Dead Lines

Go, now, and reserve a copy of his coming book, Obit, due out June 1. Made me sob on the flight home last night. Here's one slice, for your inspiration: The advertisements shout with vaudevillian verve from yellowed newspapers and posters, in words that still sound like Bob Schmidt.

'LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS,' they blare, 'SEE the 20th CENTURY ALADDIN. A MAN OF MAGIC AND MYSTERY.'

In the sepia-tone promotional photos, a dapper man in a tuxedo stands beside a levitating woman. In another photo he lies in a box, chained impossibly tight.

'CAN he ESCAPE? See THIS and MANY OTHER TRICKS.'

Inside Schmidt's Denver home, nearly nine decades of magic pours through the living room. The guillotine. The escape-proof box. The black top hat that birthed thousands of rabbits. The wand that so many - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls - truly believed held a special sort of magic.

As the Schmidt family searched through the boxes of tricks and scrapbooks inside the old magician's house, they remembered the acts they marveled at, then found a relic from the 1930s that they had never seen: a sign the size of a card table - the biggest advertisement of them all.

'My brother and I found it and we had the same idea,' said his son Kim Schmidt. 'At first we thought, 'It this appropriate?' Then we agreed, Dad would love it.'

At Bob Schmidt's funeral, his family placed the billboard where they knew it belonged: right next to the coffin.

'CHAINED, SHACKLED AND HANDCUFFED,' the sign read, 'LOCKED IN A MAILBAG AND SECURELY NAILED AND ROPED INTO THIS BOX, PROFESSOR SCHMIDT EMERGES INSTANTANEOUSLY AND FREE OF ALL HIS BONDS!'

Robert E. Schmidt, a.k.a. 'Magician Bob Damon,' a.k.a. 'Professor Schmidt,' a.k.a. 'The 20th Century Aladdin,' died May 9 of a blood infection. He was 90.

Seeing the world

Inside the traveling carnivals in the early 1900s, little Bobby was known to pop his head into the tents, coaxing the performers to share a few secrets. During the day, he helped his parents sell portrait photographs at exhibitions throughout the country. It wasn't long before the boy had become Professor Schmidt, constantly honing his dexterous hands along with his stage shtick.

In 1930s he earned a drama degree from Northern State Teacher's College in South Dakota, then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, working on construction projects across the country and entertaining the exhausted men at the end of the day. At the onset on World War II, his booming voice and ambitious tricks earned him a place with the USO.

Before the group left to tour overseas during the war an agent suggested that he not perform with a German surname, so Bob looked through his family tree and found an aunt named Damon. The stage name stuck.

While performing with the USO, he played shows literally all the way to Timbuktu - 93 countries and islands in all. It wasn't until the last one that he met the woman who would accompany him the rest of his life.

A Denver native who played organ with the all-female Joy Cayler band, Livvy Taylor was stationed in Japan, homesick, waiting for a letter from Colorado or a transfer back home when she first saw her future husband pull a rabbit out of his hat.

'When we met, I was more interested in M-A-I-L than M-A-L-E,' she said, laughing as usual. The couple were soon together onstage and off. They married on his birthday, Jan. 1, and she accompanied him on the organ in variety shows throughout the country.

As television's popularity sucked the life from many live shows in the 1950s, the couple settled in Denver, where Schmidt took a job at Neusteter's department store selling sportswear - a job he would hold on and off until the 1980s. Meanwhile, he couldn't give up the stage.

In the late 1950s the couple joined Pete Smythe's 'East Tincup' Old West theme park near Golden, where Schmidt wowed crowds with his Houdini-like escapes and giant props such as his hand-made guillotine, relying on his stage patter as much as the trick itself.

With the 'head-chopper' trick, for instance, he would slice an apple in half with the machine, then lock a volunteer's head into place, telling him to hold onto his ears when the blade drops, so he could hoist the dismembered noggin up high once it was lopped off. Schmidt would then begin mumbling to himself, pretending to have no idea what he was doing, and just before the blade dropped, he would hold up the front page of a newspaper, ostensibly from the previous town he played.

'DAMON BEHEADS MAN,' the headline screamed; inevitably, so did the volunteer.

In the late 1970s, Schmidt got a small taste of Hollywood, so to speak, landing a role in the low-budget film, 'The Legend of Alfred Packer.' He played Israel Swann, the first man supposedly devoured by the infamous cannibal.

'I remember turning on the television late one night and thinking, 'I know that guy - the one being eaten,'' remembered his son Rick. "Hey, that's Dad!''

After retiring from Neusteter's, he returned to magic full-time, performing with a traveling variety group and at hundreds of birthday parties for children, where he mesmerized the kids without talking down to them - allowing them to think they had the trick figured out, then blowing their minds.

'It's hard work, and it's a dedication thing. Plus, you really have to be a ham,' said his son, Rick. 'And Dad was a pure, dyed-in-the-wool ham. A true showman.'

'Magic was right medicine'

As they aged, the Schmidts continued to perform for people who truly needed a good escape: developmentally disabled children at Larandon Hall, elderly people at nursing homes, patients at Craig Hospital - along with dozens more.

'Your magic was the right medicine,' wrote a nurse from Mercy Medical Center, after one of his many shows.

Even into his late 80s he continued to work at birthday parties and at the Renaissance Festival, where, as an aged, gray-bearded magician walking around the grounds performing sleight-of-hand tricks, many people truly believed he was Merlin.

Though he never officially gave up magic - and was recently honored by the Mile High Magician's Society - the number of shows diminished until he could barely stand. Still, there was one trick he never forgot.

'At the beginning of every show, he would take out an alarm clock and put a satin handkerchief over it, and he would say, 'I only have a certain amount of time to do this for you,'' remembered his son Rick.

Throughout the whole show, the clock would sit onstage, ticking away. Few spectators would notice it until the last trick.

'At the end of the show, the clock would ring, and he would walk over to it and say, 'Boy, doesn't time disappear,'' his son said.

'He would take the handkerchief off, and the clock was gone.'