Owens History 03
Title
Owens History 03
Transcription
He takes the edge of his wrist and jams it into my throat. And I was unable to talk for two or three days from that. He really beat the hell out of me. And I stood up again. I could still talk at that point. It wasn't until the next day I couldn't talk from it. And I squeaked out. I said, 'My, this is rough, but this is good stuff.' Look how you threw me around. He grinned. Okay, about a week later, he confessed to me that he did this, he had to do this because. The judo he taught was of religion, and that many of the syndicate and Matthew Geisters there in Chicago would send their hoods and strong-armed muscle men around to learn from him.
So they'd go out and beat up people, you know, collecting for credit or whatever, and just meanness. So he'd beat the hell out of them the first day they'd come in, and they wouldn't come back. He says, that's how I separate the good guys from the bad guys. He says, if you hadn't come back, he says, frankly, I didn't expect you to come back the second day. He says, you're the weak one. You've taken a beating. He says, you're all right. But he said, if you've been a gangster, they can't take punishment. They don't want to be hurt. They want to hurt people. But they don't want to be hurt themselves. So if I beat them up for a day or two, they don't come back. He says, that's what he wants.
And mostly he taught policemen and detectives. As a matter of fact, one of the fellows had a black belt there. It was a friend of mine. Invented this system of drawing pictures of people, composite pictures. He invented it; sketching it. But anyway, Johnny was something. That's where I learned my judo. Also, I learned judo from a gangster, oddly enough, who was teaching dancing with me at Arthur Murray. This was several years before that. I was teaching dancing at Arthur Murray in Chicago. And unbeknownst to anybody else, well, first place, Arthur Murray was run by a syndicate gangster, top man. And some of the dancing teachers were gangsters. For instance, this one fellow came up to me and he says, 'Orange, you know, you could teach me how to hypnotize people, couldn't you?' And I said, 'yeah, yeah.' He says, 'well, I'll teach you judo if you'll teach me how to hypnotize people.' So I said, 'well, fair enough, all right.' You mean this was before you were with Osaka?
Yeah, this was several years before I was with Osaka, right? And so we swapped. And this fellow had been a Marine raider. As a matter of fact, he'd had a twin brother, and they had trained the Marines in Marine hand-to-hand fighting on the West Coast. And his brother had been shot down by the Japs right standing beside him on us, where they had to go off a sub in a rubber boat ahead of a fleet coming in to get information. They had to get the Jap guards at night and drag them back for interrogation, you see, out to the boats before the fleet came in to find out where the forces were dispersed and where the weaknesses were. So he and his twin brother went on one of those rubber boats one night, two or three other men and his twin brother.
They went around a corner of a mountain and machine gunned right, blew holes through his twin brother, and he got one in the chest. But anyway, so he taught me Marine Raider, too, though. So I also know that. It's a cruder form. It's not like you can't throw somebody through a wall with it like you can with Johnny Osaka's judo, but for just quick, fast work, it's beautiful. Let me ask you, you were in the Navy, weren't you? Yeah, I was in the Navy, right. Four years, 1941, 1945. And did you see any combat? Not combat. It was extraordinary. let's see i started out at purdue university i was assigned to purdue university well
no navy pier i'm sorry chicago pier i was the yeoman or secretary to the to the captain there of navy pier navy pier was half navy half marines and i was doing a lot of hypnotism there as a matter of fact everybody called me doc on the navy pier on navy pier all the guys um but that that was unofficial oh you're certainly unofficially hi doc hey doc fix me up tonight will you The Marines would stay in guard, say, for eight hours and then want to go to a dance. But their feet would just be so tired. So I'd hypnotize them and tell them they could go to the dance for three or four hours. Their feet wouldn't hurt. And they'd go to dance and have a lot of fun.
Or they'd come back drunk, and they couldn't show up or they'd get court-martialed. So they'd come, and I'd hypnotize them and straighten them out so they wouldn't be drunk checking back in, both the Navy guys and the Marines. I got a whole lot of that. And also, I was doing a lot of fighting, boxing in the ring there. Then I got transferred to Purdue University, where the Navy had electronic school. And at Purdue, I was a yeoman there, working both for the captain and then for some other officers. Also, I wrote and printed the newspaper for the Navy there. I was briefly on the Purdue University football team until I hurt my collarbone. Also, I fought in the ring at the Purdue University boxing match.
