Linking Rings

William W. Durbin and the Magic and Mystery of America

James D. Robenalt

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612774909
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"So how to tell of the life of a magician whose vocation was politics? A simple biography was out of the question. All of the hard research led to an idea. Why not travel back in time for one night to meet the old wizard himself in a car ride that actually did take place at the end of his life? Once there, he could tell his story directly to one of his descendants—a transference of family memories that just may have had national significance. Surely a magician could accomplish such a meeting." — from the Preface

David Copperfield had this to say about Linking Rings.

William W. Durbin, businessman, political activist, and professional magician, was a major figure in Ohio politics during the first half of the twentieth century, serving as the powerful head of the Ohio Democratic Party and as a senior official in the U.S. Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Durbin's story is that of a political maverick who knew how to manipulate behind-the-scenes activities, especially in Ohio's political arena. He was instrumental in William Jennings Bryan's near-defeat of William McKinley in Ohio, and two decades later he helped Woodrow Wilson reach the White House.

Although Durbin's vocation was politics, his passion was magic. One of the nation's premier magicians, who performed on stage as "The Past Master of the Black Art, " he was the first elected president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, a professional organization that has grown since its first convention in Kenton, Ohio, in 1926 to number more than 15, 000 members today.

Imaginatively told and thoroughly researched, Linking Rings is an engaging biography narrated by James D. Robenalt, Durbin's great-grandson, who places himself with Durbin in a long car ride back to Ohio from Washington, D.C., in February 1937.

Fans of magic and those interested in political history will find Linking Rings an engrossing read.

1

AND THINGS ARE NOT
WHAT THEY SEEM

February 1, 1937

Three and a half years after W. W. Durbin was sworn in as register of the Treasury, he faced a crisis. His daughter-in-law, Agnes, was dying of ovarian cancer. Durbin reacted to the news of her imminent demise by calling his chauffeur, Delbert Krock, to drive from Washington, D.C., back to Ohio.¹

Durbin was my great-grandfather; Agnes was my grandmother. My mother, Agnes’s oldest, told me of those terrible days in February 1937. Mom was just thirteen years old then, but the events of this time were seared into her memory. She told me of her grandfather, too, the magician and politician. Stray portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson populated some of the nooks and crannies of our basement; they were silent artifacts and occasional reminders to me that something special had taken place in my family history.

Just what had happened and the extent of the story were quite unclear. While I knew of Durbin and had an inkling that he was part of extraordinary events, virtually all of his papers and documents and all of his magic programs, apparatus, and paraphernalia were lost to the family, either sold or thrown out. I started making my own inquiries in the early 1990s, and like some great magic show, strange but wonderful things began to happen. I have often wondered if this was because Durbin was a magician or because he was a Democrat.

More and more the focus kept coming back to that fateful night in early February of 1937, just after FDR had been sworn in for his second term. What was it about that night that so transfixed me? “And things are not what they seem,” Durbin proclaimed in one of his magic programs that I found in my search, and so it became for me. I was transported to the blustery and dark late afternoon of February 1, 1937. A curtain was coming down.

“We have so little time,” he says to me as the chauffeur loads some bags in the trunk of the car.

I know there is little time, and I have to take a big breath to pace myself I also know I have to studiously avoid gawking at the man who stands next to me.

“You got any grips?” the chauffeur asks me.

“Grips?”

“Yeah, bags, suitcases?”

“No …no, I don’t.” I ask the older man in a manner that I hope suggests an unforced casualness: “How did I get here?”

“Just a moment,” he waves off the question, distracted by something. “Deb,” he says to the chauffeur, “I forgot the papers on my desk, in that pile on the right side of the desk.”

“Right.” The chauffeur hurries back toward the building, but diverts his trot and comes over to me to make his introduction first. “Delbert Krock,” he says, tipping his cap with his left hand, “glad to know you.”

Delbert Krock, here was someone I had been told was Durbin’s chauffeur. He and I had never met; I could only imagine him, until a magician who read some of my early chapters told me of an article that had appeared in The Linking Ring in 1957.² Delbert’s wife, Hazel Krock, appeared on the cover of the magazine on the occasion of her retirement from her duties as treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. Hazel had been Durbin’s secretary; she married Delbert in 1943. The article therefore contained side-by-side photos of Delbert and Durbin. Strange indeed for me to see the faces of these two together after I was deep into my writing of a trip with them.

