![]() He was also dubbed "the Second Houdini" or the Colored Houdini," the "Famous Handcuff King" and "Professor Hooper." Professionally, he was usually just called Hooper, and occasionally P. Hooper was a puppeteer as well an escape artist and magician: A poster shows several dancing marionettes, and proclaims him "Man of Many Voices" and "Master of Thousand Strings." He's carded to remain there until September 7." Some of the work was steady too: Bill Sach's "Magic" column in a 1938 issue of Billboard magazine noted that "HOOPER, colored magish, opens the season at Washington colored park, Suburban Gardens, May 16. Seibert Hooper used to say that his brother wasn't one for hard labor - he had soft hands.īut with his wife, the mind-reader and "crystal ball gazer" Princess Elizabeth ("knows all, sees all"), Peter Hooper got around: Posters and newspaper ads show him performing from the 1920s through 1950 throughout Georgia and North Carolina, up to Baltimore and Newark, N.J. That wasn't the life for the Second Houdini, though. ![]() That was typical work for a neighborhood where the men toiled at the docks or the mill, fishing or farming, or going into the piney woods to extract turpentine. ![]() James Hooper's dad, Seibert, worked at the paper mill and drove a semi. And when you opened your hand, the coin would, somehow, be gone, dead gone. He was tall and slender, and to the kids he looked like a giant, a debonair giant with a showman's flair as he placed a coin in your hand and closed your hand into a fist. One of his nephews, James Hooper, now 71, remembers how exotic the magician was in sleepy Fernandina, and how people would gather to see what he would produce next from children's ears or from the pockets of his jacket. He came from Hoopersville, a section of the small town where most of his big family lived, and where he came returned to his tiny house between trips spreading magic. His name was Peter Hooper, born in 1897 in Fernandina. He also liked to break a couple of eggs into the hat of an unsuspecting audience member. He snatched coins from the ears of children, turned handkerchiefs into birds and astonished with the "boy to human hen" trick. Hooper, the Second Houdini, came out of the remote, segregated town of Fernandina in the 1920s, from as far north as you can go in Florida before hitting Georgia, slipping out of a life of grueling manual labor for a world of magic and escape.īilled as "the world's favorite colored magician," offering "thrills, chills, shivers!!," he freed himself from straightjackets and shackles, coffins and mail bags, and dared police in many a far-flung city to just try locking him up in handcuffs or prison cells.
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