“I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.” Many, if not most people remember that’s the first couplet of Trees, a poem by Joyce Kilmer. Not quite as many remember that in spite of the name, Joyce Kilmer was a man (“Joyce” was actually his middle name). He wrote Trees in 1913 at home in Mahwah, New Jersey, where he celebrated his birthdays on December 6.
Another December 6 birthday who’s often quoted is Steven Wright, the comedian with an expressionless, deadpan delivery that usually includes paraprosdokians. That’s a one-liner where the last part goes in a direction you didn’t expect, changing your interpretation of the first part. One of Wright’s is “on the other hand, you have different fingers.” Groucho Marx had some famous ones, too, including “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” An even more famous paraprosdokian is “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” That one is usually attributed to Groucho too, but at least one investigator traced it to an issue of Boy’s Life magazine in 1954, sent in by somebody named Jim Brewer from Cleveland.
Just to continue the December 6 birthdays in the eastern US theme for a moment, Kilmer was from New Brunswick, New Jersey, Steven Wright is from Cambridge, and in 1954, Craig Newmark was born in Morristown, New Jersey. Newmark isn’t known for any particularly quotable lines, but he is known — indirectly. He’s the Craig behind Craigslist. He started it as an email service in San Francisco in 1995, and moved it to the web the next year. Although Craigslist is famously free, there’s a limited category of paid ads, mostly for job openings. That gives the site a revenue stream, and has made Newmark, who still owns the biggest share of it, very wealthy indeed. He still does some work at Craigslist (answering support calls!), but seems to spend most of his time donating millions of dollars to charities. He’s said to live modestly, ride buses, and doesn’t even own a car.
Speaking of cars, Fred Duesenberg, one of the brothers responsible for the famous Duesenberg cars of the 1930s, was born on December 6 too. Duesenberg was spectacularly successful at building racing cars, but their super luxury car — the Model J — was considered the best car in the world. The problem was that trying to sell cars for over $15,000 during the depression didn’t turn out to be a winning business strategy. The car just wasn’t a good fit for its time — the Model J’s engine produced 265 horsepower in an era when hardly anything else generated even a fraction of that. It could legitimately reach 100mph when nothing else could, but driving 100 miles per hour on 1930s roads wasn’t the most sensible thing you could do. Nevertheless, Duesenberg’s engineering was so advanced it seemed like magic at the time.
And speaking of magic, another December 6 birthday is Robert-Houdin. He was born in France in 1805, and although his day job was building clocks and watches, he invented modern stage magic. Magic tricks are ancient — some tricks have been found in Egyptian tombs — but they were traditionally performed close to the audience at fairs and carnivals. Robert-Houdin, whose first name, Jean-Eugéne, was also hyphenated, got interested in magic quite by accident. He was an apprentice in his cousin’s watchmaking shop and saved up to buy a two-volume set of books called Treatise on Clockmaking. But when he got home with his package, beneath the wrapping he discovered he’d received the wrong set of books; what he had was Scientific Amusements, which was about magic tricks.
Instead of exchanging the books, he started reading them, and before long was practicing the tricks. He started taking lessons from local magicians and learned most of the basics, including juggling. He kept up with his watchmaking, too, and opened his own watchmaking shop in Tours. Eventually he combined the two pursuits and built mechanical figures for performances, including an automaton that could write and draw — and he sold that one to P.T. Barnum. He began to be hired to perform magic by some of his watchmaking customers. Since watches were not cheap, he wound up performing magic not in street fairs and carnivals, but in elegant drawing rooms. He dressed appropriately for the occasions, and began the tradition, which still exists, of magicians performing in tuxedos.
He was also the first to have his own theater for his magic act. It didn’t begin particularly well, because when he stood up in front of a whole audience, he discovered he had a bad case of stage fright. He stayed with it, though, and eventually was performing levitations and mind-reading illusions to great acclaim.
Robert-Houdin retired from performing when he was 48 and concentrated on inventions, particularly electrical devices. His home was supposedly an all-electric household nearly a century before that sort of thing became common. His reputation persisted, though, and when Erich Weiss decided to become a working magician, it was thanks to Robert-Houdin that he chose his stage name. Houdini.
