Harry Lorayne - Life and Career

Life and Career

He grew up in New York's Lower East Side and he learned sleight of hand at the Hamilton Fish Park in the 1930s. At age 18, he began to perform as a table magician at Billy Reed's Little Club at 70 E. 55th St. in New York. The actor Victor Jory, noted for his role as a magician detective, was a regular visitor to the club. Lorayne started performing memory tricks for Jory and Jory's enthusiastic response changed Lorayne's approach to performing.

He began appearing on national (he had his own TV show in 1951, called The Prof. Magic Show) television in 1963, first on I've Got a Secret, where he demonstrated his ability to remember everybody's name in the audience and later appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and numerous other television shows including Jack Paar, The Merv Griffin Show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Regis Philbin Show, Good Morning America, The Today Show, That's Incredible, David Susskind. He was a regular performer (23 times) on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

To demonstrate his memory, Harry Lorayne would stand beside the president of the club he was visiting and be introduced to each member. The number of members of a club could reach up to 1,500. After an hour and a half, Lorayne would speak about memory for about 20 minutes and then ask if anyone had a question. He promised that he would pay any questioner whose name he could not remember a thousand dollars. He always remembered the names of every member of the audience. Lorayne also made news by memorizing and recalling information from phone books with no errors. Did the above a few times, but on just about every personal appearance, he would meet all the people in the audience, then he would open his show by asking all the people he met to please stand. He'd ask them to sit down as, and if, he pointed to each person and said his or her name. He sat down everyone in the audience - always! He had a memory school in New York employing such instructors as Darwin Ortiz. His video course (MEMORY POWER) was used as part of the training of many top corporations.