The Franklin County Fair is come and gone. Some cows have taken home blue ribbons, the weight of one bull was accurately guessed and a young farm boy with a head for numbers took home his prize: a 10-dollar bill.
Our nurses, male and female, of Charlene Manor, won the Float Prize. Some of us old-timers were bused to a great white tent where we played BINGO for the sunnier side of an afternoon. Our county fairgrounds will be mostly quiet till we meet again next September for another fall good time.
This column is about county fairs. We’ll live on memories and wait with bated breath until our county’s fair opens its gates.
The first time we went to a county fair we had a dollar to spend. What we spent it on I don’t remember. I do remember that one of us spent a dime on a chance — and it paid off.
I have memories of that fair clear in mind. More than 80 years ago, Melvin Durkey was one of my pals who took the Brockton bus that Friday morning. The other fair-going pal that day was Harold Curtiss. Harold was an only child, very smart in our elementary school classes. Harold grew up to be a fighter pilot in our country’s second world war, and was shot down over Germany in 1944.
I have other memories of that fair still clear in mind, but the memory of the dime chance and the big bull that was the main part of it, makes a story well worth the telling.
The bull was standing exactly as we had left him the day before. His hind end was pressed against the back of his stall and his head was still lowered in a position to charge.
This was no made-over beast altered to live out an impotent life in the neutral zone. There was a fire in his eye, a brilliant intelligence. Remove the bars between him and you and you’d better be quick on your feet.
A bunch of us boys went to the fair together the year of the bull. We cruised the midway, blew nickles and dimes in side-shows, come-ons and had a general good time.
When we got to the tent where they had the big bull, we were getting low on cash and diminished in spirit. It cost a dime to buy a ticket and guess the bull’s weight. There was a 10-dollar prize at the end of the day for the closest guess. Only one of us bit on that.
He was a farm boy. It was Depression time. Farming with his family is what he did. Going to school was an interruption between morning chores and afternoon labor.
The boy with the ticket tore off the end and wrote something on it. He turned it in to someone in charge and left with us to look for whatever other excitement the fair might offer.
There’s something about fairs that stimulates sex. At that time we were too young to know much about sex, but we recognized it when we saw it. We were seeing it all around us.
Healthy young bucks and their girls, laughing too loud and racing from one attraction to another, pushed and pulled, shoved and jostled, in a crowd just barely this side out of control.
We witnessed a fight. Two men were pounding each other with their fists. Not skillfully — but with bad effect. Both had battered faces and bloody noses. Their girls just stood there, doing nothing. The fighters would have killed each other if the town police hadn’t stopped them. They went off in different directions after the fight, and we went off wondering what it had been all about.
As our afternoon wore on, we came to the long line of cattle sheds where we watched a lady in high heels and a nice dress help a cow give birth to a calf. We didn’t know the word “incongruous,” but we knew it was an odd arrangement we were looking at, and would have today seen the whole episode as a raw incongruity.
There was the lady, all dolled up, and there was the cow, all humped up, the lady pulling on the hoof ends of two black legs, the cow heaving and straining to get done with it. Suddenly the whole issue slipped out on the ground and the cow turned around. The lady in the pretty dress wiped her hands on a burlap bag, then turned her back on the cow and newborn calf. We went off — wondering some more.
We went to another tent, where another “barker” was at work. We didn’t recognize this human magnet as a “con” man because we had never been irresistibly pulled — yanked is a better way of putting it — and the rascal got the last mite out of our pocket.
We went into a tent mostly full of old men, with a few kids lined up on a front bench, waiting for something to happen, kids maybe 10 years old, out of school on “fair day.”
Suddenly and with no fanfare, some nearly naked girls appeared in front of us, undulating their way from one end of a make-shift stage and back, eased along by a slick chap at a piano up front.
It was too much. We were too young for naked. One of us (my sister Caroline) said, “Let’s get out of here!” We got up and got out.
We didn’t have high hopes when we went back to the tent where the bull was. Our schoolboy friend wasn’t the only one who had taken the chance on guessing the bull’s weight. It never occurred to us that as a farm boy he had a start on the crowd.
He won. Not only had he won, he put down numbers within a pound or so of the bull’s actual weight. He got a $10 bill, and we all went home ecstatic.
And now the bull still stood just as we had left him the day before. One of us had a brother who worked for the fair, so we were with him when he went for his pay.
There was no crowd, everyone was gone. Most of the tents were folded up and ready to be trucked to the next fair. The young bucks were gone to wherever young bucks go when fair ends — and their laughing girls with them.
The cow and her calf had been carted back to the farm. Their mistress was back in the kitchen, probably having swapped her dress for jeans.
Some of us, maybe all of us, wished we’d stayed longer to see more of the naked girls. They were gone, too, to exhibit themselves in one more fair, to a gawking bunch of old men, wherever tents were next going up.
We stayed awhile looking at the bull. There was fire in his eye, a bright intelligence.
For all his being shut up in a tent, he had seen it all before. When they trucked him off to challenge small monies out of small boy’s pockets, he had seen it all before.
That’s the way of fairs.
Paul Seamans is a permanent resident of the Charlene Manor nursing home. He is a retired elementary school principal and writes the Said and Done column for The Recorder