It was an uncle, the one from Wichita Falls, Texas, who opened the eyes of five-year-old Alton Sharpe to the wonders of magic. He was on a business trip, auditing the franchised Rexall drug stores he owned, and he'd stopped to visit Alton's family who lived on the outskirts of Dallas. He was about to leave when he asked the boy, "Would you like to see a mystery of magic?" There was a "Yes, sir," even though he wasn't too sure what his uncle was talking about.

They were sitting on the front porch. "Go in the house and see if you can find an empty one-pint milk bottle," his uncle said. "If you do, bring it to me, along with the small egg that's on the kitchen table."

"When I brought them to him," Al says, "he asked me to balance the egg on top of the small mouth of the milk bottle. He had me put my right palm carefully over the egg. Then he placed his hand over mine and pressed down, telling me it wasn't going to hurt."

His uncle pressed a little harder. Suddenly, the egg dropped into the bottle. It didn't break. Al rolled it around. He turned the bottle over, but the egg would not come out. "That's a magic trick," his uncle said. "When I come back in two weeks, I'll show you how to get it out."

When his uncle returned, it was a simple matter of "reversing the magic" to remove the egg. He told Al to hold his hands beneath the upside-down bottle. He squeezed the glass neck with both of his hands. The egg popped into Al's cupped hands.

"When he asked if I wanted to know how to do it, naturally, I said yes." Not only did Al learn the secret of the egg-in-the-bottle trick, in less than a month, his uncle had taught him a second trick. "He brought me a set of Chinese Sticks he'd purchased from Lyle Douglas, who at the time was running a mail-order magic business out of his home, over in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas." The next trip, it was a Ball Vase. Each time his uncle came to visit, Al expected, and usually received, another mystery of magic.

A birth certificate was not issued on September 5, 1921, the night the baby who would later be known as Alton was born. His mother told the doctor that a name had yet to be chosen; the doctor said it could be recorded later. Apparently, that was never done, and there was some confusion when it came time to enroll him in school. That was when his mother decided to home school.

Al's father was a motion picture distributor whose territory covered Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and most of Utah. He was constantly on the road, and his mother had grown accustomed to accompanying him. Al soon joined them on their journeys. He was tutored no matter where they traveled.

Al's repertoire of magic tricks continued to grow. On his sixth birthday, his other uncle, the one who lived near Oklahoma City, gave him an English bulldog. "I named him Scat. My uncle had taught him to play dead and wake up, walk around on his hind legs, and do arithmetic. If you told Scat to count to four, he would bark four times."

His aunt, who lived in Wichita Falls and worked for a dry goods manufacturer, had one of her seamstresses sew up a tuxedo for Al. His accumulation of tricks was packed into a black leather suitcase and taken along as the family traveled from state to state. "My mother and aunt started calling on one-room country schools. If the teachers wanted a program of entertainment, they picked a date that coincided with our return trip. My fee was $1 and I was billed as 'Al the Boy Wonder & His Wonder Dog Scat.'"

That winter, when his mother and father traveled north, calling on theaters and movie-houses in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, Al elected to stay behind. He was dropped off in Oklahoma City to spend two weeks with his cousins.

Three days later, when his parents reached the Nebraska state line, they found themselves caught in a blizzard. Al's father knew where there was a roadside cafe at a nearby bus stop and suggested they stop for coffee, before continuing in the snowstorm. As he got closer to the cafe, he was forced to stop. A bus in front of them had crashed into a stalled car. There was an explosion and a fire.

From here on, what Al Sharpe knows of the terrible incident is hearsay. "Apparently, when my father saw what had happened, he pulled his car over on the shoulder, got out and went to see if he could help. He told my mother to go inside the restaurant and have somebody call for help.

"Another car was coming out of the parking lot and the driver was attempting to go around the bus to avoid the fiery accident. But the car started slipping on the ice and snow. It slid straight toward the bus and my father, who was trying to pull some people off the bus. My mother turned around to see what was going on. She saw the car crush my father against the side of the bus, killing him. She fainted."

By now, people were in a panic and rushing out of the restaurant to offer assistance. The police arrived. When they saw Al's mother lying there unconscious in the snow, they assumed she was a victim of the bus crash. They picked her up and took her inside the restaurant and laid her on one of the tables.