You mean while you were in the Navy, you were enrolled as a student in Purdue? No, I wasn't enrolled as a student. No. I worked there where they had students. And they let you play on the varsity football team? Yeah. It was amazing. Uh-huh. They let me suit up and play, and I fought with the Purdue boxing team. Go right along with them on their boxing, on their trips, and fight. And I did all these things, you know. I also, while I was there, choreographed a stage show for Stan Kenton. Stan Kenton. He and I had dinner, and I told him my idea for how to put on a terrific stage show, and he went along with it. He was appearing there at Purdue University. And he used my idea, called me a second Flo Ziegfeld.
A big hot jitterbug number; I knew all the kids that jitterbugged out around and uh, I pulled them all together for this jitterbug number to one o'clock jumpsy, and it went over great. But anyway, and then from there, from Purdue University, I was transferred uh, out into the Pacific, to New Caledonia, where I was a couple of years; New Caledonia, where I was, I worked as a a court reporter in the daytime, and uh, I gave uh shows at night in the big amphitheaters, you know, where they'd have thousands of men spread out in a bowl. I'd do shows. They had, I don't know, four or five different of these great big things all over the island, and I'd just drive from one to the other and give shows.
What did you do? Featuring hypnosis, I'd hypnotize five or ten men at a time, one at a time, and then do phenomena with them, and toss magazines out in the crowd. I'd tell them I think the page from memory and mnemonics and things like that uh-huh uh, then uh also I worked in the hospital there, wait let me let me backtrack for a second what now what did you do with mnemonics again? You memorize the page of a magazine, no, I, I memorized the entire magazine, for instance, Collier's magazine. I take it to memorize it, getting at the front cover and just going to walk right on back through it and memorize everything on each page. You have a photographic memory? No, I do not, no. It's a learned system.
It's a system I, the Roth memory system is what I started with. What's the name of it? Roth, R-O-T-H, Roth. Friends, I'll take you through it real quick. T or D is a one. You translate. And N is a two, M is a three, R is a four, L is a five. 6 is an ish or chuh, soft sound. 7 is a k or guh, it's a hard sound. Let's see. 8 is f or v, v like that. 9 is a p or b sound. And 10 is a sibilant hiss or s. For instance, if you've got page 60, okay? Page 60 on Collier's. That's cheese. That's cheese. In your mind, you see a great big block of cheese. All right, now, on the page, you may have pictures, you may have stories or whatever.
You tie them all together in your mind. Well, let's say there's a picture of Jeffrey Mishlove on the page. Okay, so then I have to see your photograph. Like, I take it with a camera, stuck on top of the cheese, and there might be a car advertisement on that page, Ford. And you see a Ford car, even the color of it. You make a picture of it and see it driving around your photograph. On the cheese, all right, and you could do 10 other things on the thing just just the same way, all right! Now when I come to a show, I throw that out in the audience. Somebody turns to page 60; he said, 'What's on page 60?' He said, 'Well, on the pages instantly comes into your mind because you hit the cheese.' There's that block of cheese in your mind; you see Jeffrey's picture photograph on top.
You see the red Ford car driving around, sir. Will you tell him what does the red Ford car have to do with cheese? No, it's an advertisement! In other words, you have standard code word. The first one is 'hat.' It's a top hat. Now, hen is your number two code word. Ham, a side of ham, is your number three code word. Hare or rabbit is your number four code word. Hill is your number five code word. For instance, on page five of the magazine, you always see the same thing. You always see the hillside. And there would be Jeffrey Mishlove running up the hillside. If this was on page five, see, with a Ford car chasing you up the side of the hill, if that was on that page.
Do you understand what I'm talking about? Well, I guess that's good enough. Yeah, you always use the same key code words, and then you tie in other words with them. And if you've forgotten what the code word is for 55, say, you just put the two L's together. You know a five is an L. It's got to be Lily. Okay, well, enough of all that. So anyway, you were doing these shows in the Navy. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, I was doing shows in the Navy, court reporting, and entertaining in hospitals. Well, I had shows, too. Weren't you also a high-speed typist? Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. I was a high-speed typist and a high-speed shorthand, Greg Shorthand. I was told I was the second-fastest man in the Pacific at one point. In shorthand?
Yeah, in shorthand, Greg. The fellow that beat me was a Pittman man. Was a what? Pittman. Pittman shorthand. Oh, I see. Yeah, he invented a system of his own of using it and got high speed with it. Uh-huh. Very, very interesting. Well, let's see now. Where do we go from here? How about high school? Yeah, okay. I went into high school; I was immature. In other words, as I explained to you, I'd go in carrying books about Lassie, and carrying little toys that the other kids wouldn't play. But you had been reading books about psychic phenomena. Oh, heavens, for years before I got into high school. But so you were, why were you reading these books about Lassie, and so on? I liked them too. My aunt encouraged that.
