The World’s Only Nude Magician (in Enigma) and the Lenox Lights

New Frontiers

‘The World’s Only Nude Magician’ takes a bow,

Or ‘it’s an Enigma to me!’

By Charles Shiver

The tiny municipality of Enigma in Berrien County has been much in the news lately. Fights have broken out between the Mayor and City Councilmen in City Council meetings, some elected officials have been arrested, and years’ worth of uncashed checks have reportedly been found locked away in City Hall.   

The recent headline-grabbing controversies reminded me that during summer 2018, I revisited Enigma for the first time in almost three decades. In July 1989, as a rookie reporter, I encountered a strange man there who spoke about once performing as “The World’s Only Nude Magician.”

Whenever I want to regain some measure of my belief in magic, mysteries, and miracles, I refer back to the story about C. Jon Owens that I originally wrote in the Tifton newspaper.

If you ever happened to drive through Enigma on Highway 82, you might not have even noticed the once beautiful and colorful, but now fading, painted mural still visible on the wall of what was once a “downtown” garage. I hope the mural is still there.

That was the handiwork of the World’s Only Nude Magician, and what better place to have met him during a hot, drowsy summer afternoon than in a community whose name, according to Webster’s Dictionary, means “a riddle; a perplexing or baffling matter, person, etc.”? John A. Ball, who founded the town between 1876 and 1880, once commented about the town’s odd name, “It was a puzzle what to name it anyway.”

Of course, the countryside near Enigma is where a local young girl’s snapshot was Photobombed by a smiling “ghost” in 2017 at Paradise Public Fishing Area (a story and photo that made Fox and other national news). The great outdoors near the neighboring community of Alapaha is where the Holyoak family spotted a panther with an African lion mane chasing a calf in the 1970s, and where their worker shot and killed the monstrous, allegedly 1,000-pound-plus wild swine “Hogzilla” in the 1990s. The giant porker became the theme of a new Southern festival (which I believe is now as dead and gone as the good, old Buzzard Day at Reed Bingham State Park), and the subject of a scientific investigation by National Geographic Channel “Explorer” that determined he was smaller than what was originally claimed.

So, on that propitious July day more than 35 years ago, I was standing next to C. Jon Owens (clad at the time in Levi jeans and a T-shirt displaying Yoda intoning, “Do or do not. There is no try,” in a speech balloon). The much-impressed city clerk had called me over from Tifton to write a story about him. He called himself “Howard Hughes with no money” because of his eccentricities. It was like being near a fiery human dynamo.

It took 74 hours for Owens, 37 at the time, to paint a large mural on the wall of G & G Auction House in Enigma. If he wasn’t so passionate about his work, the job could have lasted many more days. When he began painting his romanticized view of the auction house and South Georgia, he depicted everything you could imagine – From boys swimming in a lake to a deer pausing in the woods as if sensing the approach of a hunter.

But Owens also did work on the Enigma Post Office, game room, and Fire Department sign. “For awhile, I thought I was going to end up painting all of Enigma,” he said.

Owens, who was born in Montgomery, Ala., in 1952, had been all over the world and in every state except Alaska and Hawaii. During his youth, he spent five years in England and four years in Portugal. After service in the U.S. Army, he bought a health food restaurant in Key West, Fla. “I lived on steak,” he said. “My customers lived on alfalfa sprouts.”

After meeting a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, Owens sold his restaurant to go into show business. He said he eventually mastered 1,500 magic tricks.

“Magic’s a fascinating world,” he said. “It opens up a lot of new vistas. Magic ‘tricks’ help you find the real magic, which is in the mind. You really become aware of how ‘dead’ or unobservant people really are.

“I practice the Christian faith, not religion – which is a big business. The only way you can defeat evil is to understand evil. I quit drinking because of magic, but I also learned not to be afraid of death because of my faith.”

He didn’t want to take credit for his paintings, he added. “Jesus should take it all. When I paint, I’m in constant communication with the spirits.”

