Carny Capers

Jul 23

Back in the 1950s, during the second week of June, New Windsor, Maryland, presented its inhabitants with a canvas that would have made Norman Rockwell pack his paints and brushes and taken up residence in this little country municipality.

Did the entire tiny town---citizens from all walks of surrounding rural life---ride this seven-day adrenalin wave? Absolutely. But for a 10 year-old-boy like me, at first blush, the reasons for delight would appear to be obvious. It marked the exciting end of my dreaded school year, and kicked off the Little League season. But nothing came close to the pure joy and over the top excitement that we locals simply referred to as Carnival Week.

A tradition my father, observing all the local townships, described as “like Fords and asses, everyone’s got one!”

Town by town these traveling festivals---fund raisers for local fire companies---came with all the trappings of a mini-circus.

The Sunday night before this week of weeks, I would crack a screened window, lie in my bed and enjoy summertime---the pungent smell of the honeysuckle and wisteria that climbed the old porches of our house. I could hear the Carnies---fresh out of a tear down at another local burg---graveling the midways, setting up tents, reassembling the rides---the Ferris wheel, the Carousel, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the mini rollercoaster and the test-your- strength Ring the Bell contraption.

The excitement of the coming week was almost unbearable---so much so that sometimes on the night before the Monday’s grand opening, I would pop out of bed and count and recount my winter’s savings, primed to squander it all during the coming week on (often rigged) games of chance with the likes of Guess Your Weight, Big Cat’s Ball Toss or Mr. Duck Duck’s Shooting Gallery.

And it wasn’t just me and the other kids. The town and county, in from the local dairy farms, attended in droves to play bingo, beat the “Guess Your Weight” guy, compete for stuffed animals and Kewpie dolls in midway games, and toss ping pong balls into tiny bowls to win goldfish.

Once the week kicked off, from that very bedroom window I could hear our fire chief, Dick Hesson, on the PA system calling Bingo, “Under the B, 17, under the N, 22.” As a backdrop there were the pipe organ tunes from the Carousels Calliope, and the midway barkers - “Pitcha, pitcha, pitcha, ya can’t win if you don’t play!” Citizens of the town would sit on their front porches and rock, sipping cold beers or ice tea, enjoying this carny music mixed with the little fair’s aromas---cotton candy, funnel cakes, and candy apples.

Wafting up from the volunteer firemen’s food tent came the smell of good old home cookin’ that included fresh Maryland crab cakes. Hotdogs and hamburgers snapped and popped on the Firemen’s Ladies Auxiliary’s grills.

Speaking of memorable carny moments, I’ll never forget the evening my buddies and I were emptying our pockets for the carny who ran the Big Cat Toss. Here, baseballs were lobbed to knock lions off a (probably rigged) perch. When the old carny, who was always juggling three baseballs as he made his pitch, got a big enough crowd of us, he said, “Want to see me juggle five?” We did. And suddenly the old man, still juggling the three baseballs, began to dance up and down, and pointing to his privates saying, “You boys can add, can’t you? Three and two are five.”

Big laughs! And we went to our pockets for the quarters that would give us another toss at the lions to win a teddy bear.

Wednesday was parade night. Fire trucks from miles away came to drive in these competitive processions---prizes for Furthest away, Best looking truck, and Neatest uniforms.

Later these spiffy firemen would bailout at the bottom of High Street at the beer garden, get about half loaded and then come staggering on to the carnival grounds. That never failed to enhance our entertainment.

Meanwhile back at the parade competition the Ladie’s Firemen’s Auxiliary teams, wearing matching skirts, white shoes, starched shirts, and little envelope hats, marched in precision before the judges’ stand to compete for prizes. The New Windsor Ladies’ Auxiliary, led by Jim Lance, a local businessman, had a statewide marching reputation.

In the weeks leading up to the carnival, Lance would drill them out on Main Street. As they came by in-step, marching to Lance’s calls, Mr. Lou, our landlord, perched on a high porch, would stand and shout, “Hep, hep, hep, hep!”

I loved this, and when I spotted Lance and his battalion coming up the hill, I’d tip off my old friend - “Mr. Lou, Mr. Lou! Here come the marchers, how about some hep heps!”

