Page:Houdini - Miracle Mongers.djvu/246

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MIRACLE-MONGERS AND THEIR METHODS

he made records in lifting which, to the best of my knowledge, no other man has been able to duplicate.

John Grun Marx, a Luxemberger, must have been among the strongest men in the world at the time I knew him. We worked on the same bill several times; but it was at the Olympia, in Paris, that he shone supreme as a strongman—and at the same time as a weak one. For, in spite of his sovereign strength, Marx was no match for a pair of bright eyes; all a pretty woman had to do was to smile and John would wilt. And—Paris was Paris.

Marx's strength was prodigious, and he juggled hundreds, and toyed with thousands, of pounds as a child plays with a rattle. He must have weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds, and he walked like a veritable colossus. In fact, he reminded me of a two-footed baby elephant.

Always good-natured, he made a host of friends both in the profession and out of it. After years of professional work he settled down as landlord of a public house in England, where, finally, he was prostrated by a mortal