Delbert disappears into a massive neoclassical building that, above its Corinthian columns, proclaims itself as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.³ I look around and see a street sign that says we are on Fifteenth Street. There are lots of old cars passing. Across a sloping lawn, I see some dormant Japanese cherry trees, a tidal basin, and what appears to be the Jefferson Memorial, flickering as if it is moving in and out of time. Slowly, the memorial and the tidal basin dim and vanish.

The car we are standing next to is a Studebaker, a four-door, top-of-the-line model from the President’s Series.⁴ It has a long narrow grill slanting jauntily toward the front bumper. The side panels are graced with horizontal louvers, and a flying goddess stands as a mascot on the hood. It is a huge, humming machine.

Delbert reappears from the building and scurries on the double-quick back to the car, holding a file in his hand that he gives to his boss. The older man opens the file to inspect its contents, thumbs through it, and looks satisfied.

“Okay,” he utters to Delbert, “let’s get on our way.”

“You want to take the old National Road?”

“Yes,” Durbin tersely replies, still reading a paper in the file. So this is William W. Durbin, my mother’s grandfather, the great magician.

But did my involvement in the car ride actually take place? I confess that even now I have trouble resolving this question with anything approaching certainty. A mystery surrounds it all.

The old National Road, the highway Durbin routinely used for his travels between Ohio and Washington, was the first great national highway constructed over the Appalachians to the west. Congress passed legislation in 1806 launching the National Road, or the Cumberland Road as it was called, and Jefferson picked three commissioners to lay out the appropriate route. The path chosen followed ancient Indian trails that probably started as portage routes from the headwaters of the Potomac River near Cumberland, Maryland, to the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh. From there, a traveler on boat could hook up with the Ohio and navigate into the Ohio country.

The road eventually ran from Baltimore to the Mississippi. The cause of many battles in Congress, the road was built in stages. It ran over the ridges of the Alleghenies to the “Big Crossings” of the Youghiogheny, across the intervening hills and Laurel Mountain, right by Fort Necessity, where Washington surrendered to the French in 1754, up through Uniontown, Pennsylvania, to “Old Red Stone Fort” at the head of the navigation on the Monongahela at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and across the panhandle of Virginia (today West Virginia) to the Ohio River near Wheeling and then across the center of Ohio through Columbus.

When Andrew Jackson came over this road to be inaugurated as president in 1829, he is supposed to have been caught in a snowstorm on the west slope of Meadow Mountain at Tomlinson’s Tavern, where he waited it out by playing a card game called “Old Sledge” with his friends. Henry Clay made innumerable journeys on this road to and from his home in Lexington, Kentucky. A busy highway of commerce before the advent of the railroad, it was one of the nation’s most important thoroughfares.

“It continued to flourish,” one writer said, “with its host of stage-drivers, wagoners, blacksmiths and hostlers, its six-horse teams, Conestoga wagons, Concord coaches and private carriages, its numerous taverns and landlords, its stone paved way, its stone culverts, arches and bridges, its curious triangular stone mile-posts and oddly constructed toll houses, its manners and customs, its usages and traditions and all its busy traffic, until the [eighteen] fifties when the railroads came.”⁵

In Durbin’s day, the National Road was called Route No. 1. Later it would be renamed U.S. Route 40, and today it has been partially replaced and enveloped by Interstate 70.

To pick up Route No. 1 from Washington, Durbin would have driven out of town north on the old Seventh Street Pike to Olney and then to Ridgeville, Maryland, where he would have picked up the great road.

Durbin recommended that magicians coming from Maryland or Pennsylvania to the 1927 IBM convention in Kenton, Ohio, should “take Route No. 1, the Old National Road, which runs out of Washington through Frederick, Cumberland, Maryland, and then down over the mountains through Uniontown and Washington, Pennsylvania, and down to Wheeling, West Virginia, where they should cross the Ohio River and follow this Route No. 1 through Bridgeport, St. Clairsville, Cambridge, Zanesville into Columbus. From there they can either go by Route No. 4 to Marion, Ohio and then cross over on Route No. 10 (Harding Highway), or they can take Route 21, which is a straight line through Marysville to Kenton.”⁶

“You know where we’re going, don’t you?” Durbin solicits.

“I think so.”

“Well then, we’ll talk about how you got here later. What is important is that we get underway. Get in.”

The car has frosted windows, and for the first time I notice how cold it is outside. The sun has already begun to fall behind the thick clouds, so it appears to be getting dark even though Durbin’s watch reads half past three.

Delbert jumps in and revs the motor. Durbin carefully climbs into the backseat, and I join him there. The car smells of leather from the seats, which are shiny and smooth, and the sparseness of the dashboard surprises me. There are no fancy dials, no radio.

