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George Sateriale made his debut as a professional magician when he was 12 years old.
A woman who lived across the street from his parents’ summer cottage in Wolfeboro, N.H., was having a birthday party for one of her grandchildren and she asked George to come over and do some magic tricks for the children. Afterward, she handed him five dollars and said, “Now, you’re a professional.”
But that was a long time ago — long before he graduated from the University of Lowell in 1984 with a degree in mechanical engineering, and long before he gained international recognition in the world of magic, becoming the only person in the industry to win two gold medals — one each at the annual conventions of the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
Sateriale became hooked on magic at the age of eight when his father showed him a couple of coin tricks he had learned from a co-worker. He soon began scouring the library for books about magic, and designing his own tricks using all manner of material, from his mother’s pots and pans to stuffed animals like his sister’s Raggedy Ann doll.
The hobby went on hold during high school, where Sateriale became more interested in athletics. But once in college, he took up magic again as a way of making extra money. He performed part-time at the Ground Round in Peabody and at parties and other events.
When he graduated, he went to work for a company that designed circuit boards but he continued to dabble in magic, wondering if he could make a living at it. He was getting offers to perform on cruise ships and do a lot of traveling, something that wasn’t possible because of his job.
By this time he was planning to marry Holly Somerville, the cousin of his old college roommate, Ken Campbell. Holly encouraged George to give magic a shot.
His first jobs were on cruise ships but, he says, there was no big bolt out of the blue that catapulted his career.
“You just work hard,” he says, “and it slowly sneaks up on you. Twenty years later you look back and realize how far you’ve come.”
Once having turned professional, George deleted the “e” at the end of Sateriale. He became George Saterial (rhymes with “material”) because he felt it would be easier for people to pronounce.
He also began studying acting, voice and corporeal mime.
Acting lessons were important, he says, because “any kind of performing is acting. And it gives you more confidence on stage. The mime lessons taught me how to use my body to communicate. That’s important because in some parts of my act I don’t speak, and body language is important.”
The voice lessons helped him to overcome his typical Boston accent so that now, no matter where he appears, people can’t tell where he’s from.
In the latter part of the 1980s, Saterial decided to add doves to his act – but he didn’t want to use anything as mundane as a cage. Then one day, while wandering through a furniture store, he spied a grandfather’s clock. At first he didn’t think much of it, but the more he thought of it, the better he liked it. It could, he reasoned, become his trademark.
Using his engineering skills, he built a clock that was the centerpiece of his act when he won the two gold medals in 1999. In this performance, he makes doves appear on his fingertips and places them inside the face of the clock. He removes the sphere at the end of the pendulum and makes it multiply and then disappear. Another dove materializes and, when Saterial opens the face of the clock, the doves inside are gone, replaced by the clock’s gears and cogs.
But all his magic is not performed on a stage. He once performed on a movie set.
When Good Will Hunting, starring Matt Damon and Minnie Driver, was being shot in Cambridge, Saterial was hired to play the role of a street magician.
But as is often the case with movies, his scene was cut in the final editing. The good news, however, is that he still receives royalty checks for his work in the film.
The magician who started devising tricks with his mother’s cookware says, “An engineer makes things that work in a certain way. When you design a magic trick, you engineer something that looks ordinary but does extraordinary things – or that does something completely different from what it appears intended to do.”
Saterial says he doesn’t have an agent but does work through several agencies. Whatever method he uses, it must be effective.
He has appeared in shows in New York, Los Angeles, Canada, Europe and Asia, and on trans- Atlantic cruise ships. The corporations for which he has performed read like a page from Fortune 500.
“I travel quite a bit,” he says, “and Holly goes with me most of the time. We do a two-person act where she appears and disappears.”
The part of the business he enjoys most, he says, is “creating that same feeling of amazement in others that I felt when my dad showed me that first coin trick. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Old friends and classmates may be able to catch his show this July when he performs at the annual convention of the Society of American Magicians at John Hancock Hall in Boston. Details may be found on his Web site: saterial.com.