Jim Steinmeyer by The Last Greatest Magician in the World Read Free Book Online

much like poor Reddy Cadger, was ready to tumble onto the tracks.
     
     
    “THERE IS SOME MISAPPREHENSION abroad for the plan of the school,” Professor Henry Sawyer, Thurston’s first headmaster, explained at a Mount Hermon building dedication in 1885. “It is not a reformatory; the fact that a boy is bad is no reason he should be sent to Mt. Hermon. It is not an orphan asylum. It is a school for earnest Christian young men who want to round out their education so that they can become of use in the world.... If we are going out into the world, the head, heart and hands need training.”
    Reverend Dwight Lyman Moody was a nineteenth-century celebrity in the world of evangelism. He was born in 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded the Northfield Seminary for girls there in 1879, and in 1881 he opened Mount Hermon Academy for boys, on a separate campus across town. Mount Hermon offered classes at high school level. Unlike the Moody Bible Institute (opened as the Chicago Evangelization Society in 1901), it was not intended to produce ministers, but to give a well-rounded education. In fact, in the 1890s, Mount Hermon dropped the Bible course study, as the school felt it was attracting an inferior grade of student. Moody felt that society needed “gap-men,” good Christians who testified, worked in the world, and served between the laity and ministers. The application form to the school asked about signs of piety and pointedly inquired if the student wished to attend. “He has made it a daily prayer for months,” Round explained in Thurston’s application. Although the school was never intended as a reform school, it often accommodated hard-luck cases. Moody himself impulsively wrote on some applications, “Take this boy before the devil does.”
    The sprawling, new campus was beautiful and bucolic, with redbrick buildings surrounding the lush, hilly grounds. It was more idyllic than anything Thurston had seen in Ohio, more inviting than the city tenements or train yards that had served as his homes for the last six years. Still, he admitted that he “suffered at Mount Hermon. The change from the nomadic life to the prosaic life of a student seemed unbearable at times.” He had already calculated the train schedule. “Night after night I debated with myself whether I would quietly leave the dormitory and catch the midnight freight that stopped at Mount Hermon. I attribute my resistance to the same comfort and strength that gave me the courage to kneel at my bed in the Bowery lodging house.” Professor Sawyer once showed him a letter in his file from William Round, which had detailed Thurston’s criminal career in New York. Sawyer was grandly making the point that no further punishment was necessary, but the memory of that letter, and his status as an outsider, haunted Thurston.
    At Mount Hermon, he made a little extra money by cutting his fellow students’ hair and shaving them (a skill he learned from his father). He earned average to good grades. For example, his Bible courses began with excellent marks, but then faded to middling grades. Perhaps that was a sign of his expanding interests. He did poorly in singing (his voice had little modulation), but excellently in elocution (following the examples from Moody’s soaring sermons, he learned to add pauses or draw out his words for emphasis). He failed geometry and struggled with algebra. He learned to juggle Indian clubs, heavy wooden pins that were swung in graceful movements around his body. He was a star on the track team and intramural football team. He was also elected vice president of the Junior Middle Class (the equivalent of sophomore year).
    During a special Christmas dinner at the school in 1890, at which young ladies from the Northfield Seminary joined the boys, Reverend Moody was on hand to join the small group for holiday toasts. After dinner, the students entertained themselves with songs, games, and recitations. There, Thurston performed