By Rebecca Goodman
Enquirer staff writer

MADISONVILLE - Linda Roberts, a professional magician known to kids and former kids throughout Greater Cincinnati as Magic Wanda, died of cancer Saturday at Jewish Hospital. The Madisonville resident was 54.

Ms. Roberts performed at summer camps, libraries, birthday parties, corporate events and church and community festivals.

She also taught magic to children at the Haines House of Cards in Norwood and at St. Aloysius Orphanage, as well as at several elementary schools.

"The children just loved her to death," said her mother, Carmen M. Roberts of Dillonvale. "She was very generous of her time and she loved the children at St. Aloysius. She would buy them things all the time - everything at her own expense."

One of 75 professional women magicians in the world, according to Betty Winzig, owner of Haines House of Cards, Ms. Roberts gave magic lessons to children there on Saturdays. "She was a very happy, funny, very caring person - just great. We just loved her," Winzig said. "She did primarily things for children. Her great thing was the kids."

Ms. Roberts, who grew up in several Cincinnati neighborhoods, graduated from the now defunct Regina High School in Norwood in 1967. She majored in accounting at the University of Cincinnati and worked as a public-relations coordinator for Beech Acres for 17 years before giving up her job to become a full-time magician in 1990.

"I have loved magic all my life, and I had no idea that I could do magic," Ms. Roberts said in a 1990 Enquirer interview. "But in December of 1986, I paid my first visit to a magic shop and purchased three or four easy-to-do tricks, and I got hooked. I thought that was just the beginning of what was going to be a hobby, but by August of 1987, I had my first paid show."

She moved to Madisonville from Wyoming in 1991 and started Ta-Dah Enterprise, a public-relations consulting firm.

Concerned about crime in her new neighborhood, Ms. Roberts became president of the Madisonville Community Council and coordinated the Madisonville Project, a neighborhood effort to rid the area of drug dealers, abandoned cars and to renovate its homes.

"I believed this emerging crime wave could be stopped by using the values of a strong working class," she told the Enquirer in 1996. She applied for and received $800,000 in grants from the Pew Charitable Trust in Philadelphia to carry out her agenda.

"She is the epitome of what you need in a neighborhood leader," said former Cincinnati City Council member Bobbie Sterne, who presented Ms. Roberts the Estelle Berman Citizens Planning Award in 1996.

Ms. Roberts' doctor discovered a lump on a lymph node in her neck during a routine visit in May. Cancer was soon discovered throughout her lymphatic system. She also had a tumor near her liver. She moved in with her mother and began to fight the cancer. She underwent surgery on her neck during the first week in June and had three chemotherapy treatments before she died.

"One of the small children of a friend of hers said 'Linda is in heaven doing magic for the angels,' " her mother said.

Other survivors include: two sisters, Cynthia R. Opp of Blue Ash and Karen J. Miyano of Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii; and a brother, John A. Roberts of Dillonvale.

A memorial Mass is 4 p.m. Saturday at St. Saviour Church, 4136 Myrtle Ave. in Rossmoyne. Interment was at Arlington Memorial Gardens.

Memorials: St. Aloysius Orphanage, 4721 Reading Road, Cincinnati, OH 45237.