Located in a northern village of China, in Shangdung Providence, Long Tack Sam was born in the mid 1880s. All the stories that have come out of his childhood all lead to one conclusion: Long Tack Sam ran away from home, and over time became a mysterious and well regarded performer, magician and acrobat. This happened during the years that vaudeville was the main way of entertaining the masses of audiences around the world. After starting a family in Austria, Long Tack Sam and his troupe were forced to take their act to America. From then on, Long Tack Sam’s life was nonstop moving.
Becoming Long Tack Sam
Long Tack Sam was director of Tan Kawi Chinese Acrobatic Troupe. They were well known for their hair tricks, which was using their hair to hang from ropes, suspend, and twirl objects. When the Ching Dynasty ended, so did the right to wear the Kew or long braid, and the hair tricks ended. This was also when Long Tack Sam married Austrian Leopoldine Roesler. Due to a name conflict, the name of the Troupe was then changed to the Imperial Pekinese Troupe. That name had gotten them billed as a dog act. So finally, the name was changed to the Long Tack Sam Troupe.
The troupe performed all around the world in the 1920s, 1930s, and during the dwindling years of vaudeville in the early 1940s. Long Tack Sam was well known for two distinct acts. The fist was the Needle Swallowing Trick, which is where he would swallow needles and his assistant would pull them out of his mouth by a string that the needles were magically tied on. The second one was the Goldfish Bowl Trick, where the magician would stand for the audience, do a summersault, and then show a bowl with goldfish swimming around in his hands. In early 1922, Long Tack Sam was personally invited by Harry Houdini to join in Houdini’s Magicians Club, which was an exclusive club reserved for the best in stage magic. The moment he joined the club, Houdini patented the Needle Swallowing Trick and stopped performers from doing it. After WWI, his two daughters, Mina and Poldi joined the troupe and performed with him for over a decade, while Leopoldine was their manager.
Life After the Stage
Long Tack Sam and Leopoldine had one more child; Frank, nicknamed “Bobby”. He was never brought into the family business of magic and acrobatics. And while Bobby was still a child, Long Tack Sam unofficially retired from vaudeville. The family moved to Austria when the American Stock Market crashed. But they didn’t live long there, due to Hitler’s rise to power and the outbreak of WWII. The Long family continued to move around Europe and Asia until they landed in China. Long Tack Sam was a lucrative entrepreneur when it was hard for Asian people outside of Asia to succeed in an overly racist, war torn world. When living in China, he owned 5 theaters. When communism came to China, his property was taken.
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