Eye Popper

Linton Perry, little Negro boy who lives on a farm south of Macon, Ga., is not smart for his eleven years. Nor can he read or write. But he can do what no other person in the U. S. and only one other (a Cuban) in the whole world, so far as is known, can do. He can pop his right eye out of his head, and draw it back into its socket. If that does not startle the beholder, he will pop out the left eye, then jerk the pair alternately in and out, like the boy & girl of the Swiss chalet barometer.

Linton Perry's most awesome trick is to pop both eyes at once. Then he looks like a chubby lobster ready to go plop into a pot of boiling water. He accomplishes the feat by squnching up the muscles around his eyes.

He learned to do this curious feat during a fit of blubbering about three years ago. As he knuckled his tearful eyes he felt them gliding out of their sockets. That scared everybody who saw him. So he repeated the stunt, soon learned to pop without aid of his fingers by skillfully working his eye muscles.

Dr. James Allen Smith, young eye specialist who recently opened offices in Macon, discovered Linton Perry's binocular ambivalence, reported him to Medicine, last week answered queries on the case. By all tests the boy can see just as well whether either or both eyes are in or out of their sockets. But when he first learned his performance, he saw double.

Linton Perry knows that he is silly to do his trick. Dr. Smith explained to him that unless he ceases his monkey shines instanter, one of these days he will go blind. He will stretch his optic nerves so much that fibres will tear. Or he will jar loose the retinas in his eye balls.*

* A trick of Hindu fakirs whose eyes are deeply set is to fit suction cups over their eyeballs and from the cups suspend weights.

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