Life
Magazine
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Given the poor quality of the scan, the following was transcribed from a LIfe magazine loaned from Shari Murphy. George Legler, 67, of Tucson, Ariz., is a retired postal clerk who has ulcers, exists on warm milk and 13 kinds of pills and lives largely for the joy of leading children through an imaginative fairyland which he built out of stone cement and steel cable. For 17 years Legler has been delighting children with free nighttime trips through his dimly lighted "Valley of the Moon," which has a sorcerer's castle, a wishing amphitheater and a sugarplum tree, a cave of terror and enchanted garden. He tells the children fairy tales in which good deeds always bring rewards and bad deeds are punished. He turns water into candy and makes a green feather become a snake. The children follow him, shivering at suggestions of danger but reassured by the magic pebbles and trinkets which Legler gives out as keepsakes and by their mothers following close behind. During the disenchanted daytime Legler lives in two of the castle's narrow rooms. Already host to 2500 children this year, he dreams of eventually taking every first grader in Tucson through his half-acre world of make believe. Scanned
Photographs (in progress- come back soon): 2) Magic Symbol — is traced with fairy elixir on child's right hand to cast protective spell. If mark were accidentally made on left hand, Legler says, "you might go down the road talking to yourself." 3) In visual trick, girl gazes at sorcerer's castle through hole in card which produces an optical illusion and makes her see a corridor instead of a flat wall. 4) Fairy princess, usually played by Legler's 7 year old granddaughter appears to the children in a burst of light outside sorcerer's castle. When an occasional skeptic asks "Is she really real?" the other children quickly squelch the offender by saying "Of course she is. She moved, didn't she?" 5) Eerie exit made under watchful eye of flame lit cement gnome brings a little boy out of cave of terror where wicket witches, ogres and trolls are imprisoned under fairy spell. After this awesome interval, the children are relieved to come out and again spy the fairy queen smiling from a hill. |