Amazing

You didn’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict one thing with certainty in the 1970s—the Amazing Kreskin would show up somewhere on TV.

He did the talk shows—Mike Douglas, Carson, Merv, Steve Allen—and he had his own show. Two of them, actually, produced at both ends of the decade in Ontario. You didn’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin to know that production costs were cheaper in Canada, even though the Canadian dollar was above par for a while.

I liked Kreskin. He looked like a high school science geek and came across as earnest. You root for guys like that. And I could never figure out how he did what he did.

Here’s a feature story from the Times-Democrat from Davenport, Iowa. To be honest, the columnist seems to be rubbing his nose in it at the end. Maybe she thought she was being funny, but it comes across to me as sarcastic and condescending.

Mental Magic
By Barbara Lewis
In the first place I liked "The Amazing Kreskin." Now that the record is straight, let me tell you about our meeting. I was late.
I thought about the various excuses I would offer, but obviously I would have to tell the truth. The Amazing Kreskin, a favorite in the campus circuit, has an amazing reputation for knowing what's on people's minds. I had seen him on the Tonight show when he closed his eyes, put his hand to his forehead, seemed to go into another world, and then told a member of the audience the serial number on a $10 bill in her pocket book.
"SORRY I WAS delayed, the bus was late," I lied.
No reaction on his face.
"That's all right," he said amiably.
"What am I thinking about having for lunch today?" I asked him.
"What would you care to have?" he shot back.
"You tell me," I persisted.
"What do you think I am, a mind reader?" he asked—rhetorically, I thought. But I was wrong.
"I'm a mentalist," he emphasized. "And," he added, "I can't lead a normal life any more. Wherever I go, people ask me to tell them things like their Social Security numbers."
"Okay," I nodded, "What’s mine?"
"I don't know," the Amazing Kreskin said. "I don't even know my own. I can never remember it."
THIS ADMISSION wrecked all my preconceived plans for the interview. I had been toying with the idea of doing a silent interrogation. I was just going to think the questions and he was supposed to get the message and answer them.
"It doesn't work that way," Amazing Kreskin said, opening a black and silver box bearing the name, Kreskin's Krystal, and containing a square Lucite block. On one side are etched the words "Yes" and "No" and on the opposite side are Buy and Sell.
"You can't think questions, you think answers," he said, handing me a pendulum of Lucite to dangle over the Kreskin Krystal.
He pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket and asked me to pick one and place it on the table without looking at it.
"Now pick up the pendulum and think positively. Think of a number," he suggested.
"OKAY," I said, "I'm thinking of 5."
I dangled the pendulum and it swung in the direction of No. 3. "You are giving yourself the wrong answer. Think of another number," he implored.
I thought of 8. I was sure I was thinking of 8. But the pendulum stubbornly went another route. I tried a lot of numbers until the little Lucite ball swung vigorously in the direction of "Yes, when I thought of number 7. I turned over the card and there was the seven of spades staring me in the face.
"That is the power of positive thinking," the Amazing Kreskin said, although he modestly admitted that he was not the inventor of the phrase.
KRESKIN, WHO appears on more than 150 campuses a year, says that his Krystal can help students improve their grades. Not by giving them the right answers, he said but by teaching them to concentrate.
"Actually," he conceded, "a person could use a glass of water instead of the Krystal. And in the past, I've told this to students who always want to know what they can do to get higher grades. Generally, what they have in mind is learning how to send thought messages to their professors. Again I tell them to think for themselves.
"For instance, I tell them to use the power of concentration to wake themselves up in the morning for classes instead of using an alarm clock. I tell them to take a pendulum and use it like a divining rod over two glasses. One glass represents "Yes" and the other "No." Keep thinking of the number seven if you want to awaken at 7 a.m. Once the pendulum swings towards glass "Yes," I tell them they have it made. And they should wake up by themselves at 7."
Of course, the Amazing Kreskin and 3 M, the manufacturers of the Kreskin Krystal, would prefer buyers to concentrate with their product rather than the water glass. As Kreskin says, it makes a nice gift at $10, and one could hardly give two glasses of water as a present.
This is the second time Amazing Kreskin has been involved in a commercial venture. His previous success was known as Kreskin's ESP, which was marketed by Milton Bradley. The residual checks are still coming in to his home in Caldwell, N.J. where he lives with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. George Kresge, which also happens to be his real name.
But most often, Kress (as he is known to friends) receives his fee in less conventional places.
"When I appear at colleges, I tell the audience in advance that I have asked that my check be hidden and that if I fail to find it, I will donate my entire fee to the school's scholarship fund. Once I found it in the chandelier over the center of the auditorium. Another time it was in the brim of a policeman's hat. The most unusual," he recalled, "was in the stuffing of a turkey. The school was nice enough to issue a dry check in its place."
Kreskin, who holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., insists there are no gimmicks and he has no confidantes. "I have a $20,000 offer to anyone who can prove that I have someone or something planted in an audience," he said.
He looked, at his watch and said, "Oh my gosh. I'm late for my next appointment. I forgot all about it."
I shoved Kreskin's Krystal at him and said triumphantly, "You see, you should have set it."
Then I suggested that he telephone to say he would be late. "I would but 1 can't find the number," he said, searching frantically through his pockets. "Now think positively," I said, handing him the pendulum. Start thinking about number 8."
He couldn't help grimacing.
As I said before, I liked the Amazing Kreskin. I'm not so sure the feeling was mutual.

