YOUR SPACE: Magician has a lock on new career

Locked in, locked out?

Or maybe you just want some magic in your life.

Lonnie Brown is your man.

He’s the Harry Houdini of Memorial Hospital.

He can open the 3,500 doors at the downtown hospital campus. He also can escape from locked barrels, but that’s done after hours.

The 46-year-old locksmith uses a combination of wit and charm to make keys appear and jumbled locks disappear.

It’s an evolution of a boyhood obsession for the brown-haired guy with the impish face and mannerisms of actor Mike Myers.

Brown, who also sings, plays guitar and throws his voice, is a natural performer, whether he’s re-keying a hospital office or floating his assistant on stage.

“I did magic as a kid. I was intrigued by how locks worked. I’d think about all the parts and how things mechanically work,” he says. “I wanted to join the circus at one time.”

But the family business was fixing shoes, not putting blades through people in boxes. “I was a cobbler, a trade I learned from my dad,” he says.

One day a locksmith came into his Colorado Springs shoe repair shop.

“He had a tool pouch that opened up. He had his tools all spread out in separate little pouches. He wanted us to make a tool pouch that rolls up for his picks and stuff,” Brown says. “I was like, ‘Wow, maybe I can incorporate that in my magic.’”

He took a locksmith course, and decided it offered a more secure future for his family than shoe repair. It also fits with his illusion gigs. His 17-year-old daughter is his stage assistant.

Brown has worked the locks at Memorial for 10 years. He and another locksmith share a storage-closet-sized room tucked behind a plain white door on the fourth floor on the 900,000-square-foot hospital.

Making keys — for doors, files, medicine carts ­— is about 10 percent of the job. And it’s the easy part.

Those 3,500 doors all have hardware, he says, that get abuse from all the beds banging around the corridors. “Any door you see, I probably had to physically touch it at some point in time.”

Much of what he does is troubleshooting, like fixing the electronic pads that make those hospital double-doors seem to magically fly open when surgeons appear with the news, good or bad.

Brown always has some trick up his sleeve.

“It’s interesting to mix magic into your day, especially in a hospital,” Brown says. “As far as kids go, it makes their day.”

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