"Every time my mother came to and saw the tables and booths filled with injured people, she kept fainting. They finally got her to stay awake, but all she could ask was, 'Where is my husband?' They had no idea what she was talking about, since my father's body had been removed from the scene of the accident. She told them she had dropped her purse outside in the snow. When they found it they took her to a hospital, assuming she was looking for somebody who'd been on the bus." It would be the next morning before the police figured out that the car parked on the side of the road belonged to Al's parents.

Sharpe says that for the next three years, there was rarely a month that went by when there weren't attorneys or insurance company investigators or both at his home in Dallas. "I remember sitting there in the dining room and listening to the insurance people and my mother as they rehashed the story over and over. One night when I walked into the room, two lawyers were down on the floor using knives and forks to represent the vehicles involved in the accident." It was late and Al had a Quaker Oats box under his arm. "I kept my toy cars in an old oatmeal box. It was a collection of little metal automobiles and trucks, and I even had a bus and a wrecker. I asked the men, 'Why don't you use these?' Every time after that, whenever the lawyers came to the house to analyze the accident, they used my toy cars."

Alton was intrigued with the ways and means of attorneys, their methods for unraveling mysteries. He knew then that he wanted to become a lawyer one day. "However, because of all those tricks and things that I was learning from my uncles, I really wanted to be a magician first."

It was late 1933 and the tail end of the Depression when Al turned 12. Lyle Douglas now had two stores in downtown Dallas, one at 1616 Commerce and another near the bus station at 193 South Ackard Street. For Al's birthday present, his uncle purchased a copy of Werner F. "Dorny" Dornfield's book, Trix and Chatter and, as an afterthought, picked up a stack of The Sphinx magazines for him. A pile of 20 back issues was only a dollar.

Al pored over the magic magazines for months. "I read those thumbnail sketches of different magicians across the country and started writing letters to them. I never told them how old I was. I had my cousin who was seven years older write the letters. I figured if those pros saw a kid's scribbling, they wouldn't answer. Pretty soon, I started getting letters back. Some magicians even sent pictures. Willard the Wizard wrote back saying that he might be hiring assistants soon and told me to keep in touch. He sent me a lifetime pass to his tent show."

While doing a show in a church basement in Oklahoma, Al saw a flyer for Loring Campbell, who was appearing that night at a nearby auditorium. Al persuaded his aunt to take him. Campbell was a prominent lyceum and Chautauqua performer and his program featured stage magic, mindreading, artistic rag pictures, escapes, and ventriloquism. Watching the show gave Al the opportunity to see many of the tricks he'd only read about or seen advertised in The Sphinx. He was most impressed with Campbell's routine with the Chinese Linking Rings. Al went sleepless for almost two nights as he figured out his version of how the rings worked.

Young Mr. Sharpe was becoming quite adept at thimble and coin manipulations, learning moves from a copy of The Modern Conjuror. It wasn't long before he ordered a copy of Thayer's Catalogue of Quality Magic No. 7. The 288-page wish book was indeed as advertised: "The Finest, Largest and Most Comprehensive Compilation of Magical Goods Ever Published." And there on page 121 was the trick that he had to have, the trick that was in the repertoires of all the greats, including De Kolta, Kellar, Blackstone, and Willard — The Flying Bird Cage, Catalogue No. 912. Finest make, Price $10.

When the shiny, nickel-plated, precision-crafted birdcage arrived, Al was, quite frankly, disappointed. He could not, as the catalog description purported, "cause the cage to vanish in a flash, leaving not a trace to tell of its mysterious flight." That's because the cage was longer than his arms.

Two years later, while visiting Douglas' new store, now called Douglas Magicland and located at 409 North Ervay, Al met Harry McDaniel, the president of the Dallas Magic Circle. Although Al was too young to join the club, he was invited to one of the meetings. The local magicians liked him and, even though he was underage, he was handed a membership application. McDaniels requested that he be at the next induction ceremony.

"There were four of us being initiated that night. Harry asked each of us what our favorite trick was, saying that we'd have to get up in front of the members and prove that the trick we chose really was our favorite." Sharpe told McDaniel his choice was the Chinese Linking Rings, mainly because he'd been doing the trick his way for quite some time.

The inductees sat in an anteroom and waited their turn. As each was called, he was handed his prop of choice as he entered the meeting room. "Actually, they were playing tricks on us, but none of us knew it. The guy who said card tricks were his forte was handed a deck of playing cards, not knowing until he opened the cardbox that the deck was glued together. Another victim who professed to be an expert with Chinese Sticks was given a set that had the weights removed." When Mr. Sharpe was handed a set of Linking Rings, the key ring had been removed.

