One of the advantages of moving from the junior building to the senior building at St. Albert’s was the view. You see, the first room that you would view when you walked into the junior building was the principal’s office, but in the senior building the first room that you would view is the library.

Each week the senior building classes would have one hour in the library. This was always looked forward to by the Class of ’75 and it truly made reading a fun experience as you could read any book you liked. During this time period some students would research projects using the encyclopedias that were available in the library. Others would sign out children novels such as the “Happy Hollister’s” and take them home to read. There were a few who would go to the large dictionary at the library and giggle while they looked up dirty words and, yes, most of the dirty words were in this huge dictionary.

One time a book on magic came into the library and someone from the class signed it out and learned some of the magic tricks that were in the book. One section was called magic with numbers and the student managed to fool everyone with a magic effect from that book. It went something like this:

Think of a number between 1-20. Now double that number. Add 10 to that number. Now divide that number in half, then subtract your original number. The number you are thinking of now is 5.

The next week when the magic book was returned there was a waiting list for the book as other students wanted to see how this effect worked. Looking at it now it looks pretty simple but to a ten year old it was a mini miracle of an effect. The secret was it would always be half of the number you added. In the example the number added is 10 so it would be 5. If you added 8 it would be 4 and so on.

Here is another one from the book and I am sure you will be able to figure this one out right away. Take five 3×5 cards or strips of paper. Write Cardinal on one and any other animals on the other four. The idea is that St. Albert Cardinal’s are magical and can always be found, even if you are doing this at home and reading it from a book. Let’s give it a try shall we.

1- Line up the cards in a row in any order you like.

2 -Assign each card a number by counting left to right 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or right to left 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (your pick).

3 -Whatever number is assigned to the cardinal card, swap it that many times with a card next to it (either side, your choice again).

4 -Remove the two cards on each end as they are not magical.

5 -Swap the cardinal card one more time with a card next to it.

6 – Remove the two cards on each end again as they are not magical, remaining card is the cardinal card.

If you followed the instructions you will see that there is something magical about St. Albert’s cardinals, they can always be found no matter where you are, even from a magic book from decades ago.