Immediately before stepping on stage, he suggests using the tip of your right pinky finger to find the upper end of your trousers zipper. If your fingernail clicks against the zipper’s metal pull-tab, then you are safe and ready to make your entrance. If your pinky slides in up to your knuckle, however, then you have to XYZ PDQ (eXamine Your Zipper, Pretty Darn Quick)!

Seeking to keep Mr. Jory entertained, he idly tossed off a stunt in which he recalled the location of all 52 cards in a shuffled deck.

“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”

“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”

Mr. Lorayne’s attainments are all the more noteworthy in light of the fact that he grew up in poverty, struggled academically as a result of undiagnosed dyslexia and concluded his formal education after only a single year of high school.Image

Mr. Lorayne did not claim to have invented the mnemonic system that was his stock in trade: As he readily acknowledged, it harked back to classical antiquity. But he was among the first people in the modern era to recognize its use as entertainment, and to parlay it into a highly successful business.

He was 96.

Good afternoon, just wondering why didn’t Harry Lorraine include a memory palace in his memory techniques?