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A touring conjurer, a Long Island City pharmacist, a surgeon, and a Master of Advance Lodge who later wrote the ritual and drew the emblem for a fraternity of magicians.
Dr. William Golden Mortimer was elected Master of Advance Lodge No. 635 in December 1889, nine years after he was raised there in Astoria, and by then he had already been several men at once. He had toured the country as a stage conjurer, clerked in a drugstore down the road from the lodge room, edited a trade journal, and was a few years into the medical career that would fill the rest of his working life. What marks his place among the brethren of Advance is how he treated ritual. He studied it, kept it, and carried it with him, and a dozen years after his year in the East he wrote a ceremony of his own, and drew an emblem, for the magicians of New York.
Marble Dust and Masonic Ink
Roots ran deep on his mother's side. His grandfather, James Herring, was a portrait painter and engraver who also served as secretary of the Grand Lodge of New York, where he founded the Masonic Hall and Asylum Fund, and who stood with Samuel F. B. Morse among the founders of the New York Academy of Medicine. Mortimer's father, George, practiced law at 41 Park Row and, by his obituary's account, learned stone carving from the sculptor Robert E. Launitz alongside his legal studies, carving lion heads for the cornice of the Sub-Treasury at Wall and Nassau. A boy in that house heard about lodges, hospitals, and workshops as parts of one world.
Young Man in a Swallow-Tailed Coat
Magic found him early. Born in New York on December 27, 1854, he became a pupil of Robinson, the Fakir of Vishnu, worked backstage and on stage beside him, and by 1869 was on the road with "Mortimer's Mysteries," a show in the Heller manner, a polished parlor program rather than a sideshow. He even worked with the electrician who had run Heller's second-sight act, and the famous couch with its hidden tubes became part of Mortimer's own act. He kept at it until 1881, in what a later obituary called friendly competition with Kellar and Herrmann. The reviews were not all kind. A reader of the Red Bank Daily Register in 1878 wrote in to say the evening dragged and the tricks showed their wires, while a Chicago paper two years later praised his spontaneous humor and the pace of his changing programs. He was working the circuit, and it was an education in how an audience decides what to believe.
Stock Bottles and a Lodge Room
Out of costume he was a druggist's clerk, and it was a marriage that brought him to the lodge's village. In 1873 he married Sarah Ann Adams of Astoria, and Astoria became the place where he worked behind a counter, later joining the staff of the wholesale house McKesson & Robbins and founding and editing the Druggists' Advertiser and Trade Journal. On May 5, 1880, he was raised a Master Mason in Advance Lodge, with the road show still running and a Chicago engagement months away. The man who learned how to be believed at a footlight learned in the lodge room how to keep faith with a body of men who asked for something different.
The Gavel in Astoria
Rooks sat in the Senior Warden's chair when the lodge met to elect its officers in December 1889, with Alexander S. Williams as Junior Warden, John Oloff as Treasurer, and E. M. Whitney as Secretary. The trustees were Charles W. Hallett, W. K. Moore, and Edward J. Knauer, who had himself led the lodge for the four years before. Mortimer was chosen Master. Williams would take the gavel in 1893, and the names around him read like a roll of the men who built Advance in its first generation.
Eminent Companion, Eminent Sir
The higher bodies came in sequence. By 1888 he was Captain of the Host in Banner Chapter No. 214, Royal Arch Masons, and in December 1890 the chapter elected him High Priest, in time to see the Mark Master's degree conferred before a full room that winter. Columbia Commandery No. 1 of the Knights Templar brought the next office. He served as Commander in 1907, welcomed the Grand Senior Warden to the asylum in February 1908, and was presented with the Past Commander's ring in August, a gold cross set with rubies and diamonds. A neighbor in Pennsylvania later described him as a thirty-second degree Mason, a Shriner, and a past officer in every body he entered.
Remedies Argued in Print
In 1885 he graduated from New York University's medical school, served as an interne at the Workhouse and Almshouse hospitals on Blackwell's Island, and joined the New York Throat and Nose Hospital, where he rose to director of ophthalmological surgery. The Academy of Medicine that his grandfather had helped found elected him a Fellow in 1891. His book came in 1901. History of Coca: The Divine Plant of the Incas ran to some six hundred pages of Andean history, botany, and cultivation, and made the case that the leaf, taken as the Andean peoples took it, was not the same thing as cocaine. The New York Times wished he had written a fifty-page pamphlet instead, while the Washington Evening Star praised the book as exhaustive, and newspapers were still quoting it in 1914.