There was never a night like parade night, and the man who made it special was the most unlikely citizen of New Windsor, Hoppie Megan. For 364 nights a year, according to local authorities, Hoppie was as sober as a judge. Then on parade night, after getting liquored up, he’d slip into one of his wife’s finest gowns, tease his hair up into a bouffant, slip into her high heels, smear lipstick on his elderly face from ear to ear, and take off marching/staggering through the parade, cutting in and out of Jim Lance’s ladies’ auxiliary marchers, all the while waving a parasol.

“Hoppie’s drunk again,” said Mr. Lou, from his perch on the high porch. “But the man deserves a prize.”

Speaking of prizes. Every year as the clock struck twelve on the last night there was a raffle drawing for a new car. And a memory I’ll never forget is the morning my dad and I were standing on the street saying hello to our friend Ruth Baile. One minute she was headed to Roop’s store and the next she was running back up the street shouting, “I won, I won, I won. They pulled my ticket last night; I won the new Plymouth in the Carnival’s raffle!”

So, there were bigger prizes during Carny week than teddy bears and cupid dolls.

Obviously, the annual New Windsor Carnival week would be laced with memories. So much so that years later it inspired me to introduce my son to the Carny, embarrass myself and then share this ill-advised event with the readers of Sports Illustrated magazine.

They called it Radar Ball opening with this catchy blurb:

A FASTBALLER’S PIPE DREAM GOES UP IN SMOKE BEFORE A MIDWAY RADAR GUN.

God made radar guns to get two kinds of people: drivers with heavy feet and old ballplayers with big egos. Unfortunately, this revelation hit me a split second late, just after I decided to test my fastball at Jack and Jake’s Radar Ball, a baseball pitch game at a firemen’s carnival in New Windsor, Md.

In June, my family and I visited my mother during what folks in New Windsor call Carnival Week. As we motored toward my hold hometown, I described to Matt, our 10-year-old, summer nights in the 1950s when I as an artful little dodger, moving along the midway, beating the flimflammers and hustlers at their own games.

“Ring a dinga, ring a dinga! Ring the dinga and win a cigar,” the barker would cry, flexing his biceps.

“Guess your weight---win a prize!” the weight lady would shout.

During my hammer-swinging days, the ringer never climbed past the mark that said MOMMA’S BOY. My true calling was as a carnival ballplayer. As a Little League catcher, I couldn’t throw out a runner for all the stuffed animals at the Maryland State Fair, but when it came to easy pitch games like the old milk-bottle toss, my arm was in a league of its own. I’d plunk down two bits, get up on my tiptoes, lean across the counter and flick the horsehide into the neatly stacked bottles.

Bulls-eye!

So, this spring when Matt and I stepped out on the midway on our first night in town, saw the booth with the big J&J Radar Ball sign and heard the guy in the red golf shirt barking about “the easy pitch baseball game,” I was intrigued. “Step right up, throw the baseball, best game on the midway,” he said, giving me the once-over. “You don’t have to throw hard to win.” As Matt and I slipped into the crowd of onlookers, a teenage kid in a yellow WHY WALTZ WHEN YOU CAN ROCK-‘N-ROLL T shirt was forking over 50 cents. “O.K., step back, folks, we’ve got a ballplayer. Let’s watch his speed. Right here.” He pointed to the speed gun’s digital display board.

The rock-‘n-roller went into a windmill windup, kicked his leg and threw. Whop! The display board whirred and stopped at 62. For the next 30 minutes I stood among the noisy spectators, watching young arms crank up and fog pitches past the radar gun. As their speeds clicked up on the readout, the onlookers filled the air with cheers and jeers. “Sixty-five miles per hour, sorry, you guessed 68. Try again!” the barker shouted. While the procession of would-be Gossages and Ryans chucked away, Jake Townsley, one of the two enterprising young phys ed coaches who spent their summers touring Maryland’s carnival circuit with J&J Radar Ball, offered some insights into the game.

“The idea is to take two practice throws and guess the speed of your third pitch, but most people play to see how fast they can throw. I guess it’s macho or whatever you want to call it. But the speed of fastballs varies so much that the hard throwers rarely win,” he said.

