On March 20th, the last living assistant to Harry Houdini was lost to us.
This from an article in the UK Telegraph:
During her year with the “World-Famous Self-Liberator”, she played the role of the scantily-clad “Radio Girl of 1950”, a 1920s impression of what radio would be like several decades later.
In the autumn of 1925, in what turned out to be his last American tour (he died a year later), Houdini would start his act with a large mock wireless set which he opened front, back and top, exposing the internal mechanism to show that there was nothing there before closing it again. A voice would then announce: “Miss Dorothy Young doing the Charleston” — which was her cue to pop one foot out of the radio followed by the other one.