Long Tack Sam

To start out with an irony, I bought THE MAGICAL LIFE OF LONG TACK SAM in a bargain books sale.  The whole point of the book was author Ann Marie Fleming rediscovering the lost legacy of her great-grandfather, a magician and acrobat known as Long Tack Sam.  Discovering Long Tack for myself in a consignment sale therefore is not only appropriate but a little sad, too.  Won’t history finally be kind to this guy?

Fleming previously made a documentary out of her research, and subsequently adapted it into a graphic novel, and the result I read is as much a chronicle of her search as her discoveries about Long Tack’s remarkable journey and career into fame and back into obscurity.  At the height of his success he rubbed elbows with famous names like Harry Houdini and Cary Grant (before he was Cary Grant), crossed all kinds of cultural boundaries, and experienced history as we know it from a remarkable perspective.  Yet he was also a victim of the times, a well-compensated one, but whose fall from memory was built into the way his life unfolded.  When his contemporaries were making the transition from traveling acts to Hollywood, Long Tack continued to ply his skills the traditional way and became doomed to the existence of a novelty, one that was well-known at the time, but could never extend past the memories of those who saw him in person.

Even his own family barely remembered him!  That’s what Fleming discovered, even as they harbored relics of Long Tack’s glory days, completely ignorant of what they represented.  Putting all the pieces together produced a number of possible origins as well as documented proof of his success, but Fleming could never explain why it all fell apart so spectacularly, so mundanely.  Everyone wanted a piece of the act, but no one wanted, in the end, Long Tack Sam himself.

His story is remarkable, part of George M. Cohan, part BIG FISH, part Charlie Chan; THE MAGICAL LIFE OF LONG TACK SAM is one step into transforming the man into a legend, no matter how difficult it may prove to keep him in active memory.  To succeed, he had to become something more than himself, and in the transition lost a great deal of what he was.  Today, Long Tack can actually achieve greater success than he could ever have imagined, or even what Fleming herself could accomplish with her efforts.  There was a real Long Tack Sam, yes, but he was more sensational than reality could manage to properly convey.  And so he could very well enjoy a greater career as a fictional character.

Care to embrace this challenge?