The fairs usually were not a bad place to meet girls, and several of us had some fun out of that. The problem was that we hardly ever stayed close to the fairgrounds, since the motels and tourist cabins were pretty well booked up years in advance, so we had to stay over in the next county, or even farther away. That made the logistics of having a little fun with a honey a little more difficult, although not totally impossible. Sometimes that Ford of mine had that "whorehouse on a busy Saturday night" smell to it, and I wasn’t the only one to blame.

Although Carnie had been a good friend back on Okinawa and in Japan, I hadn’t really had much of a chance to talk to him since I joined up with the MMSA. Oh, I saw him several times, but there was never much of a chance to talk; mostly he had to spend time coordinating plans with Frank, going over arrangements, and then getting back on the road to try and stay ahead of us. I suppose it was a lonely and hectic life for those months, but he seemed to get along with it all right. Now that we saw him every day, and sometimes two or more days in a row was payback time for him, how he made up for all the running around out west. We got several chances over the next couple months to sit back, have a couple beers, and renew our friendship.

One time Carnie and I were sitting in some church or Grange’s food tent some place. It could have been most anyplace because at this distance everything seems run together and is pretty much the same. We’d walked over from where we were setting up in the infield, and to get to the food tent we’d had to pass through the midway. Of course Carnie had to stop and shoot the shit with people he knew, so it took us a while to get to the food tent and sit down to that wonderful home cooked fried chicken or whatever it was. "You sure seem at home around this place," I commented.

"Hell," Carnie replied. "To me, this is home. Until I got caught up in the Army the only home I ever knew was around carnivals and carnival people. I never knew who my real daddy was and I don’t think my mother was real sure about it. She worked in a girl show until after she got pregnant with me, and then worked in a flat joint, you know, a game booth. I really was born in a tent in the back of a flat joint, and the first smell I ever smelled was sawdust and candy floss. I was taking money off of marks in a three card Monte game or a shell game at the age of six. So, yeah, this is home to me."

"You want to go back to running with carnivals some time?" I asked.

"Not really," he said. "Oh, I suppose I will if I have to but I don’t particularly want to. It can be a good life, but if there’s anything I learned in the Army it’s that it’s not the only life. Hell, you know that. Do you want to go back to Nebraska and be a farmer again?"

"Not on a bet," I told him. "I’ve tried to be careful with spending my money, and I’ve been saving what I can, but I’ll bet that I’ve earned more money this summer than my father has all year. And, I’ve seen a heck of a lot more and done a heck of a lot more than he could have ever dreamed of. I don’t suppose I’ll keep doing this forever because I can see how the travel could get to be a real pain in the ass, so I suppose after a while I’ll find a place to teach, then settle down and have a family."

"That’s about how I look at it," he nodded. "This is a good gig, but it probably won’t last forever. The travel is really getting to be a pain in the ass, even though I like it, but I can see the day coming when a home and a family and a regular job are going to look pretty good to me. This swing is taking the sting out of the travel quite a bit, being able to be around friends like you and Frank and Spud. See, when you’re with a carnival, friends don’t last real long, just till the season is over, sometimes not even that long, and the next thing you know you’re with another bunch of carnival people. It’s the same thing, but it’s different. I know a hell of a lot of carnival people, sure. I grew up with them, after all. But I’ll tell you what, Mel, there’s not hardly a one of them that I’d trust to hold my wallet if I was to get in a fight. I grew up watching my back, and I want to get away from that about like you wanted to get away from a Nebraska farm."

"Yeah, I can see that," I agreed. "I’ve met a few nice people but I think there would be limits."

"It’s even worse when people look at you and don’t think you can be trusted," he sighed. "I’m used to it, but it can be tough. Right from the beginning, clear back on Okinawa, Frank has trusted me to do the job he asks of me, to do what has to be done to get what he wants done. I don’t feel like I’m working for Frank, I feel like I’m working with Frank, and there’s a big difference."

I had never heard it put quite that way, but I realized he was right. Sure, I got paid every week, and it was Frank doing the paying. But I always felt like I was working with Frank, for the good of the show, to try and make everything work out the best for everyone. It was a team effort, working together for the good of the whole. "I think I understand," I replied. "In a carnival, everyone is still working for themselves."

"That’s it in a nutshell," he nodded. "Like I said, I think the Army gave me a little different perspective on things, and I suppose I’m not the only person that learned that in the Army. Frank ran his shop fast and loose but he got the job done. Don’t get me wrong, I thought you did a good job when you took over the section, but I always sort of felt like you were filling for Frank."

"Well, I sort of felt that way, too," I told him. "God, that seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn’t, was it?"

"Five years," he shrugged. "I kind of rattled around for a while trying to find a place to fit in until Frank came along. I’ve done pretty well, both working with him and a little on the side here and there. I don’t know where I’m going to wind up, but I don’t think it’s going to be some carnival."

