“He made it possible for a generation of magicians and scholars to see the actual mechanical thinking that sprung from the mind of this American icon, who is still the all-time megastar of magic.” “If not for Sid, all that stuff would be gone,” said David Ben, artistic director of Magicana, a nonprofit group representing magic performers and members of the international Magic Collectors Association. His collection also included lesser items, but for Houdini buffs equally treasured, like the lock picks Houdini hid from his audiences by swallowing them, then regurgitating them, for escapes cylinder pulleys, key wrenches, latches, levers and tumblers he used in various tricks and a set of charred handcuffs from the exhibit that was set up in the theater lobby for his shows, advertised by Houdini as “handcuffs used in Spain on prisoners burning to death in 1600!” Radner is credited in the world of magicians and magic collectors with having preserved some of the most important of Houdini’s props, including the “Chinese Water Torture Cell” (a water tank in which Houdini was lowered upside down, his feet chained) and the oversize “Milk Can” he used in a similar escape stunt. The cause was cancer, his son William said.
Radner, an amateur magician and newly minted Yale grad in 1941 when he became the unlikely steward of a trove of Harry Houdini artifacts, building it into one of the world’s largest Houdini collections, died on Sunday in Holyoke, Mass.
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