Although Jerry had become interested in magic at an early age, he was isolated from other magicians, and so was left to develop his own methods and effects on his own. I had never seen anything like the magic of Jerry Andrus-and neither had the rest of the world.

A few years later, in my early twenties, by which time I had been seriously interested in card magic for some years, a magic buddy and I got the chance to attend a Jerry Andrus lecture in Manhattan. The routine was intriguing but difficult, and I’d never seen anything like some of the clever and elegant handling moments it contained. Sometime in my late teens I purchased an interesting little one-trick manuscript called “Miser’s Miracle,” that described an unusual magic trick of making coins appear from between pairs of playing cards, and then from pairs of torn pieces of playing cards that were eventually even smaller than the coins. But since Take Two is about magic and magicians, I will keep this version of the Jerry Andrus story focused on that subject. Jerry and I shared many interests, and had countless conversations about such things, through endless hours in the course of our lives as friends. Later in our lives and friendship we would become colleagues in the social activist world of scientific skepticism, as we shared a concern about the dangers of pseudoscience, and a commitment to the importance of educating the public in order to protect themselves against the likes of phony psychics and countless other kinds of cons and deceptions, some of which mask as science of a sort. Jerry was a magician, an inventor, a poet, a skeptic, a creator of original optical illusions, and in these multiple worlds in which he travelled, he was a living legend in all of them. Oh, did I mention that he was a musician? Jerry had, for one notable example, created a contraption in which he had connected an electronic keyboard to his home treadmill, so that he could exercise and play music at the same time. It was indeed his castle, filled to the brim with a lifetime of gathering and making interesting things. He lived most of his life in Albany, Oregon, and his adult life in a house that he called, and came to be infamously known amid his many friends, colleagues, and fans, as the Castle of Chaos. I certainly haven’t, and I’m quite confident I never will.

I can confidently say you’ve never met anyone quite like him. He was as brilliant as he was eccentric-which is saying something-in fact, saying quite a lot. And fortunately, I knew him well, and for a very long time-more than 35 years by the time of his death in 2007 at the age of 89. Jerry Andrus was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known.

Jerry andrus conjuring archive