Inside Martinka's Back Room
Martinka's Magical Palace at 493 Sixth Avenue was a pair of cramped rooms with a small theater attached, and in May 1902 thirteen men gathered in the back of it. Mortimer chaired the meeting. Dr. Saram R. Ellison, a physician and collector of magic books, suggested the name, and Henry Ridgely Evans, who knew them both, credited Mortimer with writing the ritual of the order. Mortimer also drew the society's emblem, and he served as the [Society of American Magicians' first president](The Society of American Magicians
The Society of American Magicians
until 1905, presiding at the first annual dinner, at the Hotel Vendome in May of that year, as master of ceremonies over sixty-three guests.
Every Trick Has a Keeper
Even in print he proved a generous source. Houdini, who would later lead the society himself and whose papers record him working on stage beside Mortimer, relied on him heavily in [The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin](The unmasking of Robert-Houdin : Houdini, Harry, 1874-1926 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The unmasking of Robert-Houdin : Houdini, Harry, 1874-1926 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.
The book cites Mortimer's account of how the electrician E. J. Dale, who had worked the Heller second-sight act, went on tour with him after Heller's death, and Mortimer eventually passed the sofa itself to Martinka's shop, where it stayed on view. Heller's second sight was the thread that tied Houdini to the older conjurers, Kellar and Mortimer among them. Evans thanks him for the facts of Buatier de Kolta's career. A Nashville magician who attended the society's 1903 convention described it as an organization formed in large part to protect performers from the public exposure of their acts. Two fraternities, one a lodge and one a society of conjurers, each ran on the premise that some knowledge is shared only in the proper order, and Mortimer served in the East of one and wrote the working of the other.
Summer Easels, Winter Roll Call
Retirement came in 1923. His second wife, Jessie Newcomb, was from a family in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, where the couple spent summers and where he painted scenes of the town, some of which still hung in the Newcomb house at his death. He returned to New York in May 1931 for the Society's national meeting, where the local paper noted him as the man who founded it thirty years before. When Advance Lodge held a fair in 1913 to raise money for a new home, the Brooklyn Eagle printed the roll of its past masters, and his name stood there between Williams's years and the 1890s.
Standing among those names, he looks at first like a visitor, a magician and physician passing through an Astoria lodge on the way to larger rooms. Then the pattern shows. He took his degrees there, led it, carried the work upward into the chapter and the commandery, and then wrote a ceremony and drew an emblem for a society that would borrow its seriousness from the lodge. Mortimer died on March 3, 1933, at his home at 447 Fort Washington Avenue and was buried at Greenwood, and the roll of Advance Lodge still carries his name.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635, records examined by Brete Murphy (raised May 5, 1880).
- Officer election, December 1889, as reported in the Brooklyn Citizen, December 22, 1889.
- Past masters of Advance Lodge, as printed in the Brooklyn Eagle, November 30, 1913.
Newspapers
- Brooklyn Eagle: December 30, 1888; December 28, 1890; February 22, 1908; March 4, 1933.
- Brooklyn Citizen: December 22, 1889; February 22, 1891.
- Brooklyn Daily Times: December 27, 1890; August 29, 1908.
- Sun (New York): January 31, 1892.
- The Daily Register (Red Bank, N.J.): August 1, 8, and 15, 1878.
- Poughkeepsie Eagle-News: October 18, 1879.
- Chicago Tribune: October 31, 1880; Chicago Daily Telegraph: November 14 and 28, 1880.
- Evening Star (Washington): March 8, 1902.
- The New York Times: October 12, 1901; November 2, 1901; March 4, 1933.
- Nashville Banner: August 26, 1903.
- Times Union (Brooklyn): June 4, 1905; March 4, 1933.
- Evening Review: August 13, 1914.
- Ephrata Review: November 6, 1925; May 7, 1926; May 29, 1931; March 17, 1933.
- Oakland Tribune: March 19, 1933.
Organizational and Published Sources
- Henry Ridgely Evans, The Old and the New Magic (1906).
- Harry Houdini, [The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin](The unmasking of Robert-Houdin : Houdini, Harry, 1874-1926 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The unmasking of Robert-Houdin : Houdini, Harry, 1874-1926 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.
(1908).
- "Deaths of Fellows of the Academy," New York Academy of Medicine (1933).
- W. Golden Mortimer, History of Coca: The Divine Plant of the Incas (1901).
- David Goodsell, Magic in America: The Story of the Society of American Magicians (2023).
- Society of American Magicians, [history and past-presidents list](The Society of American Magicians
The Society of American Magicians
historical overview and past presidents (PDF); MagicPedia (Genii).
Personal Papers
- Papers documenting Houdini's stage work with Mortimer, as examined by Brete Murphy.
Genealogical and Public Records
- Obituary of George T. Mortimer, The Sun, January 31, 1892.
- Vital and burial records: Greenwood Cemetery, New York.