I learned that the most likely customers to win are the 9-12 year-olds. “The kids will always throw right around their top speed. They’ll crank out a 40-mph, come back with a 39 mph, guess 41 and hit it right on the number. The Little Leaguers beat us to death” Jake said.

“How good is the gun?” I asked of the JUGS Super Gun II. “Guaranteed to be accurate within one mile either way. It’s the same gun they use to clock major league fastballs,” he said.

As Jake and I talked, Jack Baile (the other J) stood at the front of the booth juggling baseballs and chattering nonstop to the prospective customers. “Easy does it, step right up, no waiting, throw the baseball, pitcha pitcha!”

Above Jack’s juggling act, tacked to the top of the cage, was the game’s leaderboard. The speeds of the week’s fastest throwers were logged by age and sex: William Forney, in the 16-19-year-old bracket, topped the male ledger with an 82-mph throw, and Teri Leatherwood led all the woman with a heave of 62.

“Dad, how fast can you throw?” Matt asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, somewhere between Bill and Teri, I guess,” I said and nodded toward the board. Jack reached up, plucked one of his juggling baseballs out of the air and tossed it to me. “Here, give it try,” he said. I hot-potatoed the ball to Matt, dug into my pocket and pulled out a couple of quarters. “I think my son wants to give it a shot,” I said.

While Matt fired up several dollars’ worth of 30-to-35 mph fastballs, I began to feel a bit queasy. Call it radar phobia if you like, but I was caught between a notoriously weak right arm and an ego all muscled up and ready to throw. In one ear I could hear a replay of Harry Lambert, my old high school coach, critiquing one of my patented rainbow pegs to second base. “Cairns, that’s the first time in baseball history that an infielder had to flip down his sunglasses to take a catcher’s throw,” said the voice from my past. Then I heard Matt saying, “Come on, Dad, I did it, now it’s your turn.”

I started to walk away, but the old moxie from my carnival days erupted again. I parted the crowd, handed Jack the Juggler 50 cents and heard myself say, “I’ll throw, but you can forget about fastballs. I’ll be playing the game to win.”

From this moment on, my memory is something of a blur. I can recall staring in at the canvas catcher on the backstop and reading the sign that said HOW FAST CAN YOU THROW? And that’s when my strategy went kerflooey. Before you could say “changeup,” my left leg had kicked up at the leaderboard, and I was coming over the top, bringing the heat. Thunk went the horsehide into the canvas catcher. The display board clicked, and through foggy eyes I read my arm its last rites. The readout said 51. I threw again: 49 and again 52.

“Come on, Dad, there are three girls up there who threw faster than that,” Matt said. I reached back for a little extra. Only the sweat came faster. How long the embarrassment continued, only my son and half the population of my hometown can say. But when I topped out with a blistering 55, my arm was heavy and my wallet considerably lighter.

“Good job,” Jack said. “Try again?”

“That’s enough,” I mumbled, and with the double fives still flashing in my head, I put my aching arm around Matt’s shoulder, and we walked off into the lights of the midway.

A few days later as I drove the family south toward our home in Raleigh, NC, Matt pointed out a big black and white sign along the highway: DRIVE 55 SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR. I eased off the gas. “Hey, Mom, Dad was going faster than 55,” Matt announced. “Not lately,” I said rubbing my right arm, recalling Carnivals past when a guy could win a decent prize by skillfully soft tossing to knock over those big fuzzy cats.

A tradition my father, observing all the local townships, described as “like Fords and asses, everyone’s got one!”

Town by town these traveling festivals---fund raisers for local fire companies---came with all the trappings of a mini-circus.

Big laughs! And we went to our pockets for the quarters that would give us another toss at the lions to win a teddy bear.

Wednesday was parade night. Fire trucks from miles away came to drive in these competitive processions---prizes for Furthers away, Best looking truck, and Neatest uniforms.

I loved this, and when I spotted Lance and his battalion coming up the hill, I’d tip off my old friend - “Mr. Lou, Mr. Lou! Here come the marchers, how about some hep heps!”

“Hoppie’s drunk again,” said Mr. Lou, from his perch on the high porch. “But the man deserves a prize.” 28) Carny Capers