For those six readers who read last week’s column, please note that the on-going saga of the kayak adventures previously promised has been temporarily interrupted this week on account a timely re-visitation of the Red Deer Fair.
If there was any single person in town who loved going to the Fair more than me back in the day, well, I would challenge him or her to a hearty round on the 5 Cent Diggers. We’d soon see who would get the ultimate prize – that stack of five nickels wrapped in red or green cellophane! He or she would, of course - I never could snag that slippery stack with those remote controlled jaws.
As I may have mentioned several hundred times, I grew up in Parkvale within spitting distance of the Red Deer Fair when it was all crammed into the old Arena parking lot. A glorious combination of gravel and mud and sounds and lights and hustle and bustle unique to those July days when the Fair came to town. This was way before they started calling it an “Exhibition” and way back when they had things like Grandstand Shows, and big tents on the midway that promised the bizarre, weird and wacky Wonders of the World. Oh, and also, Girly Shows.
When you were a 10 or 12 year old boy at the Fair with your buddies back in those days you tended to linger longer in front of the mysteriously irresistible Wonders of the World tent and spend an awful lot of time surreptitiously serpentining deep in the crowd in front of the Girly Tent, trying not to be noticed by anybody you happened to know. Which, in those days, was everybody.
At the faded yellow canvas marquee a fast-talking Barker on a microphone might hold up a big glass jar with a grey lump of goo floating around in there. “Einstein’s Brain!” he would proclaim to the assembled masses. “Come in and behold! So close you can almost touch it – EINSTEIN’S BRAIN! A perfectly preserved wonder of the world! Come one, come all, to the INSIDE and see the incredible, unbelievable, amazing Wonders of the Universe!” And on and on like that.
Of course, the “perfectly preserved brain of Einstein” was either the random entrails of some unfortunate farm animal probably obtained illegally from some abattoir somewhere, or it was the brain of Harold Einstein – a used car salesman
who died happily of old age ten or fifteen years before in some place like Indiana or Iowa.
And it was even more mysteriously enticing at the Girly Tent. This rather shoddy canvas pavilion was always on the north side of the grounds, in the corner by the big Ferris Wheel and the Salt and Pepper Shaker. The Barker there was even better than his World of Wonders counterpart, and the paintings on the tent even more lurid. Every hour or so a few very bored and surprisingly unattractive ladies would parade out on the stage in front of the tent for a brief glimpse from the gathering crowd, and the Barker would strongly suggest that these ladies would be encumbered by significantly less clothing once you were inside the tent.
I never did find out if that was true or not. I was never old enough nor brave enough to step up with my 50 cents. And maybe it’s just as well; some things are better left to the imagination. Besides, the Tilt-A-Whirl was always calling my name right out loud. And of course, I had to stop for a corn dog along the way.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer writer and filmmaker.