A few months after Randi’s passing, it still is not easy to talk about him. We have often heard and read about his extraordinary adventures and exploits: the unmasking of Peter Popoff, the Carlos Hoax, the Alpha Project, the Geller caper, the psychic surgeons of the Philippines, the “Water with Memory” affair, and so on. But Randi was so much more.

He was above all a person who cared a lot for others, especially the less fortunate. Generous and unselfish, he always had kind words for everyone and was always ready to offer concrete help, not just comforting words. I have copies of innumerable letters from people all over the world who thank him for what he selflessly did for them.

His gestures of generosity and altruism were like pebbles capable of creating avalanches and having, directly or indirectly, concrete and positive effects on the lives of many people.

His stories of his life “on the road,” when he was a magician in the United States and around the world, were exciting, but every now and then telling them made his voice crack. Like when he was lucky enough to listen to a concert by the great Nat King Cole in Buffalo, New York, and then was able to sneak backstage. Completely infatuated with Cole’s extraordinary voice, Randi managed to shake his hand, express all his admiration, and exchange only a few words with that authentic legend of music before he was abruptly dismissed by some stagehand, because “It’s not good that a white boy mixes with colored people.”

Randi still got mad when he thought about certain things. In 1955, when he was already living in New York City, after moving from Canada where he was born, he was offered to work for eight weeks in Florida. “Well, you’ll be in a fistfight before you’ve been there for forty-eight hours,” his show business colleagues, with whom he used to hang out at Hansen’s Drugstore on Broadway in New York City, told him.

“Why?”

“Well, that’s totally segregated you know.”

Randi wasn’t sure he understood. “What do you mean?”

“It means that white and colored must be separated. They never attend a performance together.”

Randi shrugged. “I don’t care. I perform for everyone. I will put it in the contract that I will not perform for any segregated audiences.”

“Good luck!” they responded.

When Randi arrived in Ocala, Florida, where the tour was due to open at the Ritz Theater, he realized that on his bus there was a chain that divided the seats: white on one side, people of color on the other. In the streets, there were always two water fountains: one for the whites and the other for “coloreds.” It was the same for the bathrooms, on whose doors a sign read: “White Only” and “Colored Only.” He was already starting to fume from his ears.

He went into a Woolworths to get something to eat.

“Hot dog and an orange drink, please,” he asked.

“Oh, we can’t serve you here, sir,” the black waitress at the counter told him. “You have to go over to that side.”

Randi looked and, of course, he saw a divider.

“Does orange soda taste different if I drink it over there?”

“No … it comes out from the same machine,” she replied.

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll drink it here,” he told her with a smile.

The girl smiled back, and then she brought out the hot dog and orange drink, but a guy on the other side yelled over: “Hey, you! Whatcha doin’ over on that side?”

“Eating. Can’t you see?”

“What, you a nigger lover?”

“Well, I don’t know the young lady, but we can talk …,” he quipped with a wink.

The guy was furious. He glared at Randi like he wanted to kill him.

Randi was sure that once he got out of that place he would get into a fistfight, and he couldn’t wait to teach those bigots and retrogrades a lesson. However, nothing happened.

So he went back to the theater. That evening he presented his show; he freed himself from a straitjacket hanging by his feet from a hook suspended above the stage. The audience in the seats seemed to be almost exclusively white, but on the posters there was no mention of segregation, and, in any case, he had the spotlight right in his eyes, he was not sure if he was seeing well.

At the end of his act, out of curiosity, Randi took a tour of the theater. In the lobby, he noticed that there were boxes of programs from the show with the schedule for the evening and biographies of the artists. Each one had a serial, consecutive number on the front. Everyone in the stalls had one; it was given as a gift at the entrance. However, it seemed strange to him that so many were left over.

The organizers were busy counting them, and Randi thought they wanted to keep them as souvenirs, because they had the name of the theater on it. So he asked the guys.

“Oh, we don’t give out tickets. We give out programs, so we have to be able to account for every other program.”

Randi realized it was clever because it was obvious that they were not going to pay for the unsold “tickets.”

Then he went up in the balcony. He found that it was packed—only with black people.

“We can’t be in the audience down there,” a gentleman explained to him. “But we’d sure like to have a look at the program.”

Randi was confused. “Wait a minute. You didn’t get any programs?”

“No, they don’t give us no programs.”

Now Randi was enraged, sputtering “Wait right here.”

He went downstairs, grabbed a huge box of programs, brought it upstairs, and started handing them out.

“Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you; thank you very much.”

The organizer soon found out and was pissed off, demanding, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Well, these folks up here didn’t get programs. I guess you forgot … Well, don’t thank me.”

The attendant turned purple with anger and walked away stomping his feet.

Soon after, Randi returned to his dressing room, packed his bags, and took the first bus to the airport, where he waited all night for the first flight back to New York. He had had enough and for him the tour ended there. The theater manager later called him on the phone, threatening to sue him and take revenge. He threatened to make it impossible for Randi to work in any theater in the world if he didn’t rush back to Florida.

“The contract that I signed said that I would not work for segregated audiences, but it wasn’t like that in Ocala.”

“Well, that’s the way it is! It’s normal over here!”

“It may be normal for you, but among civilized people this is an abomination,” Randi replied and hung up the phone.

In the end, the theater manager was forced to pay Randi the agreed eight weeks, even though he had only performed once.

I wanted to share this story—which few people know and which Randi considered one of his great victories—because even if it has nothing paranormal about it, it illustrates very well how Randi, in his twenties, already had a very clear idea about what he considered intolerable in the world and knew that, if he wanted things to change, he had to commit himself personally.

Randi was like that all his life. The nice thing is that there are dozens of stories like this one, and every time I see a photo or open a box of clippings or a file of documents, they all come back to me, and I hear his voice while he tells them.

It hurts so much not being able to see him anymore and not being able to talk to him anymore. But he will always be here with me, in my mind and in my heart, and I really hope not only to be able to carry on his work in defense of rationality but also to always make my voice heard in the face of injustice. It won’t be difficult; I just need to think “What would Randi do now?” and the response will be automatic.

Goodbye, Amazing.