I had an aunt called Eve. I was the daughter of Queenie. And she was a genius. She had gotten a degree at Indiana University and then went to Columbia University in New York, got a degree. Then she went over to England, to a famous college over there, if you mentioned I know where it was, got a degree. He came back and got a degree at Northwestern. And her father, Grandpa, didn't even go one day to school. I don't know how this popped up in the genetic chain. And Queenie hadn't had any schooling to speak of. Anyway, my Aunt Eva lived in New York, and every time she'd come home, I was a little bitty kid, she'd bring me all these books on Robin Hood, big beautiful books.
Night to the Round Table, and explained it all to me. And a book about the life of Teddy Roosevelt, and how he overcame adversity, a book about Houdini. And it's interesting that all of the books that she brought me, I have since become almost professional at the various subjects. Like Houdini, I didn't stop until I learned how to go through doors, lock doors and things. But you learned magic tricks, huh? Magic tricks, too, yeah. She bought me a $50 magic set once and made my dad so mad, he took it away from me and took it back and left it at her door because she didn't bring my other two brothers something. But she sensed that I was a genius, and she was encouraging it.
Incidentally, let me ask you while it's on my mind. Are your other brothers alive? One. My brother Jack and I were almost twins in our likes, and we had terrific fun together. He's the only He's the only man I've ever piled around with. He died some years ago, about 1969 or 1970. My brother Bill is still alive. Now, he and I never did get along. He was a mama's boy. He was always running home and tattling. I don't think he's ever changed. He always had a big mouth. He's the worst coward you ever saw. That's what I'm talking about when we were kids. And we don't write. We don't speak to each other. We
just ignore each other my brother Bill where is he now well the last I knew he was down in uh South Bend Indiana that's where he did live but then he his wife left him and she's off living by herself with her family now yeah and uh I said I sent a picture a photo to Bill not too long ago I'd taken him and his wife but it came back not there he's not there. Okay. You were learning magic tricks, huh? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I was very good. You know the little shell game? Yeah. Well, when I was about eight, Diva brought me this $50 magic set. I was about eight, and I had this shell game. And I showed it to an expert at magic tricks, a man, a grown man. And he said, kid, you're sure good. He said, I know that. I can do it myself, and you're better than I am. That's where you have to palm a little P in between your fingers. Right, yeah. But I love magic, like a dog takes the water. Yeah. Uh-huh. So let's see. And in high school, you said that you were retarded. Is that the word you used? Or childish, because you were retarded?
So they'd go out and beat up people, you know, collecting for credit or whatever, and just meanness. So he'd beat the hell out of them the first day they'd come in, and they wouldn't come back. He says, that's how I separate the good guys from the bad guys. He says, if you hadn't come back, he says, frankly, I didn't expect you to come back the second day. He says, you're the weak one. You've taken a beating. He says, you're all right. But he said, if you've been a gangster, they can't take punishment. They don't want to be hurt. They want to hurt people. But they don't want to be hurt themselves. So if I beat them up for a day or two, they don't come back. He says, that's what he wants.
And mostly he taught policemen and detectives. As a matter of fact, one of the fellows had a black belt there. It was a friend of mine. Invented this system of drawing pictures of people, composite pictures. He invented it; sketching it. But anyway, Johnny was something. That's where I learned my judo. Also, I learned judo from a gangster, oddly enough, who was teaching dancing with me at Arthur Murray. This was several years before that. I was teaching dancing at Arthur Murray in Chicago. And unbeknownst to anybody else, well, first place, Arthur Murray was run by a syndicate gangster, top man. And some of the dancing teachers were gangsters. For instance, this one fellow came up to me and he says, 'Orange, you know, you could teach me how to hypnotize people, couldn't you?' And I said, 'yeah, yeah.' He says, 'well, I'll teach you judo if you'll teach me how to hypnotize people.' So I said, 'well, fair enough, all right.' You mean this was before you were with Osaka?
Yeah, this was several years before I was with Osaka, right? And so we swapped. And this fellow had been a Marine raider. As a matter of fact, he'd had a twin brother, and they had trained the Marines in Marine hand-to-hand fighting on the West Coast. And his brother had been shot down by the Japs right standing beside him on us, where they had to go off a sub in a rubber boat ahead of a fleet coming in to get information. They had to get the Jap guards at night and drag them back for interrogation, you see, out to the boats before the fleet came in to find out where the forces were dispersed and where the weaknesses were. So he and his twin brother went on one of those rubber boats one night, two or three other men and his twin brother.
