When Magic Arrived in Downtown Phoenix: Bert Easley’s Fun Shop

The opening of a new store in the City Bus Terminal, then located at 225 West Washington Street in 1947, was a godsend for Phoenix kids but not necessarily for their ever-tolerant parents. Bert Easley’s Fun Shop was a mesmerizing place chock full of novelties and gags.

“I bought some exploding cigarette sticks there that year, which were small wooden sticks with a tiny bit of explosive material on one end,” says Bill Baker, a 91-year-old Phoenix native. “You would push the stick into the end of a cigarette, and when it was lit, there would be an impressive bang. It wasn’t enough to injure someone, but it got their attention.”

Soon after Baker’s purchase at the fun shop, the 14-year-old required 53 stitches in an unrelated accident. “Mom and I were in the doctor’s waiting room for a follow-up appointment, and she lit a cigarette,” Baker recalls. “It was one I had inadvertently put an exploding charge in, and it blew up in her face. Mom wasn’t hurt, but she wasn’t too happy.”

When he wasn’t selling gags to teens, the fun store’s proprietor, Herbert “Bert” Easley, excelled at teaching them magic tricks. “Bert sponsored the Hocus Pocus Magic Club at Phoenix Union High School [at the northwest corner of Seventh Street and Van Buren], which I was part of, and we performed shows at elementary schools,” Baker says. In 1948, Easley co-authored the book Doing Magic for Youngsters.

Easley’s performing career started at Mesa High School in the early 1920s, where he gained renown for his acrobatic cheerleading skills. Afterward, he attended the University of Arizona. Easley also worked as a cub reporter for the Arizona Daily Star, where he’d dramatically enter the office by doing a dancing cartwheel over the city desk.

Later, Easley worked in Los Angeles as a dancer in movies but transitioned to magic and toured the country. After opening his fun shop in Phoenix, he continued performing magic, including his most famous illusion of playing a drunk magician called “Leaning Shoes.” With his feet flat on the floor, Easley would lean at a 45-degree angle while smoking a cigarette, which became a full-page photo in Life magazine in 1952.

Easley relocated his store to 216 North First Street in 1949. Ed Chilleen worked at the Fun Shop for many years, starting in 1952. “The store Downtown was so small we had to move boxes out to the sidewalk and then back in at closing time,” he recalls.

In 1955, the Fun Shop moved to a more extensive retail and wholesale facility at 509 W. McDowell Rd. “There were two counters: a gag counter and a magic counter,” Chilleen says. “They hired former show business people to do everything from packing and shipping to working the counters.”

Easley died at age 82 in 1987, but his family kept the fun going until closing the business after 72 years in 2018.

Of the reported 2,000 tricks up Easley’s sleeve, perhaps his finest performance was during World War II when he tried to check into Chicago’s sold-out Croydon Hotel. As Easley recalled in Genii magazine in 1963, the lady at the front desk told him he’d have to be a magician to get a room. “I did magic! And I got my room. Pocket tricks can be helpful!”

Douglas C. Towne is the editor of Arizona Contractor & Community magazine, www.arizcc.com