Here’s a later Kreskin story, from the Dayton Daily News of November 30, 1976. It makes you wonder how many reporters got cutsy interview ideas in their heads when dealing with Kreskin. Enough with the gimmicks, just ask the questions.

‘Amazing’ gift lies in keen mind, Kreskin explains
By VINCE STATEN
Daily News Staff Writer
Here was the plan: Go in with a list of questions in a sealed envelope, concentrate on the questions, and let the Amazing Kreskin write the answers on a sheet of paper.
It had all the makings of a cream puff interview. The mentalist who performed Monday night at the Victory Theater would give a private showing of his extra-sensory skills.
Only it turned out even easier than that.
The writer didn't have to write out the questions and concentrate on them. Nor did he have to think them up.
In an interview, Kreskin supplies the answers and the questions.
DESPITE A 102 DEGREE fever, the Amazing Kreskin amazed the writer with his non-stop lecture on mentalism, psychology, parapsychology, meditation and the entertainment business. He also amused, enthralled and enlightened.
Kreskin (born George Kresge, in West Caldwell, N.J.) says flat out: "I am not a psychic. I have no supernatural powers."
He says he is a "hypersensitive, a mentalist and a mental wizard, comparable to a blind person who develops an acute sense of hearing."
The best way to define his powers is by listening to a story he tells about a Reno, New, murder case he helped solve.
"THE POLICE CAME to me and wanted me to help solve this murder of a young girl," he said. "And I told them thai it wasn't within my capacity to hold objects and get vibrations on who the murderer might be. I asked to see each of the witnesses separately. They'd all seen the murder but none of them could remember it.
"What I did was stimulate their imaginations," he added. "I told one girl to still-frame the action of the man she had seen. She started describing the man in vivid detail. And I told another witness who said he had been too far away to see the man's face to 'zoom' in like a zoom lens. And he described the same man. All of them did."
Kreskin says none of the four was hypnotized, that he merely helped them remember what they had seen and heard.
"I couldn't produce information that wasn't there," he said, "but I could help bring it up."
It was not until the interview was nearly over that the sealed envelope was mentioned.
Kreskin demurred, saying he'd tried it once for an interview in Houston and it didn't work too well.
But how about this?
SO IN A TINY ROOM in the southeast corner of the Biltmore Towers Hotel, while the temperature outside hovered near 20, for an audience of one, the Amazing Kreskin, through mental processes still not fully understood by science nor the writer, did cause a 25-cent piece to fall from the writer's hand at the same time that the words "jack of spades" were uttered.
And mysteriously, when a card with an "X" on the back was turned over, it was that same jack of spades.
Amazing, Kreskin! But the writer has seen that kind of magic before. Only the last time it was at an all-night poker game and it cost him money.

We don’t hear a lot about the Amazing Kreskin any more. He’s still around, though. He even has a Twitter feed. “Even now, I know what you're thinking!” his Twitter page says. I suspect he therefore knows I have finished this post.