The snickers grew louder as Al counted the rings and said, "Here I have an ordinary set of Chinese Rings... much like those used by the great Loring Campbell." He then proceeded to do his usual routine. "As I went through the fancy links and unlinks, the audience grew silent. I thought I was dying a death out there, but when I finished I bowed anyway." There was a burst of applause, even a shout of "Bravo!" McDaniel barked, "Just a minute, young man. Would you do that again?"

Nobody knew it, but when Al first saw Loring Campbell perform the Linking Rings, he had no idea how the trick was done. "So I went home that night and took seven or eight coat hangers and bent them into circles and worked out a routine that looked like what Campbell did. I had figured that two or three of them were probably linked, but I knew nothing of a key ring."

In the fall of 1937, when Alton turned 16, he moved to Denver, Colorado to attend Evergreen Military Academy. Before he hit the books he hit Pratt's Bookstore, a schoolbook supply that also had a novelties-and-magic department. Here he met Earl Reum, a student and magician who talked Mr. Pratt into letting them run the magic counter for the next few semesters. It wasn't long before the two figured out how to get purchase requisitions past Mr. Pratt, enabling them to order all their tricks at wholesale prices.

Gambling was pretty much wide open in Denver and the surrounding resort areas, and with the various clubs such as the Elks, Moose, and Shriner's always needing entertainment, Sharpe had the chance to develop a nightclub act. During his second year at military school, he started working through theatrical agents. Tommy Burchell booked him into hotels such as the Ute in Salt Lake City, and that summer got him two weeks at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles.

No sooner had Al reached the West Coast when he met movie producer Harry Popkin, who told him he could get him two weeks at the Million Dollar Theater in L.A. The only problem was the two weeks coincided with his Orpheum dates. Through some creative scheduling on the part of Popkin, Al was able to work the four-a-day at one theater, as well as the three at the other. "I did my eight minutes right after the feature picture ended at the Orpheum, then skeedaddled four blocks down the street to the Million Dollar, where I had an extra set of props, and went on just after the newsreel ended."

William Larsen Sr., who was into his third year of publishing Genii, had a big blackboard on a wall where he posted all the venues that magicians were working. Al says, with a laugh, "When the other magicians saw the two theaters listed by my name, they'd ask Bill, 'How the hell's that possible?'"

Sharpe became friends with Larsen and admired the fact that he was able to pursue his highly respectable profession as criminal lawyer and still devote so much time to magic. (In 1939, the Larsen Family toured the United States with a full-evening show.) Bill not only introduced Al to all the magicians, but a galaxy of Hollywood stars as well. The rest of the summer was a whirlwind of shows, the highlight being a testimonial banquet for Max Factor. Here, Al met and hobnobbed with Bette Davis, Chester Morris, Mickey Rooney, Bobby Breen, Ray Milland, "Think-a-Drink" Hoffman, and comedic movie actor Gil Lamb.

"Lamb got me three walk-on roles, one in a William Powell movie where I was paid good money for just sitting on a barstool for four hours. On that set, I met Adolph Menjou, the actor who taught me how to 'shoot a cuff.' Menjou told me that whenever he was standing upstage, he would lightly tug on his coat sleeve, causing the white French cuff of his shirt to pop out slightly. He said that shooting a cuff was a device he often used to steal a scene."

World War II was coming on and Harry Popkin offered to get Sharpe a deferment that would allow him to work in the movie industry. But Al decided to head back to Colorado, where he enrolled at the University of Denver. His studies kept him busy, but he found time to do shows for club-date producer Harry Greban, who booked him in hotels and casinos in Utah and Nevada.

Just before Thanksgiving of 1941, Greban advised Al that a deal was pending for 12 weeks on the Kemp Time circuit, a tour of theaters and military bases in and around Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Sharpe needed to report to Chicago to finalize the contract, even though the tour was two weeks away.

When he checked into the Three Deuces, a stopping place for people of the theater, the first person he shook hands with was Harry Otto, a juggler who was booked on the tour. Otto's specialty was juggling billiard balls and he showed Al all sorts of manipulations that he would later add to his act. "Harry taught me how to toss two-inch balls high into the air and catch them one at a time between my fingertips." Every day, Al attended the magicians roundtable, where he met and became friends with many of the people that he'd written to as a kid: Dorny, Vic Torsberg, Okito, Arthur Buckley, Joe Berg, Jack Gwynne, Jim Sherman, Ed Miller, Ed Marlo, Bob Hummer, and others too numerous to mention.

