On March 20, we received word that Dorothy Young had died. The reason we were notified is that she was the last living assistant of Harry Houdini, and may even have been that last living person to have actually known him. My first thought was, "She surely must have been old, since Houdini died in 1926," ... and she was -- 103!
Since I write the obituaries for The Broken Wand in The Linking Ring, I set about looking for more information on her. I Googled her and was surprised to find page after page of references to her, mostly linking her to Houdini. As I looked into her story, I discovered that Ms. Young only toured with Houdini for one year. In fact, she completed her one-year contract with him only two months before he died on Halloween, 1926. She was just seventeen.
I found and read more than a dozen obituaries on her, in newspapers all over the country (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times), and beyond (the Windsor (Ontario, Canada) Star, the London Daily Mail, etc.). In every single case, their headlines identified her as the last living assistant for Houdini.
She wrote a pamphlet in 2003 -- "Touring with Houdini;" appeared in a documentary for PBS in 2005 ("Houdini: Unlocking the Mystery"); and appeared in October 2008 as a participant in The Official Houdini Seance on the campus of Drew University, where she was a major benefactor.
An obituary for Ms. Young will appear in the May issue of The Linking Ring, along with a feature giving more details and photos of her long, colorful life. Oh yes, when asked if she knew how Houdini did his illusions, she said of course she did, but that she was sworn to secrecy, and she never told. So the last chance to learn his secrets is now gone. Goodbye Houdini secrets.
