The magician with the world’s greatest memory

Harry Lorayne never forgot a face. At his magic shows, he would meet nearly every person in the audience and then rattle off their names later, pointing each one out in the crowd. He wowed with that trick at theaters and trade shows across the U.S., as well as on two dozen stints on TheTonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Over the course of his decades-long career, he said, he recalled the names of more than 20 million people.To skeptics who thought he was cheating by planting friends in the audience, he retorted, “Who’s got 500 friends?”

Born into a Jewish family on NewYork’s Lower East Side, the young Harry Ratzer had a reading disability. When he brought home bad grades, his father, a garment worker, would beat him, so he began studying memory training and learning how to associate words with mental pictures. He started out as a card-trick magician, taking the stage name Lorayne after his wife’s middle name. One night he “idly tossed off a stunt in which he recalled the location of all 52 cards in a shuffled deck,” said The New York Times, and the reaction was so awed that he made memory tricks his main act.

Lorayne became “a showman, salesman, author, name dropper, and weaver of stories,” said The Washington Post. He published multiple books on memory training, offered an online “Memory Power” course, and consulted for actors and politicians to help them improve their recall. He always maintained that he wasn’t born with any unusual talent—he just honed mnemonics to an art form. “What I did is to streamline and sophisticate these techniques,” he said, “to make them work in this workaday world.”