Finally, on December 6, the acts and performers reported to Miss Sunny Fox, a swing-era dancer who was producing the USO revue. They rehearsed with the band, then boarded a train for the all-night ride to Hattiesburg. "One can well imagine my surprise when, upon our arrival in Mississippi that morning, we found out that our country was at war." Following the three months of shows in the Deep South, Al traveled from coast to coast for almost two years working more nightclubs, interspersed with shows for War Bond rallies and USO canteens.

By 1944, Sharpe was determined to get into the U.S. Army Air Corps. With recommendations from flight instructor Clayton Mardoni, of Mardoni & Louise second-sight act fame, and Col. Harry Tunks, also a magician, Sharpe was sent to Sioux City, Iowa to await orders for air cadet training. The papers never arrived. Instead, Al was handed a telegram from General H.H. "Hap" Arnold, stating he was released from all obligations to the Air Corps and was to join a Camp Show unit being formed around movie star Mickey Rooney. He was flown to New York, where rehearsals began the next day for Hip! Hip! Hooray! The show played military hospitals around New York and for all the workers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before it shipped overseas.

"Hip! Hip! Hooray! The Jeep Shows are on the Way!" was the hue and cry as Mickey and the gang took the entertainment as close to the front line as possible. Ten Jeeps transported the 40 performers and musicians. Harry James' brother, Jimmy, was the bandleader. In addition to Rooney and actor Bobby Breen, there were five variety acts, including another magician, Jim Conley. As the Allied Armies cleared a path from Normandy to Paris, the performers worked their way around Southern France, entertaining the First, Seventh, and Ninth Armies. During the Battle of the Bulge — when the U.S. Army broke through the Ardennes Forest and the enemy at Bastogne surrounded the entertainers — the Jeep Show troupers were rescued by none other than General Patton's Third Army.

The war was declared over on May 8, 1945. A week later, Mickey's show unit entertained at the Pottsdam Conference. Sharpe was invited to do close-up at the dinner table of the Big Three — Truman, Attlee, and Stalin. When Rooney headed back to America, Hip! Hip! Hooray began a celebratory tour of theaters in France, this time giving Al the opportunity to perform with Marlene Dietrich, Joe E. Brown, and Celeste Holm.

Later that summer, Al was on his own and he went on to London, where he enjoyed an extended engagement at the Albany Hotel. This was followed by a run at the Bagatelle, where he met Jon Martin, the British magical mechanic who built a pair of custom birdcages for Al's act.

Returning to Paris to work at the Cafˇ Baccarrat on the Champs Elysees, Al encountered Alan Keith, a sophisticated sorcerer who would soon appear as an enigmatic persona in Sharpe's literary endeavors. Al also met Guy Bare, the creative craftsman who engineered props and scenery for the Folies Bergere. Guy fabricated several pieces for Al's act and was instrumental in getting him a spot in the Folies show. Following that engagement, Sharpe performed magic and pickpocketing with the Madrono Circus, a one-ring circus that featured unique traversing scenery designed by Bare. Then, it was on to the Casino Municipale in San Remo, where he did a command performance for Louis, Lord Mountbatten.

When Sharpe returned to Chicago in 1951 for a run at the Empire Room, he could now boast of having headlined on two continents. He renewed his friendships with the many magicians who gathered daily for the roundtable at Drake's Restaurant. In so doing, Al became a close friend of Arthur Buckley, the Australian card and coin manipulator who enjoyed a successful career in vaudeville. By 1934, Buckley settled in Chicago to work as an electronics engineer for Reliable Electric. It was Arthur who encouraged Al to enroll at John Marshall Law School, earn a degree in law, and eventually become a member of the Illinois bar. Meanwhile, Al had signed with MCA and continued to play some of the country's top hotels and supper clubs, including a month at the prestigious Baker Hotel in Dallas.