They went around a corner of a mountain and machine gunned right, blew holes through his twin brother, and he got one in the chest. But anyway, so he taught me Marine Raider, too, though. So I also know that. It's a cruder form. It's not like you can't throw somebody through a wall with it like you can with Johnny Osaka's judo, but for just quick, fast work, it's beautiful. Let me ask you, you were in the Navy, weren't you? Yeah, I was in the Navy, right. Four years, 1941, 1945. And did you see any combat? Not combat. It was extraordinary. let's see i started out at purdue university i was assigned to purdue university well
no navy pier i'm sorry chicago pier i was the yeoman or secretary to the to the captain there of navy pier navy pier was half navy half marines and i was doing a lot of hypnotism there as a matter of fact everybody called me doc on the navy pier on navy pier all the guys um but that that was unofficial oh you're certainly unofficially hi doc hey doc fix me up tonight will you The Marines would stay in guard, say, for eight hours and then want to go to a dance. But their feet would just be so tired. So I'd hypnotize them and tell them they could go to the dance for three or four hours. Their feet wouldn't hurt. And they'd go to dance and have a lot of fun.
Or they'd come back drunk, and they couldn't show up or they'd get court-martialed. So they'd come, and I'd hypnotize them and straighten them out so they wouldn't be drunk checking back in, both the Navy guys and the Marines. I got a whole lot of that. And also, I was doing a lot of fighting, boxing in the ring there. Then I got transferred to Purdue University, where the Navy had electronic school. And at Purdue, I was a yeoman there, working both for the captain and then for some other officers. Also, I wrote and printed the newspaper for the Navy there. I was briefly on the Purdue University football team until I hurt my collarbone. Also, I fought in the ring at the Purdue University boxing match.
You mean while you were in the Navy, you were enrolled as a student in Purdue? No, I wasn't enrolled as a student. No. I worked there where they had students. And they let you play on the varsity football team? Yeah. It was amazing. Uh-huh. They let me suit up and play, and I fought with the Purdue boxing team. Go right along with them on their boxing, on their trips, and fight. And I did all these things, you know. I also, while I was there, choreographed a stage show for Stan Kenton. Stan Kenton. He and I had dinner, and I told him my idea for how to put on a terrific stage show, and he went along with it. He was appearing there at Purdue University. And he used my idea, called me a second Flo Ziegfeld.
A big hot jitterbug number; I knew all the kids that jitterbugged out around and uh, I pulled them all together for this jitterbug number to one o'clock jumpsy, and it went over great. But anyway, and then from there, from Purdue University, I was transferred uh, out into the Pacific, to New Caledonia, where I was a couple of years; New Caledonia, where I was, I worked as a a court reporter in the daytime, and uh, I gave uh shows at night in the big amphitheaters, you know, where they'd have thousands of men spread out in a bowl. I'd do shows. They had, I don't know, four or five different of these great big things all over the island, and I'd just drive from one to the other and give shows.
What did you do? Featuring hypnosis, I'd hypnotize five or ten men at a time, one at a time, and then do phenomena with them, and toss magazines out in the crowd. I'd tell them I think the page from memory and mnemonics and things like that uh-huh uh, then uh also I worked in the hospital there, wait let me let me backtrack for a second what now what did you do with mnemonics again? You memorize the page of a magazine, no, I, I memorized the entire magazine, for instance, Collier's magazine. I take it to memorize it, getting at the front cover and just going to walk right on back through it and memorize everything on each page. You have a photographic memory? No, I do not, no. It's a learned system.
It's a system I, the Roth memory system is what I started with. What's the name of it? Roth, R-O-T-H, Roth. Friends, I'll take you through it real quick. T or D is a one. You translate. And N is a two, M is a three, R is a four, L is a five. 6 is an ish or chuh, soft sound. 7 is a k or guh, it's a hard sound. Let's see. 8 is f or v, v like that. 9 is a p or b sound. And 10 is a sibilant hiss or s. For instance, if you've got page 60, okay? Page 60 on Collier's. That's cheese. That's cheese. In your mind, you see a great big block of cheese. All right, now, on the page, you may have pictures, you may have stories or whatever.
You tie them all together in your mind. Well, let's say there's a picture of Jeffrey Mishlove on the page. Okay, so then I have to see your photograph. Like, I take it with a camera, stuck on top of the cheese, and there might be a car advertisement on that page, Ford. And you see a Ford car, even the color of it. You make a picture of it and see it driving around your photograph. On the cheese, all right, and you could do 10 other things on the thing just just the same way, all right! Now when I come to a show, I throw that out in the audience. Somebody turns to page 60; he said, 'What's on page 60?' He said, 'Well, on the pages instantly comes into your mind because you hit the cheese.' There's that block of cheese in your mind; you see Jeffrey's picture photograph on top.
