Johnny Fox

John Robert "Johnny" Fox (November 13, 1953 – December 17, 2017) was an American professional sword swallower and sleight of hand expert.

Early life Fox was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. He saw his first sword swallower at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Massachusetts, when he was eight or nine years old. At approximately the same age, his father gave him a book about Harry Houdini which inspired Fox—substituting spaghetti—to recreate the magician's trick of swallowing a key on a string and then regurgitating it. He learned sleight-of-hand in the 1970s from Tony Slydini, an Italian magician known as "the Master of Misdirection". In his early twenties, Fox was performing in Boulder, Colorado, when he heard that his act had been stolen by a competing magician. He was featured in the 2003 documentary Traveling Sideshow: Shocked and Amazed by Jeff Krulik. He occasionally worked as a consultant for other sideshow artists.

Freakatorium In June 1999, Fox opened the Freakatorium, El Museo Loco, a museum of side show curiosities, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the face of low numbers of visitors and rising rent, the museum was closed in January 2005. Fox was partly inspired to open the museum by his childhood visits to Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus in Times Square. His collection of oddities includes narwhal tusks, an elephant's-foot liquor chest, a two-headed turtle, a vest owned by General Tom Thumb, and the glass eye of Sammy Davis Jr.

Personal life Fox married his wife, Valeria, an Argentine dancer and photographer, while they were atop elephants in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2002. They resided in Seymour, Connecticut.

Illness and death

In the fall of 2016, Fox was diagnosed with hepatitis-C and cirrhosis of the liver and tumors.

After waking up from his coma, he recovered enough to return to performing at the Maryland Renaissance Festival for the fall 2017 season.

Fox died on Sunday, December 17, 2017, of liver cancer, aged 64.