Our trip to Ohio figures to be a sad journey. With death slowly closing in on my grandmother, Durbin’s thoughts of his own mortality cannot be far from his mind. He has had a special relationship with Agnes over the years. She was beautiful, with thick auburn hair (she once cut it in a “flapper” style in the 1920s in a fit of feminism) and a stately Irish look. Over the last year, though, she had wasted away; now she weighs no more than eighty or ninety pounds and is bedridden.

Like many, my interest in the genetic milieu from which I sprang was not awakened in earnest until one of my parents died. In my case it was my mother’s death in the summer of 1990. After she died, I found that I was drawn to her grandfather, not recognizing what I was getting into. I did not start off to be obsessed by him, the process sucked me in; the old man seemingly provoked, incited, and energized the encounter. The odyssey I embarked upon actually began one evening when I found a box in a storage bin of a condominium my parents owned. The box was cluttered with photos, letters, old magazines, and newspapers. Out of this jumble of papers and documents, one newspaper in particular presented itself, as if someone had pushed it to the top.

In it was an article dated June 26, 1936. The crumbling and yellowing remnant of the newspaper contained a picture of my mother grasping the Ohio standard at the Democratic National Convention, which was held that year in Philadelphia, the city where the nation was born. During this convention, FDR delivered one of his best-remembered lines. Like so many of his speeches, this one contained word-magic, for what he said that day could not have been more true or prophetic for my mother and her generation. “There is a mysterious cycle in human events,” he said to the crowd of over one hundred thousand adoring followers in Franklin Field. “To some generations much is given,” Roosevelt bellowed as he held precariously to his wind-blown speech. “Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”⁷

My mom was twelve when she was brought to the City of Brotherly Love to see and participate in the grand spectacle of her first national convention. She had accompanied her father and grandfather as an initiation rite of sorts in her political education.

I read the old article and something deep inside was triggered in my soul. I had to find out more.

Margaret Durbin is only 12 but she is going to be the first Congresswoman from Ohio, declare both she and her father, Francis Durbin, delegate from Ohio and manager of Senator A. Vic. Donahey’s successful 1934 Ohio campaign. So in order to prepare her for her future political activities, Delegate Durbin brought her from Lima, Ohio, to attend the Democratic national convention.

Margaret’s grandfather is William W. Durbin, register of the treasury in Washington and manager of the William Jennings Bryan campaign in 1896.

Margaret thinks the convention is “just grand” and isn’t missing a single activity. Her favorite affair was the William Jennings Bryan breakfast, because her granddaddy was a friend of Bryan and he used to be a frequent visitor to their home.⁸

The writer of the article, a woman, obviously enjoyed her young subject. “Since she has been in Philadelphia, Margaret has met such notables as Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Senator Alben W. Barkley and Marvin McIntyre, President Roosevelt’s personal secretary, but she hasn’t achieved her heart’s desire—to meet a congresswoman!”

My mother never did become a congresswoman, although she would have been a great one. She joined the navy as a Wave in 1943, typed correspondence for some of the navy brass in Washington and, after the war, went to the Ohio State University on the GI Bill. During her time in the service, she started what became a lifelong habit of smoking. She stopped in 1986 after my father had heart bypass surgery, but in 1989 she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

After graduating from college with a degree in education, she worked briefly at a Lima radio station, married my father in 1950, and together they raised five boys and two girls through the fifties, sixties, and seventies. We were the focus of her life. She was strong-minded, opinionated, self-assertive, and active in my hometown—on school boards and on local TV talk shows (where she reviewed books like Go East, Young Man, the autobiography of Su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. And Things Are Not What They Seem
• 2. “Tim Kelly Will Not Soon Be Forgotten”
• 3. The Doctor
• 4. My Good Old Mother
• 5. Taking Second Money
• 6. Our Fiery Trial
• 7. A Cross of Gold
• 8. The Levitation of Princess Karnac and Harry Kellar
• 9. Woodrow Wilson: “Despicable, Lousy, and Contemptible”
• 10. The River Lethe and Warren G. Harding
• 11. Kenton, Magic Capital of the World!
• 12. The Man with the Lights
• 13. Master Francis and the King of the Bootleggers
• 14. “I Am Mighty Glad You Were Elected”
• 15. “Taking Up the Cudgels in My Behalf”
• 16. Undaunted by the Deep Menacing Dirge
• 17. Crossing the Bar
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index