Early Life
Andrus was born January 28, 1918 in Sheridan, Wyoming. At the age of 10, he moved to Albany, Oregon, where he lived until his death in 2007. At 12, Andrus became interested in the art of illusion when he saw a performance of a reformed "spiritual medium". He joined the International Society of Junior Magicians when he was 16 and by his 40's became known as a "magician’s magician". According to long-time friend Ray Hyman, Jerry's mother was a fundamentalist Christian, and his father died when Jerry was young. Jerry became a skeptic when he was about 12. His middle school had lost a basketball game to a rival school, and students were blaming the referees for bad calls as the reason for the loss. Jerry had an epiphany that the other school would be saying the same thing if the loss had gone the other way. From that moment on, Jerry began to challenge the beliefs he had taken for granted before.
Read more about this topic: Jerry Andrus
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the “mainstream” culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn’t think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.”
—Jan Clausen (b. 1943)