Owens held magic shows for the underprivileged, went on college lecture tours speaking about magic and hypnosis, and did ministry work in churches using magic. He also performed at the night clubs Shakespeare’s in Salt Lake City, Narcissus in Boston, and Raffle’s in Tucson, Ariz. – where he called himself “The World’s Only Nude Magician” and where his mother lived.

“She brought some of her friends over to watch my show,” he said. “It was a real trip.”

I assume his biggest trick was making his clothes disappear. You wonder where he hid cards and the rabbit for his act.

Owens said during his days as a magician, he met such celebrities as Harry Anderson of “Night Court” (now deceased), Whitney Brown of “Saturday Night Live,” the magician Dr. H.P. Lovecraft (I couldn’t find any reference to this person on the Internet other than as the iconic New England science fiction/horror writer), football player Joe Namath, and baseball great Willie Mayes.

According to Owens, he also was “Mr. Flick” in the Bic cigarette lighter commercials.

Unfortunately, while performing a “double-fire routine” one night in 1980 at the Narcissus club, he dropped a lighted torch in a lady’s lap. She wasn’t hurt, but he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Owens then began painting, a career that brought him mixed results. “I’ve eaten steak and lobster, but sometimes lived on bread and water,” he said. “I’ve slept under park benches for painting. I’ve even had a wino steal my portfolio. In Los Angeles, professional working women would come up to me asking to sell their bodies to me for my paintings. My art must be good … look at me.”

Owens’ acrylic, often surrealistic paintings were displayed at galleries in San Francisco, Daytona Beach, Fla., New York City, and Seattle. From 1980 to ’89, he produced more than 1,400 paintings.

Owens went to Enigma to paint a truck for a local gentleman who met him at a flea market stand in Jacksonville, Fla. Owens then went on to bigger things, such as the G & G Auction mural. Always restless, Owens planned to spend a few more days in Enigma bass fishing and painting. Then he was to set out again on the long but golden road of artistic freedom.

I often wonder whatever became of Jon. I haven’t been able to find any info on him with Internet research.

Did he end up back at Vegas, marry a show girl, and end up raising a litter of rugrats after all?

Or did he continue to stay on the road, perhaps passing through other sleepy mini-cities in this area at some point and painting more of his murals?

Did he get back into magic and roam the world Merlin-like, always learning new and deeper secrets?

The only proof I now have that Jon ever existed is the vanishing Enigma auction mural (which I again hope hasn’t faded away since my last visit in 2018), and a purple sun visor on which he had painted with a thin brush a candy stripe-horn unicorn, next to his scrawling signature. He may be only seen now in barely open portals of the mind leading into the dim past and always shifting dreams.

The Lenox Lights

There is nothing really new under the Moon about all the weird drone sightings that people have reported recently across the U.S.

According to the Aug. 3, 1966, issue of The Adel News, Jimmy Cone of Lenox tried to describe a lighted object that hovered over the town for about two hours the previous Thursday night.

“I don’t know what it was, for I never saw anything like it,” Cone was quoted as saying in an article.

“The object flashed red and green, like a revolving light on a police car, and moved from side to side, and up and down,” he said.

The object was centered nearly over the water tower and was no more than 250 feet above the ground.

“It didn’t make any noise at all,” he said, “and when it left, it left a smoky vapor behind it.”

The object was sighted about 2:30 that Thursday morning and stayed over Lenox for about two hours.

Cone said he and another man, Charles Terrell, were working when they saw the object. Later, Herman Blizzard, also a night worker, came by, and Cone and Terrell stopped him to show him the strange object.

About the same time, a lady saw a similar object about four miles south of Lenox, according to a local resident.

The late Dan Cowart, former probate judge and editor of the now nonexistent newspaper The Sparks Eagle, would later state in his paper that he wouldn’t write about such sightings in the northwest part of the county unless he saw those objects himself. He emphasized how “subjective” reports of UFOs could be.

And even if he saw something, he wrote, he might be too scared to print the story.