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June 3rd, 2003

Teen beats medical odds, has magic touch By CORRINE WILSEY

For Generation NEXT

The Magical Chadakazam can make a cane dance, get a blind-folded duck to pick your card from a deck of cards, and make audience members spout 50-cent pieces like a fountain. But that's not why he's magical.

Chadakazam is Chad Juros, an Egg Harbor Township boy who was given a 5 percent chance of living after being diagnosed at age 7 with a rare leukemia. The fact that he survived is what makes him magical to his mother, Penny.

What makes him magical to others is his ability to pull coins from ears, make doves disappear and get a glass of water to levitate. Those are some of the 19 tricks he performs in his 45-minute show, which he takes on the road about 20 times a year. Chadakazam will next perform in public at 11 a.m. June 24 at the Egg Harbor Township branch of the Atlantic County Library. He's also scheduled to teach a magic course starting July 9 at Egg Harbor Township Middle School.

It was during his long illness - from December 1995 to January 1998, when he underwent an experimental protocol at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that involved chemotherapy and brain radiation - that Chad was introduced to magic. His father, Donald, was a dentist in Northfield who dabbled in magic, performing tricks for his patients to relax them before surgical procedures.

Donald taught his son a magic trick a week during the months he was hospitalized. In addition to learning magic tricks during that stressful time, Penny says her son had to learn to walk and talk all over again.

"He's a miracle," she says. "To go from having last rites administered two times, from not even being able to walk or talk, to do all this sleight of hand magic is a miracle."

Chad, who continued learning magic tricks after his release from the hospital, continued his training on his own after his father died, at age 41, of brain cancer in January 2000. Asked how he compares to the man who gave him his start in magic, Chad says, "I'm better than he was."

"His father would love that he said that," his mother says. "And he's right. He is better."

At 4-foot-10-inches and 78 pounds, Chad, 14, is considerably smaller than his eighth-grade classmates at Egg Harbor Township Middle School. But on stage, dressed to look like a gangster in black pants, black shirt with rolled-up sleeves, vest and black hat, he's a giant. Adults like his coin and card tricks best. Crowds respond most favorably to the levitating glass of water and a trick called the Drawing Board. For the Drawing Board, Chad draws a smiley face in black marker on a white board. But when the face becomes so animated that it gets scary, he hurries to erase it.

His favorite trick is the Dancing Cane, which he performs to Michael Jackson's "Thriller." The Dancing Cane is exactly what it sounds like: Chad's black cane leaps from his hand and dances alone in the air.

"I like it so much, I walk around the house doing it," he says.

The hardest trick to learn was the Miser's Dream. That's where Chad makes 50-cent pieces materialize from various body parts of audience members. You expect him to be able to pull coins from behind someone's head. You don't expect him to play people like slot machines, getting them to lift and shake their legs as he sticks a bucket under their butts to catch coins that fall with a comical clank into the bucket.

Chad, his mother says, has a typical sibling love-hate relationship with his older sister, 16-year-old Faith, a tennis player and 10th-grader at Egg Harbor Township High School.

Off the stage, Chad is a typical teen. He likes history, gets A's and B's on his report card, enjoys drawing in pencil and listens to all kinds of music except punk rock. Due to the many months he spent riding in the car back and forth to Philadelphia for radiation treatments, Chad became an expert on the oldies, the kind of music his mother favors. Most people his age don't know who Chubby Checker is. Chad is more likely not to know who Carson Daly is.

His hobby is rocketry: He builds rockets and launches them. Sometimes, they come back to earth intact enough to use again. His last one, he says, crashed and broke.

The Magical Chadakazam is available for hire. He can be contacted at chadakazamMagic@aol.com

For more information on the Magical Chadakazam, visit

www.magicalchad.com

(Corrine Wilsey is an eighth-grade student at Ocean City Intermediate School.)