ICYMI: The Great Boomsky book launch and show

From the June 18th stream on the afrohealer YouTube channel:

 

 

 

 

Isaac Willis, The Great Boomsky, in Halifax Today

From the February 14th article "Remember This? When Isaac met Blanche" by Margaret Steele in Halifax Today:

At age twenty-five, Isaac Willis – The Great Boomsky – was already a renowned magician. That night he was playing a block away at the Academy of Music with Richards & Pringles Famous Georgia Minstrels.

By 1905, Isaac had already been touring for nearly half of his life. He had started as a teen apprentice with the legendary magician Herrmann the Great, playing the assistant character “Boomsky.” Now he was a star in his own right.

With ads foretelling “A Gleeful Comingling of Joviality” and “A Coalition of Mirth, Vivacity and Gaity,” America’s premiere Black minstrel company packed theaters everywhere they went. The group’s fifty men lived and traveled on a private Pullman railcar. Their 1905 summer tour would play eighteen Nova Scotia towns in three weeks, including a three-day stand in Halifax.

That evening Blanche jostled her way to her seat at the Academy of Music. The capacity crowd howled at the opening comedy skits then tapped their feet and clapped along to the band’s rousing ragtime tunes.

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The Great Boomsky: Truro magician Isaac Willis

From The Chronicle Herald:

In the 1920s, a popular “professor” worked as a porter at the Truro train station. However this porter wasn’t a moonlighting academic.

Under the stage name of Professor Boomsky, he once mystified full houses at the world’s finest theatres. And before that, he worked at the White House.

Isaac Willis was born on Christmas Eve, 1879 in Alexandria, Va. By the age of two, he was living in Washington, D.C., where his father, a former cart driver, was a doorman at the White House. Eventually, Isaac joined his father, working there as a messenger boy.

By a twist of fate, Isaac caught the eye of Alexander Herrmann, a millionaire magician who lived a glamorous lifestyle befitting a modern-day rock star, complete with a yacht, private railcars, and a seaside mansion.

Herrmann, who often gave command performances for presidents and royalty, took notice of the charismatic Willis. In a flash, the White House needed a new messenger boy. The teen had signed on as Herrmann’s apprentice, assuming the role of Boomsky, the magician’s beloved stage assistant.

Read more.