When long-time Chicago magic dealer Joe Berg moved to the West Coast in 1952, Sharpe stepped in to buy his store at 30 West Washington. A fair amount of inventory came with the deal, however, it wasn't long before Sharpe's Studio of Magic was releasing its own products. There was a Cane to Table built by Arthur Buckley; a Fez Egg Bag; several creations from Bob Haskell, Keith Clarke, Bob Hummer, and Richard Himber; and Al had acquired the props and rights to Ade Duval's nightclub silk act.

Sharpe started dealing at a few magic conventions, as well as performing on the shows. In September of '52, at a Houdini Club Convention in Whitewater, Wisconsin, Al's act made quite an impression on an up-and-coming conjuror. "It was the first time I had seen the Miser's Dream performed," says Norm Nielsen. "I was a senior in high school, but after seeing Al Sharpe's act and Neil Foster's card manipulations, I made up my mind I was continuing my education at the Chavez College of Magic."

Being a native Texan, Al's Labor Day weekends were usually set aside for the annual Texas Association of Magicians Conventions. In 1953, in an effort to encourage professionals and semi-pros to compete, Al set up a "revolving trophy" that awarded originality. The trophy remained in the possession of the winner for a year and passed on to next year's winner, unless someone won two years consecutively, then the trophy was kept. The first Al Sharpe Award for Originality in Presentation went to W.C. "Stubby" Stubblefield at the '53 TAOM Convention in Houston. Successive winners would be Mark Wilson in '54, Robert Gurtler (André Kole) in '55, Sam Berman in '56, and Ramon Galindo in '57. When Galindo won the Sharpe trophy again in 1958, it was retired.

In 1954, public relations executive and magician Robert Parrish convinced the owners of The Gaslight, an exclusive key club on Chicago's North Rush Street, to feature magic regularly in their showroom. Al performed twice a night for two weeks, alternating with Parrish every two weeks, for six months. About the same time, Al's friend, Marvyn Roy, who'd already made a name for himself with "Artistry in Light," started performing the act on ice at the Conrad Hilton. When Marvyn told Al that acts on ice demanded higher fees, Al took skating lessons and mounted his nightclub act on ice. Immediately, he went into an ice revue in Mexico City for a month, followed by two weeks at the Casa Carioca in the winter resort of Garmish, Germany. But that was it. The bucks may have been bigger, but the skater's lifestyle was not for Al. Besides, those heavy, clunky skates didn't fit into his attachˇ case.

"Ever since I was a teenager," Al says, "I vanished the cage from beneath a cloth. This was inspired after seeing how Frakson covered his cage with a flagstaff as it disappeared. I improved my presentation while I was in Paris, when I had Guy Bare make a special cloth that allowed me to have a lady from the audience cover the cage." The spectator apparently held the cage by a ring handle as Sharpe took a step back; the vanish didn't happen until he grabbed the corner of the cloth and pulled it away.

When Al repeated the cage vanish for Okito, the second time letting him hold the cloth, he was still mystified. "I could tell Okito wanted me to show him my method, but he never came out and asked. Instead, he offered to make me a new cloth, saying, 'I just need to measure the cage before I make the cloth." Al kept his old cloth.

Beginning in June of 1954, Sharpe penned a monthly column for M-U-M. "Circling the Loop" was a breezy commentary on the "Midwestern magic news as seen from Chicago." There were updates on the latest activities and where the pros were, including the goings-on of Alan Keith, of whom Sharpe wrote, "In my opinion, which is unofficial, immaterial, possibly incompetent, but at least impartial, the most outstanding magical performer today is Alan Keith."

By 1956, the Al Sharpe Studio of Magic had moved to an upstairs office space in the Woods Building on West Randolph Street. And because Mr. Sharpe had built up quite a sizeable practice as a civil law and tax attorney, numerous were the times he'd have to shut down the shop to "run over to the courthouse and take care of a legal matter." Finally, in the spring of 1957, Al sold the shop to Clarke "The Senator" Crandall, who ran it for two years before closing it.

In late 1960, Sharpe was retained by the American Guild of Variety Artists to audit and ferret out the corruption that had taken over certain branch offices of the performers' Union, which was, and still is, affiliated with the AFL-CIO. It was a time when gambling and racketeering were prevalent in most of the mob-owned nightclubs under AGVA's jurisdiction, and allegedly mobsters had infiltrated the Union's offices. "AGVA is divided into three regions: the West Coast, the Central, and New York or the East Coast," Sharpe explains. "New York was corrupt, but the branch offices in the Central area had the most corruptness. When the Union decided they wanted to eliminate the problem, I was hired as the appointed attorney to the regional director of AGVA's Central to clean it up."

