Magician's Daily Herald headline predictions 'spot on'

Nearly 60 years to the day of the Chicago Tribune's "Dewey Defeats Truman" edition, an area magician has made newspaper headlines seem easy to predict.

In late September, Bill Blagg III, a Zion native, recorded his predictions of the Daily Herald's Nov. 7 headlines on a cassette tape.

That tape, placed inside a sealed Federal Express box, sat on display in a Plexiglas case at the Hemmens Cultural Center from Sept. 26 until Blagg's Friday evening performance.

At the 8 p.m. show, Blagg asked a Hemmens staff member to retrieve the tape from the box, box office supervisor Amanda Rodebeck said.

As the tape began to play, audience members checked predictions with copies of the paper, Rodebeck said.

"It was spot on," she said.

Blagg had predicted that a picture of President-elect Barack Obama would be on the cover of the paper.

Obama's picture was indeed featured on the front page, directly under the paper's masthead.

Blagg also conjectured that local police would be referenced on the front page, Rodebeck said. Friday's page one contained coverage of police response to recent gang violence in Elgin.

Blagg also predicted that Elgin Area School District U-46 would be "talking or negotiating" with someone, Rodebeck said.

Coverage of a meeting between village of Bartlett and U-46 officials was given front page play.

Blagg told us this week that the unique thing about the predictions "is that you can't tell anyone about it or it doesn't work. Because honestly, I would be predicting lottery numbers and taking a finder's fee all day long if I could," he said.

Blagg had promised to refund audience member's $20 to $50 tickets if he had been proven incorrect.

Luckily for him, neither Dewey nor Truman graced the front page this time.

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Related documents</h2> <ul class="morePdf"> <li><a href="/pdf/page1.pdf">Front page of Daily Herald's Nov. 7, 2008, Fox Valley edition</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>