Jack Burch – A Bicycle Mystery

I really enjoy finding new throw-out cards that utilized the free promotion that was offered to magicians from Bicycle Playing Cards. In exchange for the ad on the front of the card that proclaimed how good Bicycle Cards were, the magicians could get the cards made up for free. This card for Jack Burch caught my eye as the wording was a little different than what I was used to seeing.

 

In place of the phrase “When you play with BICYCLE you hold GOOD PLAYING CARDS”, this card states, “Bicycle” “Playing cards possess peculiar points of merit not found in other makes at the same price. Their playing and wearing qualities are unequaled. Insist on having “Bicycles”. “They are the best”.

The back of this card remains a mystery however. It is gone. It is not that there is scrapbook residue covering the back. The back is just not there. Evidently this card was glued in a scrapbook, and when it was removed, the Bicycle back was left behind. It is a shame too, as I feel this card is a very early example from the Bicycle promotion. The era in which Jack Burch performed leads me to believe this.

From The Sphinx for July of 1902.

Below is a short bio on Burch which appeared in The Sphinx for November of 1902. His name was John G. Burch, but in reality his last name was Burcy. He went by “Jack”. Besides the bio, he was also featured on the cover of the magazine.

In the first ten years of the Twentieth Century, I found several references to Burch, and good reviews, in the magic magazines and newspapers of that era. An odd item I found in The Sphinx for June of 1904 was a notice that Burch had declared bankruptcy. I thought that this was an unusual thing to print in a magic magazine. This is where I found his real last name.

Occasionally Burch ran ads in The Sphinx for items that he had for sale. In September of 1906, he was offering Harry Kellar’s “Blue Room” Illusion for sale. If he really did have Kellar’s original apparatus as he said he did, you would think he would have avoided misspelling his name as Keller. Twice!

Kellar ad from the Boston Globe for May 18, 1897 and The Sphinx for September, 1906.

After 1910, references to Jack Burch seemed to stop. The only thing I did find was an item from The Sphinx in February of 1917, in which W. J. Hilliar was quoted as saying, “Do you remember – When Jack Burch was a magician?” Like the backside of his throw-out card, Jack Burch just vanished…

From the Louisville Courier-Journal for January 6, 1901.