HOUDINI'S DARKEST DAYS

1912 Poster: "Homecoming of a Milwaukee Boy!"

In Milwaukee, young Ehrich Weiss, the future Houdini, learned how to fight and how to jump a freight. He told a friend in 1912: “I dislike Milwaukee. It reminds me of the worst time in my life.”

In previous posts, we’ve sketched his melancholy coming of age travails. We’ve just returned from Milwaukee and can now fill in more of his sad story.

As we’ve outlined in earlier posts, Houdini’s father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, Ph.D., L.L.D., was forced to escape from a very good life in Budapest to a not bad life in Appleton, Wisconsin. Appleton was a progressive college town where he landed a job as the Jewish community’s first rabbi. From 1875 to 1882 he conducted services and performed marriages in rented rooms on the second floor of a commercial building on Appleton's College Avenue. 

Rabbi Weiss's synagogue: second floor

In September 1882, Appleton’s Jews began to collect money to build the town’s first synagogue, Temple Zion. 

Temple Zion

They raised enough to begin construction on both the temple and a nice house for the rabbi and his family.

They also raised more than enough to hire a new rabbi who hailed from Gemünden, the town in Germany where most of Appleton’s Jews had originated. The Houdini biographies claim Rabbi Weiss was too Old World and the town wanted someone who spoke English. But his successor, the Gemünden favorite, spoke no English at all and was not even an ordained rabbi, like Weiss.

We know this because we’ve unearthed German-language records never before consulted by Houdini historians.

Within two months of the Temple Zion fundraising, Rabbi Weiss had lost his job and left Appleton for good. Old and gray, with seven mouths to feed, he hoped to find work in Milwaukee, 100 miles away. Young Ehrich was eight years old. Houdini's own writings indicate that his father's sudden unemployment came as a shock to the whole family.

Rabbi Weiss's next official act, in November 1882, was to file his ordination credentials with the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds. 

We discovered this document, written in old-style German, in a forgotten, uncatalogued stack of old papers in the vaults of the Milwaukee County Historical Society. Its existence was unknown to top Houdini historians. It shows Weiss was a highly trained rabbi (with a doctorate and a law degree) who had been ordained in Hungary at age 21. He was hoping to find work as a rabbi in Milwaukee's fast-growing Jewish population. He never succeeded, and the family got sucked into a whirlpool of poverty.

Things were not so bad at first. Rabbi Weiss had been making $750 a year in Appleton and perhaps the town was gracious enough to pay him some severance for his eight years of service.

This is reflected by the relatively comfortable Milwaukee bungalow the Weisses first moved into, at 719 Prairie Street. In his writings, Houdini mentions that they even had a “servant girl” in this location, Minna Shamer.

719 Prairie Street. The original owners, not the Weisses, are shown.

The rabbi’s first entrepreneuring effort was to open a Hebrew school in this house. It did not do well. Though the Jewish population was growing, the job market was bad for rabbis. The Jewish ghetto where they lived, known as The Haymarket, had several small synagogues, but none were prosperous enough to support a full time rabbi. 

So in addition to teaching Hebrew, Weiss worked as a shochet, a kosher butcher, and also performed occasional weddings, funerals, circumcisions and other Jewish ritual work. The economic results can clearly be deduced by the poorer and poorer homes the Weiss family was forced to move into.

They lived at two addresses on Cherry Street, right in the center of the ghetto.

Cherry Street scene from Houdini's day.

In 1885, Mayer's first son, Houdini's half-brother Armin, died of tuberculosis. Mayer was devastated and, according to Harry, took to his bed. Things went steadily downhill, as evidenced by their next address.

Approximate location of 517 Sixth Street.

When they moved the following year, to 517 Sixth Street, young Ehrich could stand it no longer. He ran away from home. He sent this famous postcard to his mother, addressed to her at 517 Sixth:

Library of Congress

According to contemporary maps and insurance records, 517 Sixth Street in 1886 was not really even a house. It was a converted stable, with no furnace and no fireplace. The winter of 1886 was the worst in Milwaukee's history, with an accumulated snowfall of 109 inches.

A few doors down from 517 Sixth Street. The Weiss residence looked just like this.

These were indeed the coldest and darkest of days for Houdini and his family.





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HOUDINI'S FORGOTTEN YEARS

NEW LIGHT ON HOUDINI'S CHILDHOOD

IN HOUDINI'S BACKYARD






[Images from Milwaukee Public Library, unless otherwise noted.]