The exhibition gave the public a chance to see New York’s finest demonstrate their athletic ability as police competed in everything from horse-riding challenges to hurdle races amid the pomp and circumstance of band music, singing, and humorous contests that “caused such laughter that the big grandstand fairly rocked,” according to The National Police Journal, October 1921, p. Hosted by the New York Police Department, the Police Field Day Games was an annual fundraising event held in the summer or early autumn on two consecutive Saturdays or Sundays at the Gravesend Race Track in Brooklyn, New York, among other locations, including Sheepshead Bay Race Track, also in Brooklyn. Harry Houdini performing the suspended straitjacket escape at the Police Field Day Games in Brooklyn, New York, on Aug( The New York Times, August 29, 1920) It was published in The New York Times on August 29, 1920, with the caption, “HARRY HOUDINI, HANDCUFF KING, Freeing Himself from a Straight-jacket While Suspended in the Air at the Police Field Day Games at the Gravesend Race Track.” Instead, here’s a scarce photo of the man, upside down as he often was (hence the danger of plummeting), and a little background info to follow. I suspect that today at least some Houdini and history bloggers will expound on the myths, realities, and ironies of the pioneering showman’s demise, so I won’t offer you more of that. And of all the things that could have killed a daredevil like him-drowning, suffocation, strangulation, plummeting-it was peritonitis that ultimately did him in. That’s exactly what Harry Houdini did 91 years ago today: October 31, 1926, 1:26 p.m., age 52.

There’s no enviable day to die, but if you’re a magician, and you have to cash in your chips, anyway, it might as well be on Halloween.

Houdini straitjacket escape