COUNTY FAIR

My parents were failed entrepreneurs, not by choice but by default.  My father simply was incapable of working for someone else.  Instead, my parents owned an appliance business that never succeeded beyond providing our family a day-to-day existence.  The insecurity resulting from their constant agonizing over how to make ends meet, which they shared with my sisters and me as passive participants, was a signature influence in the evolution of my attitudes toward career choices.

My parents ran their business out of a dilapidated storefront that featured a cheap asphalt siding patterned to look like fake brown bricks and front windows that were seriously fly-specked.  The store was situated directly across the street from the town’s Sears and Roebuck store, and it seems remarkable now that my parents sold any appliances at all.  That they did is, I believe, a tribute to my mother’s sales ability, as my father primarily spent his time on repair calls, fixing up the used appliances they took in on trade, and delivering the appliances that my mother sold.

Looking for a way to gain commercial visibility, for a few years in the late 1950s my parents rented a booth at our county fair.  Their booth was in the exposition building, the place where you would find the insurance agents, the aluminum siding salesmen and the bath refurbishers, the Vegematics and the miracle Ginsu knives, and, for a time, my parents’ appliances.  Our booth was bare-bones—maybe a couple of standup signs and a few banners supplied by the appliance manufacturer, along with a half dozen refrigerators and freezers.  This was at a time when appliances were just evolving to square corners from rounded ones and when white was still the only color.  Avocado green and dark bronze were still a few years away.

The fair was held in August when my sisters and I were on summer vacation.  Sometimes our parents would let us stay home—one of my sisters was old enough to pretend, at least, that she was babysitting us.  But other times they would drag us to the fair for the day.  For a kid this could be incredibly boring.  After spending perhaps ten minutes standing around in our appliance booth, we would wander off to explore the remainder of the modest-sized fairgrounds.

My favorite was the midway where people generally wasted their money on games that appeared easy but that were generally rigged to make them nearly impossible to win.  This, despite the fact that from time to time we would see swaggering young men dressed in Levis and sleeveless t-shirts, sporting ducktails and with girls on their arms holding enormous stuffed animals that they had won at the booth where you had a couple of chances to throw softballs at whitewashed milk bottles that were evidently filled with concrete, or maybe lead.

One year my older sister won a couple of live baby ducklings by tossing dimes into plates at one of the midway booths. What were we thinking?  We lived in an urban neighborhood.  The ducks didn’t last long.  One was gone within a couple of days.  The other lingered on for a week before dying, despite my mother’s best efforts to save it by administering it an enema with an eyedropper.  By that point we were not heartbroken.

Matters were a bit dodgy on the other side of the midway.  There, for a dollar, men (and even teenage boys, as I was to discover a few years later) could crowd into a tent attached to a semi trailer one side of which could be lowered to form a stage, revealing young women who stripped down to pasties—and nothing else—in front of the leering men, some of whom would encourage the strippers by throwing additional dollars onto the stage.

Meanwhile mother and dad were trying to sell appliances.  One year, perhaps to make a few bucks as well as to attract passersby to the booth, my mother sold necklaces made of beads scented with perfume.  Even I could see that these necklaces were pathetic.  Another year my parents announced that they were holding a drawing to award a free freezer to a lucky entrant whose name would be picked on the final night of the fair.  I’m not sure that this promotion resulted in any appliance sales, but it did increase foot traffic, as people filled out the homemade entrance forms and stuffed them into a crepe paper covered box with a slot cut in its top that my mother had improvised.

As the final day of the fair approached, though, my parents began to realize what hadn’t occurred to them when they had hatched this strategy:  They simply couldn’t afford to give away a freezer.  The cost to us would be the equivalent of a week’s income for our family.  When anyone asked when the drawing would occur, my father took to saying that the winner would be announced at the grandstand show on the final night of the fair.  Then that evening, as the show was starting and the crowds were beginning to thin, my parents simply packed up the booth, loaded the appliances on their truck, and quietly slipped away.

No one in the family ever mentioned the drawing again.

© 2017 John M. Phillips