Chattanooga Magic & Fun was started in 1979 and is the longest running full time magic shop in Tennessee. Magic shops have come and gone and Chattanooga Magic & Fun is here. I am the owner Barry Manley, I have had an interest in magic since I was 10 years old when a teachers brother came to my class and performed a magic show for the fourth grade class.Since that time I was hooked on MAGIC. Every book I could find on magic, I would get and like a sponge try to learn everything I could about magic. My first book was Howard Thurstons' Magic Book. I would save my allowance and whenever I went to the city, I would visit Gene Gordon's Magic Shop on Niagara and Main St and blow my $2.00 or $3.00 on magic tricks or books.

   To me at that time books were the heart of magic. I could read about Kellar, Thurston, Houdini and my favorite at that time was Blackstone Sr. At that time Karl Norman was the manager of Gene Gordon's shop and my mother would let me stay there all day just watching Karl show his skills to all that would watch.

   At age 12 we moved to a farm and it was harder to get anything about magic, and Walter Gibson's program "The Shadow" was on the radio one night; I heard and ad about magic and Walter Gibson's book on Magic Tricks, so I sent in my $2.50 and within the week I was the owner of the Gibson's book on magic Tricks & Illusions. (I still have that book in my own magic library today).

   After the war we our family moved to Florida and they had a big magic shop in Miami called Jahn's Magic Shop. Every Saturday I would ride the bus to that magic shop and stay all day and just watch and talk to magicians people like Marlo, Johnny Paul, Harry Lorayne(wow), it was like being in magic heaven. I bought very little  because I wasn't making much money going to school and working at the Home News in HIaleah running copy to the press/printer for Jay & Blanche Morton. I was earning the enormous sum of $9.00 per week. But it was spending money, and did I ever spend it.

   After a few years I got a job working in Miami at the Olympia Theater as an usher and I got to see all the famous stage magicians, Jack Gwynne, Henny Youngman, Frank Cole, Mandrake just to name a few. They would eventually come to the magic shop which was only a block and a half away from the theater. I was in tall cotton. After that I even got to assist Leon Mandrake while he was working the Clover Club in Miami for three whole weeks.

   Its' always been a life long dream to own my own magic shop, and after moving to Chattanooga in 1977  for a new job I decided to give it a try. I opened Chattanooga Magic & Fun in 1979 and the rest is history. It has been in the same location since its inception. Serving the needs of professional as well as the amateur and beginning magicians and performing birthday parties, picnics, banquets and various functions for IBM, Shaw Industries, Ingersoll Rand, TVA and performing on the  Riverboat, and Riverbend for a couple of years.