Hemlock Fair - Vignettes

By Jack Evans circa 1985

“Right this way, folks. Three balls for a dime! Win a kewpie doll!” The concessionaire’s eyes scanned the midway crowd to zero in on his quarry.

“You, there, with that pretty gal! I know she wants a kewpie doll. You look like a ballplayer to me! Here, knock over the bottles. Nothing to it!”

The concessionaire’s right arm reached out over the narrow counter to its fullest extension waving three baseballs toward the young couple. The alleged ballplayer hesitated in his advance down the midway. The girlfriend clinging to his arm gave him a reassuring smile. His right hand slid into his pants pocket to find a dime as he warmed to the task.

The concessionaire, or one might say, the operator, a young scamp of medium height, transferred the baseballs to the challenger, pocketing the dime in his somewhat soiled white duck slacks. He stepped to the side of the tent as the ballplayer took his stance in front of the counter to pitch the first ball at the target, one of two arrays of white wooden replicas of quart size milk bottles. The bottles were arranged on knee-high pedestal platforms having a table diameter of about 16 inches. Three bottles in a row supported two more in a pyramidal pattern facing the ball thrower. The two pedestals with their bottles were spaced about two yards apart at the rear of the tent. The distance from the bottles to “the pitcher” out in the midway was a scant five yards. It looked easy. Knock down one of the clusters of five bottles and win a kewpie doll. The dolls adorned in glitter, and not much else, lined two shelves: one down each side of the tent.

The aspiring pitcher loosened up his right arm and heaved a fastball that missed the mark completely; the momentum of the ball was absorbed by the barrier of straw bales at the rear of the tent. The challenger seemed to be slightly befuddled and disgusted by such a wide and errant pitch. The concessionaire uttered encouragement, “It only takes one ball to win a kewpie doll!”

The young pitcher appeared more determined than ever now and flung the second ball, grazing the upper right bottle of the stack imparting a sufficient sidewise impulse to knock down its companion bottle as well as falling itself. Two down and three to go!

The young ballplayer reacted with a smile, which he beamed to his companion. He gripped ball number three firmly, wound up and delivered. Wham! It hit the bottom edge of the platform, dropping to the ground. The ball, if observed closely, was noticeably flattened into an oval shape. The three lower bottles stirred little if at all, as if they were glued to the platform.

“Wow, if you were just a couple of inches higher you’d hadem!” exclaimed the operator.

“You got the range now, bud. Here, take three more balls, only a dime!” He dangled three more baseballs almost in the face of the challenger who was game to try it again and handed over another dime.

The target this time was the other set of five bottles toward my side of the tent, at the rear, diagonally opposite the operator who had hired me that very morning at an hourly wage of 15 cents. My duty was to pick up the balls and re-set the bottles, a task that a boy of 10 or 11 years could aspire to.

I stood backed up to the side of the tent with the bottle stack edge in front of me. The first pitch glanced off the farther bottom bottle shoving it backward slightly, disturbing it enough to topple the upper right bottle as viewed from the midway. The second ball hit the lone upper bottle near its base propelling it into the straw barrier. The contestant was definitely more accurate now in this second round. Again it was two down and three to go.

The young pitcher appearing confident now, wound up and deposited a fast ball striking high between the farther two bottles which lazily tipped over leaving the one closest to me upright. He spewed out a couple of oaths followed by an angry pronouncement, “Those bottles should have gone down!”

“You almost did it, bud. Here, give it one more try, three balls, only a dime.”

It was little wonder that the bottom row of bottles clung to the platform. They were filled at their base with about five pounds of lead! My instructions were to set up the three leaded bottles on the bottom and the unleaded two on top. Actually, a light breeze could topple the upper two. The baseballs, although they appeared firm, were filled with sawdust and they absorbed a large proportion of the energy upon impact, leaving little to impart movement to the target. The contestant at that point, could well have been thinking that his two dimes might have been better spent buying a couple of hotdogs, or possibly two ice cream cones together with soft drinks, such was the high value of our currency in the twenties.

While the young couple sahntered away into the crowd, I reset both stands of bottles, picked up the balls, squeezing and hammering the deformed ones back into a more spherical shape. The concessionaire took up his cry, “Right this way, folks! Three balls for a dime. Win a kewpie doll!”

Across the midway, a weasely old concessionaire standing on a platform in front of his tent yelled, “Two thousand years old and still alive! You’ve never seen anything like it before, folks. Right this way!”

Weird and unearthly sounds were emanating from beneath the platform, the sounds attributed to this mysterious thing, age: two thousand years. My playmate, Harland, in the employ of the concessionaire was hidden beneath the platform drawing a violin bow across the strings of an old bass fiddle. I must say he was doing a whopping good job of creating uncanny noise. To the curious and the gullible, for a fee, their eyes could cast upon an old decrepit mummy. Perhaps the mummy or its lure was ancient enough, but it was only “alive” in the sense it, together with the mysterious base notes of Harland, attracted the dupes of the midway.

It’s late in the day now. I’ve had my fill of setting up bottles, hearing the chant of the huckster, seeing the expressions of dismay on frustrated ball throwers. I ask the concessionaire for my day’s wages, about eight hours worth. He sidesteps to one end of the counter beneath which is a pile of small boxes of cheap chocolates, tosses me two boxes worth fifteen cents a piece. That’s my day’s wages! The guile of this guy! If I were bigger I’d punch him in the nose. He’s taken advantage of me, a mere boy.

That’s the way it was, experiencing skullduggery both first and second hand. I resolved, then and there, forever to be wary of hucksters, on or off a midway. Yes, the Fair was amply educational in a variety of ways.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to the Evans Family for sharing Jack’s work.