Stincel, Man of Mystery, and the Miracle of Digitization

It's a wonderful mystery that has lingered for most of this century.  

I first encountered this lovely piece advertising a magician named Stincel in 2006 when a reader of throwingcard.com, a website that preceded the creation of Propelled Pasteboards, kindly uncovered a small stash of these lovely, colorful cards at an estate sale and kindly provided me an exemplar.  The charming period graphics of this large-scale card instantly captured my imagination.  But who was Stincel?  Therein lies the mystery.

So, on New Year's Day, 2017, I posted an entry describing some of the extraordinary efforts I had made to "Get Stincel!!"  This included searches of various resources and databases and consultation with fellow historians.  Nothing.  

Then, some genealogical research suggested a possible match: Sylvester A. Stincel (1898-1996), a cabinetmaker and WWII veteran born in Illinois who later settled in California.  Though these leads seemed promising, I was forced to conclude:

Despite these advances, I still cannot find a trace of Stincel performing as a magician anywhere.  So, dear reader, I turn the mystery over to you.  

For the last eight years, the challenge remained unanswered.

Yet, other forces have intervened.  As discussed elsewhere on these pages, digitization of massive volumes of resource material - especially the AskAlexander database run by the Conjuring Arts Center - has greatly facilitated historical research and, in some cases, rendered possible discoveries which, in the past, would have been impossible.  We described how important this can be for researchers and collectors trying to track down information about pieces of ephemera that, at one time, simply could not have been researched.  

And so it is with the mystery of Stincel . . .

Beginning in 1946, a lighting engineer and magic enthusiast named Charles R. Tracy (a/k/a Bud Raymond), began compiling a Directory of Magicians, offering magicians free listings, and obtaining names and addresses through a variety of sources worldwide.  When he hit 5,000 names, Tracy thought he would go to print, but names kept pouring in.  After five years of work, he finally went to press.  In its first incarnation, Tracy printed 2,500 copies of his 400 page Directory of Magicians, containing more than 16,000 listings.  (Linking Ring, Jan. 1952).    It initially sold for $5 in paperback, $6.50 hardcover, though later ads at the 1955 IBM convention suggest it was reduced to $2.    This extraordinary and seemingly unprofitable work made Tracy, who lived more than 101 years, "known by magicians everywhere." (Linking Ring, June 1987).  

Among its 16,000 listings, the Directory of Magicians includes eight words that constitutes the only reference I've found to Stincel as a performing magician.  It reads "STINCEL Sylvester 316 E Mulhall El Monte California."  The entry not only confirms that Stincel is Sylvester Stincel, but puts him, around 1950, at an El Monte address only about 12 miles from the Los Angeles address listed on the souvenir card.    

Make no mistake: at some point in the past I had endeavored to search Stincel in AskAlexander with negative results. However, AskAlexander is constantly expanding its archive, making it (like many digitized databases) increasingly powerful. Thus, repeating this search recently led me to the Directory of Magicians, the contents of which, at some point, was added to AskAlexander's amazing collection.  To this day, newspapers.com, a resource with more than a billion archived pages, produces nothing about Stincel as a magician, but contains three hits for a 1998 estate sale of real property located in Twenty-Nine Palms California belonging to Sylvester Anthony Stincel in 1998.