NOTABLE DEATHS ELSEWHERE
JAMES RANDI, 92
Dazzling magician regarded as nation’s foremost skeptic
James Randi, a magician who later challenged spoon benders, mind readers and faith healers with such voracity that he became regarded as the country’s foremost skeptic, died Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Florida. He was 92.
The James Randi Educational Foundation confirmed the death, saying simply that its founder succumbed to “age-related causes.”
Entertainer, genius, debunker, atheist — Randi was them all. He began gaining attention not long after dropping out of high school to join the carnival. As the Amazing Randi, he escaped from a locked coffin submerged in water and from a straitjacket as he dangled over Niagara Falls.
Magical as his feats seemed, Randi concluded his shows around the globe with a simple statement, insisting no otherworldly powers were at play.
“Everything you have seen here is tricks,” he would say. “There is nothing supernatural involved.”
The magician’s transparency gave a glimpse of what would become his longestrunning act, as the country’s skeptic-inchief. In that role, his first widely seen exploit was also his most enduring.
On a1972 episode of “The Tonight Show,” he helped Johnny Carson set up Uri Geller, the Israeli performer who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. Randi ensured the spoons and other props were kept from Geller’s hands until showtime to prevent any tampering.
The result was an agonizing 22 minutes in which Geller was unable to perform any tricks.
Randi bounced his 5-foot-6 frame energetically, even in his final years. He sought to disprove not just those who read palms and minds, but chiropractors, homeopaths and others he saw as predators seeking innocent people’s money.
Randi targeted those he saw as frauds with a tenacity and dedication he admitted was an obsession.
“I see people being swindled every day by medical quackery, frauds of every sort, psychics and their hot lines, people who claim to be able to find lost children or to help them invest their money,” Randi told The Associated Press in 1998. “I know they are being swindled because I know the methods being used.”
Once, awaiting the chance to sift through the trash of a faith healer, Randi spent days in his car, eating Twinkies and drinking Pepsi.
“I suffer from this obsession that I have something important to do,” he explained in a 2007 interview.
Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Toronto on Aug. 7, 1928, Randi — known by everyone simply by that surname — had a nagging desire to question from a young age.
Academically, he said he was bored in school and teachers acknowledged he was prodigy far ahead of his peers. He never earned a high school diploma or went to college but in 1986 was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship, often known simply as a “genius grant.”
He spoke with certainty. While he said he never really questioned his beliefs, he acknowledged there was always a chance he was wrong.
“I am probably right. But I’m always only probably right,” he said. “Absolutes are very hard to find.”
For all the analysis Randi put into seemingly everything, he still found delight in observing magic he knew was a stunt or watching a film that was just fantasy. He talked about the crushing feelings of watching a friend die and spoke of the magic of love. In 2013, he married his longtime partner, Deyvi Pena. He was the subject of a 2014 documentary, “An Honest Liar.”