Sharpe began with the Dallas branch, which took two years to get straight, then moved to St. Louis for about nine months, on to Denver for a month, and back to Chicago. Basically, he was assigned the task of firing the staff members in each of the branch operations, going through the books, and then making legal decisions as to how to reorganize the offices.

Al was prohibited from performing while serving as AGVA's legal advisor. So, as an outlet for his magic, he turned to writing. In 1961, he authored and self-published a book he called Expert Hocus Pocus. The slim volume contains many of the routines he used in his nightclub performances over the years. The chapters are Openings; Money Magic, including his Miser's Dream; Card Magic, with items from Riser, Marlo, and others; Rope Magic; Chinese Linking Rings; and The Vanishing Birdcage. Personal reminiscences are throughout the book. And it's interesting to note that before the first chapter, Alan Keith writes some opening "Remarks" about Al, while in the penultimate chapter of the book, Al writes a piece praising Alan Keith's "Presentation."

During Al's two-year tenure at the Dallas AGVA office, he often opened a door or two for his fellow magi. Harry Blackstone Jr. showed up in 1962, not long after earning his master's degree at the University of Texas, looking for work. "Harry had left his job with the radio station [KTBC] in Austin and he really didn't have an act, yet. So I called up Jack Ruby, who owned the Carousel Club, and told him that there's a guy in town whose father was a famous magician. Right away, Jack offered to audition Harry on the midnight show." Blackstone put together some card tricks and did his father's Rope Tie and injected some comic relief into the Carousel's bill of exotic dancers. The audience loved him. Jack Ruby loved him. And the strippers loved him. Blackstone ended up working almost six months at the Carousel before heading out to Los Angeles, where he'd soon launch a magic career by going on television with the Smothers Brothers.

When Sharpe left Dallas in May of 1962 to go to the AGVA office in St. Louis, he offered magician Tom Palmer the branch manager position, a job Palmer would take and keep until February of 1964. Not long after Al completed his clean-up duties in St. Louis and Denver (where he had to fire the same AGVA rep he knew from his college days), he returned to Chicago and soon found out that his legal services were no longer needed.

"About that time, because of my experiences with union negotiations, I was invited to join a well-established Chicago law firm and become a partner." The firm that Sharpe would partner with for the next two decades specialized in labor relations with major airlines, including TWA and American Airlines. And several of the cases that Al would work on took him before the Supreme Court.

It was at this point in his life that Alton Sharpe became involved in the FBI investigations surrounding the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Sharpe had been gone from the Dallas AGVA office for a little over a year when, in the summer of 1963, Carousel Club owner Jack Ruby became totally disgruntled with the union's policy permitting non-professional strippers to perform at nightclubs under AGVA's jurisdiction. He was adamant that the competition was employing inexperienced girls and promoting "amateur nights" in a manner calculated to destroy his business.

About a week before the Kennedy assassination, Ruby received a letter from AGVA branch manager, Tom Palmer, stating that modifications to the policy were being considered and amateur nights "would not be tolerated." The letter upset Ruby; his discontent with the Dallas office grew acute. He called Sharpe at the AGVA office in Chicago, soliciting his help. Al suggested that Jack mail a copy of Palmer's letter and he'd look into it. Not long after Ruby's call, on November 21, Sharpe's services were suspended by AGVA.

On November 23, the day after the JFK assassination, Sharpe and his wife phoned the Dallas AGVA office to tell Tom Palmer of Al's termination. Because Tom was not in the office to take the call, the secretary was told of Al's misfortune. Before they hung up, Sharpe gave the secretary a message: "Tell Jack not to send the letter today, it would be awkward in Chicago."

The secretary did not tell Palmer of her conversation with Al until the next morning. And she never attempted to "tell Jack not to send the letter..." It didn't matter. Jack Ruby had been arrested and jailed for the murder of suspected presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The following day, Tom contacted the FBI, informing them of the phone call from Al.

On November 25, when FBI agents interrogated Al Sharpe in Chicago, he explained why it would be "awkward" for Ruby to send the letter. According to the agents' report, filed November 26, 1963: "Sharpe described Ruby as a person who became excited when a disagreement occurred..." That FBI report became Warren Commission Exhibit No. 2323 and was part of the Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, that was submitted to the President on September 24, 1964.

