a small drug store as a pharmacist’s apprentice. After high school he attended Joliet Junior College and then the University of Illinois in Urbana. The Korean War was in progress during the early fifties, and being drafted into the army was a very real possibility for all males over the age of eighteen. Some of his high school ROTC classmates were talked into joining the National Guard, sent to Korea, and died in the initial fighting. Dick received a bachelors and masters degree in psychology at the University of Illinois. After a tour of duty in the army, he came to California, was married, and took a position with General Motors and finally Pacific State Hospital Pomona in the early sixties.

Five of Dick’s friends, myself included, also came from Joliet to Southern California in the fifties and early sixties. Our biographies, up to that time, with minor variations, are strikingly similar to Dick’s.

The Magic Red Egg Bag

It was probably in the summer of 1945 that, with the encouragement of my aunt, my sister Shirley and I began to work on perfecting a magic act. I talked about my interest in magic to Donny Williams, a neighbor, and he said that he knew somebody who would like to sell some magic tricks.

One day that summer, Donny and I walked down John Street, to a house about a half-mile away, and introduced me to Dick Eyman. Dick led us into his basement where he showed us a table covered with the components of a very elaborate chemistry set. He explained that he did magic in past, but was now interested in chemistry. To illustrate the wonders of chemistry, he took a bottle of sulfuric acid, poured a few drops on a piece of cloth, and let me inspect the hole that the acid produced.

Getting to the point of our visit, Dick produced a cardboard box containing the magic tricks that he wanted to sell. The three that I remember best were the milk pitcher, die box, and what I have come to call the magic red egg bag. Dick demonstrated the disappearance of a wooden egg into the red bag and the difference between his milk pitcher and the one that Donny owned.

I agreed to buy the whole box for about twelve dollars. I took it home and over the next few months learned to perform each of the tricks. It was not long before I lost interest in magic and put the box away in the corner of my closet.

The Cavalcade of Stars

In February 1947, I graduated from 8th grade and entered Joliet Township High School. Some of my grade school friends told me that I could avoid taking high school physical education by enrolling in Junior ROTC. I took their advice and it was in ROTC class that I met Dick Eyman again. Over the next three and a half years, we shared the ROTC experience and became friends.

At some time in that period, Dick inquired about the magic tricks and I told him that they were stored, unused, in my closet at home. He said that he had a renewed interest in magic and wondered if I would sell the tricks back to him. We agreed on a suitable price and the box was returned to its original owner.

On December 17, 1949, in a letter written to our common friend Dave Evans who was in England for a year, I stated the following about the annual high school talent show: “Cavalcade of Stars made a big hit, and it was really swell. My sister Shirley and Dick Eyman were in it. Dick did a pretty good magic act. As I said before, it was a swell show.”

What I didn’t tell Dave was that Dick performed, on the auditorium stage at JTHS, the milk pitcher, die box, and magic red egg bag tricks which I had previously owned.

I haven’t seen the red egg bag in fifty years, but I know it is this there somewhere in Dick’s collection of magic.

The Military Ball

In September 1949, Dick and I were made ROTC officers and assigned to Company B. The 1950 yearbook has a picture of us both standing at attention in front of the company. We automatically attained some important status because the ROTC officers were to host the Military Ball which many regarded as the most important social event of the high school year. In April 1950, Dick and I, with our dates, attended the ROTC officer’s dinner followed by a dance in the high school gymnasium. We wore classical World War II army aviator officer uniforms which all of us had spent a great deal of time obtaining in the preceding months. I had borrowed my jacket from a war veteran neighbor. The high point of the evening, and perhaps our high school years, was when Dick and I and the cadet officers formed an arch with our sabers and all of the other dance attendees filed through as the band played a John Philip Sousa march.

Things Dick Eyman Liked in the Early 50s

Moira Shearer in the Red Shoes; the tenor Mario Lanza; Cannery Row; The Sun Also Rises; beer, thin crust pizza, Italian beef sandwiches, hot peppers, and slim jim sausages, at Timponi's Wigwam Tavern near the U of I campus; drinking sparkling burgundy in my Newman Hall room overlooking the Pi Phi house; taking 8mm movies of the dancing coeds at Spring Carnival; giving personality profile tests to female students and then loaning out the results to male friends; watching Alec Guinness movies; imitations of Brando in “Streetcar” shouting “Hey Stella” or “Hey Blanche, whose clothes are dese?”; the Nebish cartoon character huddled in a small box saying “People are no damn good”; Illini Union classic movies on Friday night; complaining about and analyzing the implications of the two to one male female student ratio at the U of I.

The Two Best Things about Kankakee Illinois

My older brother, who attended the University five years before me, told me that the best way to travel the 100 miles from Urbana to Joliet was to hitchhike on Route 45, through Kankakee to Route 30 and to Joliet.

The Los Angeles Times recently quoted David Letterman as having said that one of the ten best things about Kankakee Illinois is that it is freeway close to Joliet.

Dick Eyman and I discovered one other thing about Kankakee, after I convinced him to join me on a hitchhike home for the weekend, one Friday afternoon in 1953. We quickly got a ride with a salesman who said he was going to Chicago and could drop us off at Route 30. He was very talkative and immediately began to describe, in lurid detail, what he customarily did with the women who worked in a particular Kankakee business establishment. We both listened to him partly embarrassed and partly amused. After more than an hour, we arrived in Kankakee and the man announced that he was going to stop to see one of his lady friends and we were more than welcome to wait in the car. We agreed to wait. He drove down a side street, parked in front of what looked like an ordinary house, and quickly went inside. The salesman returned to the car after about thirty minutes. We were quickly at Route 30 where he let us out and we hitched a ride into the center of Joliet. Dick and I agreed that neither of us had ever seen anything like that before.

Last year, when I talked with Dick in Las Vegas, we remembered our Kankakee experience and agreed that it was very strange indeed.

Thanksgiving Dinner 1961

In retrospect, it is obvious that Dick was far more concerned about my social life than I was of his. While we were at the U of I, in 1954, he and his future wife Vivian got blind dates for several of us at the Illinois State Teachers College at Normal. He arranged for a female schoolteacher friend to show me around San Francisco after I was discharged from the Navy in June 1958. On my way to the University of Illinois, I briefly visited him in Southern California and he set me up with another single teacher.

Partly because of Dick’s glowing description of the employment prospects, I left my job at the outskirts of Chicago and move to Southern California in the summer of 1960. Dick promptly introduced me to yet another schoolteacher and two other single women.

I have to admit that not once, during our long friendship, have I ever returned the favor. I fact, at one JJC party I blatantly took away a girl that he had been eyeing all evening. He made no complaint and never mentioned the incident for which I am ashamed to this day.

In November 1961, I was living in Malibu, and Dick contacted me to invite me to Thanksgiving dinner with him, Vivian, his mother, and his father. I said that I had been dating a girl from England for several months and could I please bring her along with me. He agreed. We went to the senior Eyman’s house on Thanksgiving day and I introduced Mary to Dick, Vivian, and Dick’s mother and father. We had a very nice turkey dinner and, when I could get Dick alone, asked him what he thought about Mary. He said that she was very good looking and had a great personality. Dick’s father also thought that Mary was great.

Mary and I were married in May of the following year. I’m sure Dick breathed a sigh of relief that the last of his hometown friends had finally settled down and he didn’t have to find any more single schoolteachers.

It Was a Swell Show

In conclusion I can only paraphrase what I said in my letter to Dave Evans of December 17, 1949: So long buddy, you put on a pretty good magic act; it was a swell show.