‘Georgia Magnet’ Gives Marvelous Exhibition
Camden Post-Telegram - October 26, 1909
Miss Annie Abbott Amazes Large Audiences at the Broadway Theater by Her Wonderful Ability to Balk Strength of Ten Men
When it came to the time for Miss Annie Abbott, the “Georgia Magnet,” to do her world-famous turn at the New Broadway Theater at last evening’s performance, the orchestra struck-up “Way Down South in Dixie,” a slim, but shapely young woman clad charmingly in red and with a most pleasing personality tripped out on the stage and at once magnetized herself into the good graces of an audience that filled almost every seat in the house and three of the boxes.
Besides being a magnetic marvel, Miss Abbott is a Southern woman of high culture, possessing an irresistible faculty to please, as was shown in her spoken prologue preceding her almost supernatural feats as the veritable “load-stone” that she is. Miss Abbott weighs but eighty-eight pounds, and the claim that she can lift ten men but that ten men cannot lift her, was more than substantiated at the matinee and evening shows yesterday, and will be repeated all week.
Fifteen young men, all of them sturdy athletes, including Charles Errickosn [sic], George Clayton, Percy Verga, Jr., and Carlos Epifanos, constituted the judges at last night’s exhibition, and when they got through their twenty-five minute ordeal in futilely trying to make “the Georgia Magnet” get a move on they were puffing and blowing like a bunch of porpoises.
Miss Abbott put her subjects through a lot of amazing paces. As many as ten of them bore down with all their might upon a stick about eight feet high, which she held vertically aloft with the palms of her hands, but, tug as energetically as they would, they could not force it within two feet of the stage floor. The strongest could lift “the magnet” from the floor when she so willed, but when she brought her wonderful powers of resistance into action she was like someone glued or spiked to the spot.
Another inexplicable act of Miss Abbott is to bear aloft with ease in air ten men whose combined weight must have footed-up at least 1,200 pounds. Then again she placed the palms of her hands against a proscenium pillar, with the hands of two of the committee interposing, and called on a dozen or more to try and budge her from her position, but push and shove as frantically as they did they could not feaze her a little bit. Then she asked the committeemen whose hands intervened between the post and her if they left any extra pressure of her palms upon them, and they said not in the slightest.
As the climax of her astounding acts Miss Abbott hypnotized a little girl into duplicating her magnetic feats. She had big “Jim” Kirkley hold the child by the arms and in the main aisle told the girl to concentrate her thoughts upon what she, Miss Abbott, was thinking of. Then she instructed Kirkley to try and lift the little one. The large one heaved the girl above his head as if she were a foot ball. The child’s mind, however, had been distracted by the turmoil of the gallery, but when Miss Abbott secured absolute silence and gained the girl’s riveted attention Kirkley, huge and muscular as he is, was powerless to budge her an inch from the aisle.
In the vaudeville line at the Broadway this week there is simply a surfeit of good things.
James Kennedy and company, in a one-act play, “Jack Swift,” with that versatile comedian and singer James Kennedy in the title role of Jack Swift, the Bucket-shop Man, made a tremendous laugh hit, the cast of the delightful skit being as follows:
Rita Lindale, Adelaide Boothby; Mrs. O’Reilly, Who is it?; Tommie, the Messenger Boy, Master Charles Kennedy; Herbert Wyllie the Detective, Charles Latham; Jack Swift, the Bucket Shop Man, James Kennedy; George Washington, named by mistake, Kathleen Farroe.
Scene—Drawing room, Lindale Manor.
Another hilariously funny sketch is “The Unexpected,” with its convulsively amusing race track episode, presented by Jack Wyatt and Miss C. Blanche Rice, created a pandemonium of merriment.
Pelzer and Whyte, song eccentriques in a richly melodious and whimsical burlesque novel comedy singing act, got the glad hand times galore.
Ned Monroe and Frank Ely Mack, black face comedians in the fun overbubbling “Taking the Third Degree,” furnished infinite jests amid repeated recalls.
Claude Thardo, “The Song Tailor” with the sunny smile, catchy topicals and the freshest of gags, made such a popular impression that he ultimately had to genially bow his declination to respond to almost unceasing demands for more, and Nellie and Edith Hart, clever singers and fanciest of dapper dancers, were other exceeding enjoyable features of the bill.
“In the Heart of a Race Track Tout,” the Kinetograph graphically shows all the thrilling sights of a New York race track on a big handicap day.