The setup of the booth at the fair couldn’t have been simpler. It consisted of a ball hanging from a string and a bowling pin. The man who ran the booth was just opening up as I strolled by. His cashbox was empty and badly needed filling. He saw me as the deep pockets to start filling it. Of course my pockets were far from deep in those days.
He gave me his spiel: “All you have to do is give the ball a push so that it swings past the pin. If it knocks the pin down on the return swing, you win.”
He demonstrated. It looked easy. The trick was to push the ball as close to the pin as possible on the outward swing, so that it would hit the other side of the pin on the return swing. He let me have a practice push. The ball hit the pin. I could have been a winner.
He kept talking to keep me from leaving. My greed overcame my doubts. I gave him money and pushed for real. The ball suddenly had a mind of its own. It swung wide on the return swing and missed the pin. I tried again. Same result. I played for all the money that had accumulated in the cashbox (which wasn’t much) and lost.
I hadn’t seen the musical, Guys and Dolls, yet or I might have thought twice about risking my money. When Sky Masterson is offered a sucker bet, he says something like this: “My daddy didn’t do much for me, but he did give me one good piece of advice. He said, ‘Son, someday a man will come along and show you a brand new deck of playing cards, still in the original wrapper. He will offer to bet you that the jack of hearts will jump out of the deck and spit cider in your ear. Do not take that bet, or as sure as we’re standing here you will be wiping apple juice out of your ear.’”
As good as Sky’s dad’s advice was, I usually spent all the money I had on me at the Erie County Fair. One time I lost my wallet—or had my pocket picked—but by then it was empty and the recipient didn’t get anything.
Our family lived on a small farm in Clarence, outside of Buffalo, New York in the 1950s. We couldn’t really claim the title of farmers, although we raised some pigs and my brothers owned the cow that supplied us with milk. My brother, Mike, worked for neighboring farmers and came closest to being one, himself.
Whether or not we had hayseeds in our blood, we enjoyed going to the fair. It featured displays of farm machinery and locally grown crops, but we liked the games best. We also got to see shows, such as Joie Chitwood’s Hell Drivers, featuring daring young men driving new Fords, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and the other carelessly out the window. They drove an obstacle course, often on two wheels, crashing through flaming barricades, supplying thrills and chills.
The summer that two southern girls stayed on the farm next to ours, Mike and I took them to the fair. They hailed from Georgia and had accents that could turn water into honey. When Frances called me Al she pronounced it Aisle. I won her a teddy bear by dropping a ring on a coke bottle. Mike couldn’t manage to do that so he paid for me to win a bear for his girl. He almost wasted his money, but on my last try the ring bounced off one bottle and encircled the bottle next to it. Bingo!
But back to the ball and pin. Having taken science courses in school, I should have been suspicious when I saw the booth man spinning the ball as he told me how easy it was to win. Spinning the ball wound the string. When I released the ball the string unwound, causing the ball to spin in that direction. The spinning ball acted like a curveball in baseball; it curved away from the bowling pin.
How many people caught on to that in time to save their money?
