Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

No Fair!

161 l No Fair! On a wet Sunday afternoon in early June 1957, I was sitting at the dining room table in our old house on River Road, drinking a glass of milk, and paging through the Milwaukee Journal comics section. It was raining too hard to go fishing, I was fourteen years old and bored, and the comics weren’t helping much. As usual, Dick Tracy was fighting crime and talking on his 2-Way Wrist Radio, the Dragon Lady was plotting Oriental intrigue, Fearless Fosdick was shooting neat round holes in the bad guys, and evil commies were kidnapping Little Orphan Annie while her dog Sandy looked on helplessly, saying “Arf.” I flipped to Pogo and Li’l Abner, the only strips I actually liked. Pogo was always good for a laugh, and I routinely checked out Li’l Abner to gawk at Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine, Stupefyin’ Jones, and the other Dogpatch girls in their incredibly tight and skimpy clothes. 162 NoFair! I was looking them over when Dad came in from the kitchen and handed me three envelopes of Burpee seeds—watermelons, acorn squash, and cucumbers—and a slender book on raising vegetables. “Project for you this summer,” Dad said. “Spade up a patch behind the shed and plant ’em according to the instructions in the book.” Cripes, I thought, school just got out Tuesday and already he has me digging. “It’ll be a money-making proposition,” Dad said. “I’ll pay you fifty cents for every watermelon that’s big enough to eat, a quarter apiece for the squash, and a nickel each for the cucumbers. And if you enter some of them in the county fair, you’ll get an exhibitor’s pass that will let you in free every day, whether you win a ribbon or not. That’s two bucks saved right there, and if you’re lucky with your crops you’ll have all the money you need for the fair.” That got my attention; I was a fair fanatic. The Manitowoc County Fair was held six days each August about a mile and a half from our place, and I never missed a day. It ranked right up there with Christmas and Thanksgiving as one of the high points of my year. In Manitowoc, the fair was as close as we ever got to the bright lights. To my surprise the vegetables flourished. By the middle of August I had a dozen big watermelons, two rows of plump and profitable squash, and about a hundred cucumbers that met the strict standards set by my book: four inches long, an inch in diameter, and warty. Bigger cucumbers, the book said, were full of seeds and too large to be conveniently pickled and put into Mason jars. I decided to enter my cucumbers, and it was with great expectations that I paid the one-dollar entry fee, signed a form, and picked up the pass. On Monday, the first day of the fair, I put a paper plate with five carefully chosen cukes on a long table in the Armory with dozens of others, mostly huge and undesirable. Apparently the people who grew them hadn’t read the book. 163 The largest cucumbers of them all, great swollen things like green submarines, were next to mine. They had been entered by someone named Laura Larsen. I pictured her as a chubby, snub-nosed little girl in a starched pinafore who would pout when I walked off with the blue ribbon. I left the Armory and took a walk around the fairgrounds while the morning was still fresh and cool. On the north side of the midway , seriously sunburned men were walking slowly back and forth, assembling the Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Scrambler, the Octopus, and other large and rickety rides. Across the midway from the rides was a row of pitch-and-toss stands. They were already open for business, but I passed them by. I had been cruelly cheated by them in previous years, and I knew from bitter experience that I couldn’t lob a five-inch wooden hoop over a four-inch post from a distance of ten feet. I had also learned that I couldn’t throw a baseball hard enough to knock over three white bottles stacked in a pyramid. I suspected that the bottles were made of lead, and I...