For the next 20 years, as Sharpe diligently pursued his profession of attorney at law, he managed to find the time to acquire an impressive arsenal of card artifice and effects. He became a connoisseur and collector of some of the finest card magic of the time, card magic that he would share with other enthusiasts when he published the books that are now known as the Expert series.

Sharpe's Expert Card Conjuring was released in 1968. Disciples of Ed Marlo were amazed at the amount of new material that Al had obtained and written up for Marlo — over 60% of the tricks and moves in this volume are attributed to the man. Other contributors include Dai Vernon, Charlie Miller, Carmen D'Amico, Roger Klause, Tony Kardyro, Robert Parrish, Ernie Bryant, Fred Lowe, Jim Ryan, Frank Thompson, Harry Riser, Charles Aste, Jimmy Nuzzo, Bruce Cervon, and Clarke Crandall, with a handful of Alton Sharpe and Alan Keith effects thrown into the mix.

When Expert Card Mysteries was released the following year, cardicians were surprised to see such items as Larry Jenning's Invisible Palm Aces and Eddie Fay's gambling methods hit the printed page. There's less Marlo in Mysteries and more "contributions from the world's card experts." And Al's seemingly endless parade of contributors continued when Expert Card Chicanery was published in 1971. The scope of the material in these three volumes definitely advanced the literature of 20th century card magic.

When Al was ready for retirement from the legal world in 1980, he and his wife, Lorraine, had already decided they wanted to move to California. Al had always fantasized of having a home with a theater, a place where magical soirees could be staged on a whim. This dream probably stems from his memories of the theater at Brookledge, the location of the Floyd Thayer Studio of Magic that, in 1942, became Al's friend Bill Larsen's home. "We looked at a lot of Hollywood directors and movie stars' homes that had screening rooms, but all these houses were too big. We finally found one we liked; it was Constance Bennett's house in Beverly Hills." Constance was the sister of Joan Bennett and starred in the late 1930s Topper movies. Tom Palmer, now Tony Andruzzi, came out and helped Al build a jewel of a stage in the center of the living room.

In May of 1983, the Number One issue of Ollapodrida made its appearance on the magic collectors' scene. The masthead of the 12-page bi-monthly carried the subheads of "Each Issue a Collector's Delight" and "A Journal of Magical Melange." The Spanish slang word ollapodrida roughly translates to "stew pot of rotten goodies." And Al's homemade magazine is just that — cut-and-pasted tidbits of magic history, vintage photos from Al's collection, or reviews of shows seen or magicians known mixed in with never-before-published tricks from the greats, or a montage of snapshots from a Magic Collectors' Weekend. The last page of Ollapodrida is usually reserved for the "Back Chat from Kellar's Den," a place for Al to editorialize on the state of the art as he sees it.

In 1991, when the Sharpes' Beverly Hills home was broken into and many of their personal effects and magical treasures were stolen, Al and Lorraine made a move to a place less hectic than Hollywood. It's the resort-like community of Leisure World in Laguna Woods, a retirement village of 19,000 residents that's nestled in the rolling hills of South Orange County. There is no stage or theater in their spacious villa, but there's a full-evening-show's worth of mysteries and memorabilia scattered about the place.

Mahogany ball vases and card boxes, glossy enameled two-inch billiard balls, and a wand of California orange wood with tips of rare mountain manzanita — all masterpieces of the Thayer era — rest on the center shelf of an ˇtag¸re. On the glass shelves above and below are coin boxes and card houlettes, decks of cards, manipulative watches, and droppers of coins and balls and cigarettes. There are holdouts and dye tubes, stack after stack of palming coins, and various sets of cups and balls — piece after precious piece of magic from P&L, Okito, Martinka, Conradi, Brema, and on and on. Other rooms have boxes of yet to be unpacked, and perhaps soon to be performed, apparatus that's been accumulated over the years. One of Al's prized possessions is the elaborate bar that Charles "Think-a-Drink" Hoffman used in the Broadway show The Streets of Paris. It was a gift from Charlie, "for standing guard over my props when we did that Max Factor benefit in Hollywood back in the 1930s." At the end of a hallway is a dark study (Could this be Kellar's Den?) where the bookshelves bulge with collectible magic books, pamphlets, and vintage catalogs. The tall file cabinets are obviously stuffed with more secrets, arcane information, perhaps the pages of an in-the-works biography of Alan Keith, that other man of mystery.