NECROLOG

JAMES ‘THE AMAZING’ RANDI

James ‘the Amazing’ Randi was a professional magician, skilled escapologist, author and entertainer, a leading figure in the ‘skeptical’ 1 movement for many years and a figure of considerable importance in the sociological study of the paranormal.

A slightly built man sporting a magnificent hallmark white beard, he proved a persistent media presence for over half a century after hitting upon challenging psychic claimants as part of a crusade against what he condemned as pseudoscience, quackery and gullibility on the part of the public and society at large. Lionised as a champion of truth and touchstone by skeptics and considered a pest of the first order by many others, over the years he proved a brilliant self-publicist and media personality who became internationally known for outspoken and brazen attacks on healers, fortune tellers, psychokinetic key benders, dowsers, ESP practitioners and housewives who claimed they helped solve child murders, upon all of whom he turned his basilisk glare. For many years he travelled the globe brandishing an increasingly dog-eared cheque for $10,000 announcing it would be payable to anyone who could convince him they truly possessed psychic or supernatural powers.

Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Toronto in 1928, the son of a telephone company executive, Randi maintained he was a child prodigy of sorts. “I had a very nasty time of it as a child. There was no one to talk to. There were no special schools for children back then,” he recalled in 1981. He found escape in libraries, museums and shows at the Casino Theatre where he witnessed a stage