Hardy Chronicles — Who’s Your Daddy?Inside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

Sailor Maurice

We last mentioned the Hardy family in the first of many promised installments of the Hardy Chronicles. The story, for those of you new to Inside Magic or to the fun of reading, ended with my Grandma, Thoma Hardy outliving a sailor boy she met at the funeral of my grandpa, Thomas Hardy V.

Grandma and Sailor Maurice lived a pleasant life for the 18 months he was alive. By all accounts, the marriage was on the rocks anyway. (“On the Rocks” is a very clever turn of a phrase by me to apply to a sailor worst nightmare, the method of pouring an alcoholic drink and where most of the cars ended up after my grandma’s accident. I am so witty and clever that most magician-writers are jealous of me).

He was killed in a bizarre but unfortunate bet. Grandma had grown tired of Sailor Maurice and his Sailor Maurice-Like ways and some say she murdered him by offering him the bet. Either way, Sailor Maurice was not able to catch a bullet in his teeth like other “Real Men” Grandma told him about. In fact the coroner’s report notes he wasn’t even able to move his head into the correct position because of the chains and leather neck collar.

There were some at the Inquest that doubted there was even such a bet made; rather, they suggested she made the whole thing up just to get rid of Sailor Maurice. They’re position was strengthened by his lack of knowledge of the secret of bullet catching, the fact that he was securely bound with leather restraints and rope and that he was apparently asleep at the time the catch was to be performed.

But Coroner did find that Grandma Thoma was “A very attractive twice-widowed woman with big eyes and a sweet little way about her.” (See, Inquest of Cause of Death: Maurice Doodaday at 9). She and Coroner Pete dated after the Inquest – not as in “months after the Inquest was concluded” but as in “flirting during the autopsy slides and playing footsie…

Sailor Maurice

She died in her sleep – which is how she had always hoped she would pass – unfortunately she was sleeping while she piloting a friend’s barge on the Missouri River and took out the steel support structure of the west-bound Daniel Boone Route 40 bridge causing the structure’s partial collapse. Of the 38 families affected by the accidents on the bridge and those unfortunate souls plummeting into the Mighty Missouri, only two sued. Those were different times.

Before the carnage that marked the end of her life, Grandma and Grandpa Hardy did have one child; not surprisingly named “Thomas Hardy V.” As noted earlier in the chronicles, my family has been genetically linked by their mathematical ineptitude. (If that’s a word and it must be because my spell check didn’t highlight it). So with the birth of my father in 1939, there had been now three “Thomas Hardy V” and each were called “Tom Hardy, Jr.”

Some suggest that my father was not the offspring of my grandfather but only of my grandmother. See, Thomas Hardy, Jr. is a Bastard! , Senator Clarke Crandall, Tops Magazine, June-October 1956 and My Son, Thomas Hardy, Jr. by Dai Vernon in Hugard’s Magic Monthly, May 1958; but see, Hardly a Hardy, Reader’s Digest, June 1961 (suggesting Grandma Hardy couldn’t say “fer sure” who my grandfather was); and That’s Our Boy!, by Siegfried and Roy., (New York: Doubleday 1964). I discount the Siegfried and Roy claim because they are roughly the same age as my father and because when I brought them the book to sign as a souvenir and asked for a free pass to their show, their stage manager called security on me. (I’m not saying Siegfried or Roy called security on me or refused to give a free pass – I never got to see them. I’m saying I doubt the historicity of their statement because I’m bitter that I didn’t get something free. Some call me “petty” and “vindictive.” I hate those people and I will find some way to destroy them and their careers for their careless statements.)

Regardless of my true grandfather, I know that my father, Little Tom Hardy, was my true parent. He has passed away, now; and by that I mean he’s moved to <span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"