You see the red Ford car driving around, sir. Will you tell him what does the red Ford car have to do with cheese? No, it's an advertisement! In other words, you have standard code word. The first one is 'hat.' It's a top hat. Now, hen is your number two code word. Ham, a side of ham, is your number three code word. Hare or rabbit is your number four code word. Hill is your number five code word. For instance, on page five of the magazine, you always see the same thing. You always see the hillside. And there would be Jeffrey Mishlove running up the hillside. If this was on page five, see, with a Ford car chasing you up the side of the hill, if that was on that page.
Do you understand what I'm talking about? Well, I guess that's good enough. Yeah, you always use the same key code words, and then you tie in other words with them. And if you've forgotten what the code word is for 55, say, you just put the two L's together. You know a five is an L. It's got to be Lily. Okay, well, enough of all that. So anyway, you were doing these shows in the Navy. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, I was doing shows in the Navy, court reporting, and entertaining in hospitals. Well, I had shows, too. Weren't you also a high-speed typist? Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. I was a high-speed typist and a high-speed shorthand, Greg Shorthand. I was told I was the second-fastest man in the Pacific at one point. In shorthand?
Yeah, in shorthand, Greg. The fellow that beat me was a Pittman man. Was a what? Pittman. Pittman shorthand. Oh, I see. Yeah, he invented a system of his own of using it and got high speed with it. Uh-huh. Very, very interesting. Well, let's see now. Where do we go from here? How about high school? Yeah, okay. I went into high school; I was immature. In other words, as I explained to you, I'd go in carrying books about Lassie, and carrying little toys that the other kids wouldn't play. But you had been reading books about psychic phenomena. Oh, heavens, for years before I got into high school. But so you were, why were you reading these books about Lassie, and so on? I liked them too. My aunt encouraged that.
I had an aunt called Eve. I was the daughter of Queenie. And she was a genius. She had gotten a degree at Indiana University and then went to Columbia University in New York, got a degree. Then she went over to England, to a famous college over there, if you mentioned I know where it was, got a degree. He came back and got a degree at Northwestern. And her father, Grandpa, didn't even go one day to school. I don't know how this popped up in the genetic chain. And Queenie hadn't had any schooling to speak of. Anyway, my Aunt Eva lived in New York, and every time she'd come home, I was a little bitty kid, she'd bring me all these books on Robin Hood, big beautiful books.
Night to the Round Table, and explained it all to me. And a book about the life of Teddy Roosevelt, and how he overcame adversity, a book about Houdini. And it's interesting that all of the books that she brought me, I have since become almost professional at the various subjects. Like Houdini, I didn't stop until I learned how to go through doors, lock doors and things. But you learned magic tricks, huh? Magic tricks, too, yeah. She bought me a $50 magic set once and made my dad so mad, he took it away from me and took it back and left it at her door because she didn't bring my other two brothers something. But she sensed that I was a genius, and she was encouraging it.
Incidentally, let me ask you while it's on my mind. Are your other brothers alive? One. My brother Jack and I were almost twins in our likes, and we had terrific fun together. He's the only He's the only man I've ever piled around with. He died some years ago, about 1969 or 1970. My brother Bill is still alive. Now, he and I never did get along. He was a mama's boy. He was always running home and tattling. I don't think he's ever changed. He always had a big mouth. He's the worst coward you ever saw. That's what I'm talking about when we were kids. And we don't write. We don't speak to each other. We
just ignore each other my brother Bill where is he now well the last I knew he was down in uh South Bend Indiana that's where he did live but then he his wife left him and she's off living by herself with her family now yeah and uh I said I sent a picture a photo to Bill not too long ago I'd taken him and his wife but it came back not there he's not there. Okay. You were learning magic tricks, huh? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I was very good. You know the little shell game? Yeah. Well, when I was about eight, Diva brought me this $50 magic set. I was about eight, and I had this shell game. And I showed it to an expert at magic tricks, a man, a grown man. And he said, kid, you're sure good. He said, I know that. I can do it myself, and you're better than I am. That's where you have to palm a little P in between your fingers. Right, yeah. But I love magic, like a dog takes the water. Yeah. Uh-huh. So let's see. And in high school, you said that you were retarded. Is that the word you used? Or childish, because you were retarded?
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“Owens History 03,” Archive Home, accessed August 12, 2026, https://www.pkman.org/archive/items/show/502.