Dai Vernon

Dai Vernon (June 11, 1894 – August 21, 1992) was a Canadian magician. ^[1] His expert sleight-of-hand technique and extensive knowledge garnered him universal respect among fellow magicians and the nickname of The Professor. His influence was considerable in the magic world with his generous mentoring to a number of famous magicians. He lived out his last years at the Magic Castle.

Name

A misconception is that he began to use the first name "Dai" after a newspaper mistyped "David", the paper actually was using the Welsh nickname for David (he was happy for it to be pronounced Day or Die). When Verner first moved to the United States, the male member of a popular ice-skating pair had the surname Vernon; Americans continually mistook Verner's last name to be the same as the popular ice skater, and eventually the magician became fed up with correcting people and simply adopted "Vernon" as well.

Birth

He was born in Ottawa as David Frederick Wingfield Verner. He learned his first tricks at age 7 from his father. He often mentioned this while doing a trick adding he wasted the first 6 years of his life. His father was a government worker and an amateur magician. He studied mechanical engineering but by World War I he had moved to New York City. ^[1]

Biography

Due to his extraordinary skill at sleight of hand, Dai Vernon is affectionately called The Professor. Harry Houdini (who in his early years billed himself as "The King of Kards") often boasted that if he saw a card trick performed three times in a row he would be able to figure it out. Vernon then showed Houdini a trick, where he removed the top card of the deck and placed it in the middle, and then turned over the top card to again reveal the original card. Houdini watched Vernon do the trick seven times, each time insisting that Vernon "do it again". Finally Houdini's wife, and Vernon's friends said, "Face it Houdini, you're fooled." For years afterward, Vernon used the title "The Man Who Fooled Houdini" in his advertisements. Vernon also claimed that Harry Houdini was not a magician and didn't do anything, only escapes.

Vernon first fell in love with magic when he was eight years old after his father took him to see a magic show. The first real magic book he ever owned was an early edition of perhaps the most famous card book of them all, The Expert at the Card Table, by S. W. Erdnase.^[2] By the time he was 13 he had memorized the contents of the book. He also had a famous encounter with another up-and-coming young magician from his town, Cliff Green, who asked Vernon, "What kind of magic do you do?" Vernon responded by asking the boy to name a card. Upon pulling a pack of cards from his pocket, Vernon turned over the top card of the deck to reveal the named card and replied to the speechless Green, "That's the kind of magic I do. What kind of magic do you do?"

As a young man, Vernon moved to New York where, in the back room of Clyde Powers magic shop, he found favor among many of the great magicians of the era, including Dr. James William Elliott and Harry Kellar. It was in New York, at the home of magician Al Baker, that the famous incident involving Walter Scott occurred. In 1930, Scott, then an unknown card hustler, was brought in to do a demonstration. After Scott was blindfolded, one of the men watching shuffled and cut a pack of cards and handed it to Scott. The blindfolded man proceeded to deal out six hands of five-card draw poker, and in his hand were four aces and a king. None of the magicians present saw how it had been done, earning Scott the nickname "The Phantom of the Card table", and many believed that his skills rivaled those of Dai Vernon. However the only magician not present that night was Dai Vernon. More information on this and other magicians can be found in The Phantoms of the Card Table by David Britland.^[3]

Dai Vernon spent most of his life traveling all over the United States of America looking for card cheats and anyone who might know anything about sleight-of-hand with cards. He was famously under-credited for much of the work published in Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue's Expert Card Technique,^[4] though a later edition included an extra chapter which acknowledges Dai Vernon's contributions. In fact, a huge portion of the sleight-of-hand had been discovered by Vernon over years of searching.

Vernon was perhaps the most skillful sleight of hand artist that ever lived and, with Ed Marlo, possibly the most influential card magician of the 20th century. Among magicians, he is credited with inventing or improving many standard close-up effects with cards, coins, and other small items. The "standard" Cups and balls routine is his, and his 6-ring "Symphony of the Rings" remains one of the most popular Chinese linking rings routines in use to this day.

Vernon spent the last thirty years of his life as Magician-in-Residence at The Magic Castle in Los Angeles, California. There he mentored numerous well-known magicians including Ricky Jay, Persi Diaconis, Doug Henning, Bruce Cervon, Larry Jennings, Chuck Fayne, Michael Ammar and John Carney. Michael Skinner, who was a student of Vernon, shared Dai's love and search for magic. All mentioned have become some of the best close up magicians in the world.

Death

He died on August 21, 1992 in Ramona, County of San Diego, California.^[1] He was cremated, and his ashes are interred at the Magic Castle.^[5]

Legacy

In November 2005, Karl Johnson wrote The Magician And The Cardsharp^[6] about Vernon's early days of tracking down a specific yet unknown cardsharp, who developed an undetectable false deal.

In June 2006, the first in-depth biography of Vernon was released by Squash Publishing entitled Dai Vernon: A Biography, *Artist * Magician * Muse (Vol. 1: 1894-1941)^[7] (first of planned two volumes) written by Canadian magician David Ben.

Dai Vernon in film

The character of "The Professor" (played by Hal Holbrook) from the movie Shade was based on Dai Vernon, and the character Vernon (Stuart Townsend) was named after him.

References

^ ^a ^b ^c "Dai Vernon, 98; An Expert Magician Who Taught Others", New York Times (August 29, 1992). Retrieved on 2007-08-21. "Dai Vernon, a sleight-of-hand artist who was a mentor to many of the most accomplished magicians of the last half-century, died Aug. 21 at the home of a son, Edward Wingfield Verner, in Ramona, Calif., where he had lived for the last two years. He was 98 years old."
^ Erdnase, S. W [1995]. The Expert at the Card Table: The Classic Treatise on Card Manipulation, 1st Ed. reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 144 pages. ISBN 978-0486285979.
^ Britland, David; Gazzo [2004]. Phantoms of the Card Table: Confessions of a Card Sharp, 1st Ed., New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 256 pages. ISBN 978-1568582993.
^ Hugard, Jean; Braue, Frederick [1974]. Expert Card Technique: Close-Up Table Magic, 1st Ed. reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 448 pages. ISBN 978-0486217550.
^ Johnson, Karl [2005]. The Magician and the Cardsharp, (p. 282). "He was cremated, and after the box with his ashes was brought to the Magic Castle, it was placed for display on a ledge at the top of a wall filled with photos and other memorabilia from his long life in magic. The ledge was so high that the box was almost out of sight."
^ Johnson, Karl [2005]. The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist, Adapted edition, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 368 pages. ISBN 978-0805074062.
^ Ben, David [2006]. Dai Vernon: A Biography--Artist - Magician - Muse (Vol. 1: 1894-1941). Chicago, Illinois: Squash Publishing, 366 pages. ISBN 978-0974468150.

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