Profile: The Wizard of Or: Jerry Andrus

It must have been a decade now that I was privileged to visit Jerry Andrus at his home, the "Castle of Chaos," in Albany, Oregon. His extremely funky, packed house looked ordinary enough from the outside, but once you stepped in it was like going behind the curtain of Oz's wizard. Only a lot more down home. Having lived there virtually his whole life, there was a quirky place for everything: a vacuum cleaner in the ceiling, a room full of half-finished illusions and, my favorite, an Apple computer with saxophone keys jerry-rigged to it so that common shift-letter combinations could be pushed with a single depression. This special Apple was set atop apparatus beneath which was a treadmill. Combined with a tape recorder that he had arranged to be hands-free, Andrus could exercise while he transcribed his magnum opus, named Scribulations if I remember correctly. As we toured the house young booking agent I was with said more than once, "You're a wonderful man." It was clear no woman lived there and Andrus explained that it was a very rare and beautiful thing for two people really to get along. It is not surprising that such a man, not just a magician but the most prolific and creative deviser of optical illusions in recent history, was so free and easy with the truth: that, too, is a rare thing. I will never forget the off-the-cuff way he told us how he was alerted, as a youngster, to the pervasiveness of illusions. The genesis was geographic. "Everyone said that the United States was the greatest country. I believed them. Then they said Oregon was the greatest state. Okay. But when they started in on Albany being the greatest city in this state, a bell went off. I knew that wasn't true, and backtracked to begin questioning all the other statements I had been fed." (Okay, it's been a decade so this isn't an exact quote, but you get the gist.) Andrus explained to that the Castle was in disrepair. Usually, when you walked into his house, an electric eye rang notice across the way, at his brother's. We visited his brother and creativity apparently ran in the family. We were treated to spectacular fractal-like displays, on a VCR, of colorful shapes. It turned out they were made by filming dishwashing liquid at an oblique angle. Then Andrus's brother was off to a birthday party, as a friend of his was turning 100 that day. Back in the Castle he showed me the work on his color change, in which the hand is shown empty both before and after the card changes, and kindly gave me permission to publish instructions to make his amazing three-dimensional "parabox" (a tower that seems suddenly to flip positions as you watch it with one eye) in my co-authored What is Sex? (review) Just another day in the life of the Wizard of OR.