At age nine, he was hired in his first professional capacity as a “Prince of the Air” to a three-rate circus. His fascination however was always with magic Houdini would carefully scrutinize the traveling circuses that came to town and perfect their tricks.

The Rabbi, wanting more for his growing family of six children, moved the family to Appleton, Wisconsin and Americanized their last name to “Weiss.” As a young boy, Ehrich tried to contribute to the family income and worked odd jobs from selling newspapers to shining shoes. Houdini’s meager beginnings trace back to Budapest, Hungary, where on March 24, 1874, he was born to Rabbi Mayer Samuel and Cecilia Weisz and named Ehrich. The crews worked frantically to exhume the casket, but efforts to revive Burrus were unsuccessful.Harry Houdini, master magician and electrifying escape artist, comes to life in this succinct, yet fascinating portrayal written by well-known biographer, David Adler and his son, Michael. Witnesses said they could hear the plastic and glass of the coffin shatter from the estimated nine tons of cement and dirt. “As soon as we finished and the truck pulled away the whole thing dropped,” Henderson said. The crews put another three feet of dirt into the hole and then began covering that with three feet of cement. After he got that done, he wanted the locks back on and asked us to start burying him again,” Henderson said.

“We gave him time to slip the chain from his neck. Burrus was staging the stunt as a benefit for the clinic.

“He said the chain was too tight (around his neck) and was choking him,” said Sean Henderson, a resident of the Third Floor drug recovery clinic. Wednesday night, wearing a white tuxedo, Burrus was handcuffed, wrapped in chains, locked inside the see-through coffin and then lowered into a seven-foot-deep hole.Ĭrews started pouring wet cement into the hole from a cement truck until Burrus knocked on the casket lid asking them to stop.

Harry houdini master of magic