Star Tribune
Pioneering bird-in-hand magician went from Mankato to stages around the world
A self-described loner, Jack Kodell bounced around southern Minnesota as a kid before — presto! — blossoming into a world-renowned magician.
With his first-ever live bird act, Kodell wowed everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Ed Sullivan. He made tiny parakeets appear and vanish from Paris to Las Vegas, where he performed the Strip’s first magic act in the 1940s at just 17.
Only a few people today remember Kodell. One of them is Roger Jennings, 80, a Mankato-born former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and lawyer who lives in Simi Valley, Calif. Jennings learned magic from his ninth-grade algebra teacher, Ronald Hibbard, who started a magic club in the 1950s at Lincoln Junior High School in Mankato.
“All of the seven members knew about Jack Kodell and his success in performing magic around the world,” said Jennings, a member of various magicians’ organizations for nearly 50 years.
Online there is a 5½-minute clip of Kodell’s act, recorded in France in 1958 , when he was nearly 30 and wearing his full-tail tuxedo.
But things weren’t always so glitzy for Kodell — a stage name for John Koudelka, born in Mankato in 1927.
His father sold Firestone tires in southern Minnesota before World War II, moving every year to open new territory. The lifestyle was tough on young Jack, the only child of Ed and Ida Koudelka, a school teacher.
“We lived throughout the state of Minnesota in a different town every year, Mankato, Albert Lea, Austin and some small towns, too,” he wrote in “Kodell: Do Something Different,” his 2011 autobiography.
Making friends proved tricky, he said, because “each town held a different school and different kids … one year really does not cement any solid bonding of lifetime school pal relations.”
Kodell said his parents felt sorry for all the uprooting “and made every effort to make up for it in any way they could.” Or as a 1952 profile put it in Linking Ring, a magic journal: “His folks catered to his every whim.”
That included occasionally driving the family car at age 7 under parental supervision and moving beyond his model airplane hobby to fly real airplanes — logging 79 cockpit hours aloft between ages 8 and 13 (three years before he could get a license).
The turning point for the adventurous kid came in 1941 when Jack won the Soap Box Derby in Minneapolis, prompting a Sunday front-page photo with his trophy and a big grin. He qualified for the international title in Akron, Ohio, but lost in the first heat to a kid from West Virginia.
While in Minneapolis for the derby, Jack stopped at a downtown magic shop and purchased a set of multiplying billiard balls. He mastered the trick “after countless hours and weeks of practice,” studying under a Mankato meat merchant who “dabbled in the ancient art” of magic, according to the 1952 profile. “Under the butcher’s tutelage Kodell soon developed into Mankato’s favorite and busiest young performer.”
Jack moved with his parents to Chicago when he was 16, just as he was developing his parakeet trick. By 17 he was performing in Las Vegas, a town that Kodell said “didn’t want any association with cheating involving cards or coins,” the two staples of magic shows. His bird act changed all that.
Kodell took the stage in several countries, including England where his 1950 marriage in London to popular British singer Mary Naylor landed him on the front page of the tabloids. But after 15 years as a headlining magician, Kodell walked away from magic in 1962 while still in his 30s.
“His type of top-hats-and-tails show, accompanied by a live orchestra, was on the way out, and he was not interested in changing his style,” the Orlando Sentinel reported in 2001.
After Jack and Mary moved to Florida in 1991, opening a dinner show theater and managing a hotel, Kodell said: “Now everyone does a bird act.”
Kodell died at 84 in Orlando in 2012, two years after a Florida theater honored him as a Legend of Magic. “It feels so good to walk out on stage one more time,” he told a magazine writer.
Kodell returned to Minnesota to perform at the State Fair in 1960. Minneapolis Star columnist Cedric Adams wrote that the former Soap Box Derby winner had visited 18 countries in the nearly two decades since leaving Minnesota, and noted that the Kodells had to fork out 50 cents each to get into the fairgrounds and 75 cents to park their car there. “Neither Mary nor her husband can quite get used to having to pay to go to work,” Adams wrote.
Curt Brown’s tales about Minnesota’s history appear every other Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident, and maintained that police who were contacted a few days after the encounter by the woman concluded “the Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.” Police have not confirmed that assertion.
Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” where he works as a host, the statement said.
The statement came after a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. The person who sent the memo to the transition team did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017 encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.
The detailed, four-page memo about the incident has set off debate among senior Trump transition officials, but so far Trump has stood behind Hegseth. Spokesman Steven Cheung earlier this week said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
The documents from Hegseth’s attorney and the memo to the transition team from someone who said she is a friend of the woman and was “present and involved” in the case tell drastically different stories about what happened seven years ago at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa – although both sides agree that Hegseth had a sexual encounter with a woman there.
Hegseth, whose second wife had filed for divorce the previous month, had traveled to Monterey to speak to a California Federation of Republican Women conference. Afterward, according to his lawyer, he went to the hotel bar with a group of attendees.
The Gophers women’s hockey team contained longtime WCHA rival Minnesota Duluth, winning 3-2 Saturday afternoon to sweep a series at Amsoil Arena. The No. 3 Gophers haven’t lost to the No. 4 Bulldogs since the NCAA regional final in mid-March 2022.
Peyton Hemp, Gracie Graham and Emma Connor scored for the Gophers (10-3-1, 6-3-1 WCHA), with Abbey Murphy getting two assists. UMD’s Kamdyn Davis and Nina Jobst-Smith scored for the Bulldogs (6-55-1, 5-4-1 WCHA).
Gophers freshman goalie Hannah Clark had 31 saves; UMD’s Eve Gascon had 35.
UMD freshman defender Davis scored her first career goal off a backhanded pass from sophomore winger Grace Sadura. Davis skated in from Clark’s left side and lofted it to the right corner in the first five minutes of the opening period. Freshman defender Graham whipped the puck past Gascon midway through the period to tie the game. Peyton Hemp scored a power-play goal in the final two minutes of the first period, poking the puck in low on a rebound of a shot by Nelli Laitinen. The Gophers closed the period with a 2-1 advantage.
UMD’s Sadura left the game near the end of the second period after taking a major misconduct penalty for making contact with an opponent’s head. The Bulldogs were able to kill the penalty to close the period.
Gophers junior winger Connor scored midway through the final period, putting a rebound past Gascon. The Bulldogs had a 5-3 power-play advantage when Jobst-Smith sent the puck sailing high past Clark in the final five minutes of play. UMD pulled Gascon in the final minute but wasn’t able to tie the game.
The Gophers eased past the Bulldogs 4-1 in Friday’s opener, helped by two goals by Ella Huber, one shorthanded, the other an empty-netter, and two assists by Natalie Mlynkova. UMD’s Gascon had 48 saves, tying a personal best.
The Gophers host No. 8 St. Cloud State for a home-and-home series next weekend. The Bulldogs host unranked Bemidji State.
Dassel-Cokato went 79 yards in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter, scored on a 5-yard run by Kobee Thielen with 51 seconds left and tacked on a two-point conversion to rally past Pequot Lakes 29-26 in the first Class 3A semifinal game Saturday at U.S. Bank Stadium.
Pequot Lakes built a 19-point lead early in the third quarter, then tried to cling to that advantage, but Dassel-Cokato’s rushing attack proved too potent.
The Patriots (11-1) scored the first time they touched the ball, on a 13-pass from Mike Oseland to Bryar Nordby for a 6-0 lead.
Dassel-Cokato (11-1) responded two drives later, Thielen scoring on a 1-yard fourth-down run. Thielen had carried the ball on each of the two previous runs and appeared to have scored on each, but officials didn’t see it that way. Thielen’s score gave Dassel-Cokato a 7-6 lead early in the second quarter.
It was the last time the Chargers had the lead until the final drive.
Pequot Lakes, making its first state tournament appearance since 2017, leaned on the arm of Oseland to build that 19-point advantage. Oseland went 15-for-22 in the game for 196 yards and three touchdowns.
Dassel-Cokato rallied in the second half, getting rushing touchdowns of 30 and 2 yards from running back Caleb Smock, cutting the Pequot Lakes advantage to five, 26-21, early in the fourth quarter.
