10. The Carnival ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

“Don’t forget that you’re taking the boys to the Carnival this evening,” Ida reminded Joe, as he prepared to spend the afternoon picking corn.

Robert had not forgotten! He could hardly wait to go!

Sponsored by the Lions Club, the Carnival was held each year in the gymnasium of the Pine Village School. It featured games and prizes, and everyone attended from miles around.

After supper that evening, the boys put on their jackets, and Joe guided them across the state highway that ran in front of their farm. The occasion was so important that school officials had placed the Coca-Cola life-size lithographed tin policeman signs at the entrances to the school. The smiling policeman in his blue uniform and white gloves held a yellow shield bearing the words SLOW SCHOOL ZONE. Joe, Charles, and Robert followed the driveway around the back, or north, side of the school and through the parking lot filled with the rounded forms of older cars and the streamlined forms of newer cars, some sporting fins over the taillights. Adults and kids of high school age milled about the doorways of the gym.

Construction of the gym had begun in 1940 and was completed in 1943 as a Works Progress Administration project. When the brick school building burned on Sunday the 21st of November in 1943, the gym had been spared.

While Robert had been inside bigger buildings, such as the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music on the campus of nearby Purdue University—which was an enormous auditorium—he considered the gymnasium to be big enough. High above his head, dark brown rafters formed aesthetically pleasing diamond patterns across the square-based elongated-dome ceiling. The bleachers rose on three sides from concrete tiers that met in parapets sporting iron railings above ramps that sloped down to the double doorways on the southeast and southwest corners. In Robert’s imagination, the parapets, with their additional seating, arched above drawbridges, as if the gym were a medieval castle.

Outside, the autumn air was crisp, but, inside, the crowd made the atmosphere warm. Joe bought tickets for the boys to redeem at the booths. The throng of families and children was elbow to elbow within the gym, and the noise made it almost impossible to hear what anyone was saying. Robert loved the commotion! Booths manned by volunteers stood everywhere on the giant rumpled canvas that covered and protected the varnished basketball floor.

Robert’s favorite game was to go fishing. Two members of the Lions Club stood behind a metal tank made for livestock. Joe handed them a ticket, and one of the men offered Robert a dowel rod for a fishing pole. At one end of the rod was a shiny steel hook. The object was to reach into the water and hook a wooden fish that was about three quarters of an inch thick and six inches long. Each fish had a screw eye at its nose. Logic would dictate that it would be easy to snag the hook through one of the screw eyes, but, for a boy of only five years, hooking a fish was tricky. Robert held the pole almost straight up and down while he leaned against the edge of the tank. The fish, which were painted various colors, bobbed up and down. With all the patience that he could muster, Robert slowly twisted the rod until the hook seemed to line up under the screw eye just beneath the surface of the rippling water. Then he gently pulled the rod upward. Happy day! He had snagged a fish! The volunteers quickly grabbed it, so that no water would drip on the canvas.

His prize was a thin bamboo cane painted dark green. Everywhere, boys and girls who had won games were twirling similar canes. A few splintered remains of canes were underfoot.

Charles likewise won a cane.

Other booths invited contestants to toss balls at wooden targets about the same size as the fish but cut in the shape of milk bottles and painted white. At the milk bottle game, Robert and Charles won crickets, which were brightly colored tin noisemakers equipped with a rectangular piece of metal acting as a spring. By squeezing the spring to bring its end closer to the oval colored top, the owner could make a loud click–click sound. From everywhere could be heard the “click–click, click–click, click–click” of hundreds of crickets, adding to the overall din.

All evening, Joe smiled, as he met neighbor after neighbor for friendly conversation. How he could hear what the other person was saying was miraculous, given the cacophony in the gym. He was a little hard of hearing anyway. He always said that, as a child, he had developed an infection of the inner ear and that, when the doctor had lanced the eardrum to release the pressure of the infection, the result was a loss of some of Joe’s hearing in that ear. Somehow or other, he managed to understand what his friends were talking about while the crickets sang all around him and the volunteers at the booths sang out to patrons.

With a ringing in their ears, Robert and Charles went with their father across the parking lot to the one-story school that had replaced the two-story brick one that Joe had attended. Joe treated the boys to slices of pie in the cafeteria. The fluorescent lights seemed especially bright after threading their way between parked cars in the night.

Robert was sorry for the fun to have come to an end. Joe led Robert and Charles back across the street, and Ida told them it was time for them to change into their pajamas and go to bed.

“Did you win anything?” she asked the boys.

“Oh, yes!” they replied. They demonstrated how loud their crickets were. Ida knew that she would have to put up with the noisemakers for a few days, until their novelty wore off and the clicking mercifully stopped.

As Robert pulled the heavy blankets up to his chin, he turned toward the window near the foot of his bed. The panes looked out on the school driveway. The headlights of cars came to a stop before turning right or left onto State Route 26. For several minutes, Robert watched the light that swelled in the bedroom from each automobile that arrived at the intersection and that dimmed again as the car made its turn. He had had about as much fun as he could stand, so he eventually fell asleep.