"I can’t see me being a race driver forever, either," I agreed. "I don’t think I’m quite ready to settle down in some high school yet, but I don’t think I’ll mind when the time comes. I think I’ll be happy to just find some girl and settle down to raise a family."

"The thing that worries me is that the wild goose bit me in the ass when I was just a little tyke," he smiled. "It’s going to be hard as hell to settle down in one spot and think that I’m going to pretty much have to stay there. I think the racing bug has bitten you in the ass, and I think you’re going to have a hard time getting away from it."

I know I thought an awful lot about that discussion for quite a while after that. Yeah, I enjoyed the racing, but I figured that I’d get my fill of it sooner or later and go on to the next thing. The same thing with the travel – I really liked it, I loved to see new country, meet new people even if I didn’t always get to know them very well. There was always something new and exciting over the next hill, and always seemed to be something new and interesting outside the car window as I drove down the highway. But I figured the day would come when I’d get tired of that, too, and be looking to settle down.

But I liked what I was doing and planned on staying doing it for a while, unless something unexpected happened – and there was always the possibility of that happening, of course.

Something unexpected could always happen. I mean, look at Chick – the clear cut, hands down all-time MMSA champion pussy hound. He picks up a strange piece for a one night stand in a nowhere town in Texas, and that was all she wrote. One time along in the middle of the fair season we were playing down in Indiana. We had a short jump that day; when we were at breakfast, with all of us together in some little greasy spoon, Chick and Hattie got up and said, "Before we get on the road, we’d like all of you to come down to the courthouse with us. We understand that they don’t have a waiting period in Indiana, so we’re going to get married."

I don’t think that really surprised any of us very much, although I think if anyone had to bet they would have bet on them waiting until the end of the season. It turned out that Hattie was pregnant, and in fact had been for a while but had just realized it. I figured out afterward that they’d decided they wanted to get married quick so the kid would be as legitimate as possible – that was a big deal back in those days.

So we all followed them over to the courthouse in whatever little Indiana town it was, waited around while they got the license and then watched as the local judge tied the knot. I don’t think that there was a one of us looking on that would have been willing to bet that the two of them would last more than a year, but it was their doing and so long as they were happy with it I guessed it didn’t matter.

I’ll jump way ahead of the story here to say that we were all dead wrong; a few years ago I went to Chick and Hattie’s fiftieth anniversary party; they had a bunch of kids and grandkids, and from what I could see had a good life together. She was still a good looking woman and still had a smile on her face – and was still happy that Chick had taken her out of Floydada with only the clothes on her back.

But that was way in the future and we had no idea of that then. For the most part, things didn’t change with them for the rest of the fall; the two of them still shared a motel room or tourist cabin, and we were on the move every day. She still washed cars and did other chores around the show, and she was sort of like everyone’s little sister.

In general, the fair season moved south with the fall. We played our last date in Michigan in the first week of October, but we moved south pretty quickly after that since it was getting chilly at night. We even got caught by frosts a couple times, but fortunately never bad enough to freeze up the blocks on the race cars, which would have been a major disaster. We never ran anti-freeze in them since there was no point in it, but after that if we hit an evening that it looked like it might freeze hard we drained the engine blocks and radiators.

By the time the month was ending we were on a swing through Oklahoma and Arkansas and playing our last few fair dates. It wasn’t back to back like it had been even earlier in the month, and along in there we did a few solo dates like we had done in the early part of the summer.

All in all, I think I did pretty good on the fair dates. I liked those big, wide tracks and it may have been that the 66 car could wind out a little better than some of the others. I wasn’t winning every time and actually couldn’t have won every time. There were times that I dogged it a little and let someone else win, or at least finish in the money, because I didn’t want Spud to think that the car was so good that he might take that restrictor plate down a sixteenth. But I managed to win about once a week, maybe not that often, and finish in the top three a couple times a week, and of course that added to the bonus money.

I don’t want to say that I was stacking money back real good, but I was a few bucks ahead and careful with my money since I figured I was going to need it sooner or later. I was several hundred bucks ahead for the season by this point, and really didn’t have a whole lot to complain about.

Over the course of the previous winter Carnie had talked to Frank about the possibility of a swing through the Deep South after the fair season was winding down. He remembered some good times in the area in the late fall with carnivals while he had been growing up, and thought there might be some possibilities there. Frank wasn’t so sure about it; he’d been at Ft. Benning in the Army back in the early part of the war and didn’t think much of the Deep South. He conceded that most of his experience with the South involved Phenix City, Alabama, which in those days was a huge collection of bars, whorehouses, and gyp joints since the area around Ft. Benning in Georgia was dry.

But by the time the season began Frank had agreed to give it a try. He and Carnie had worked out that we’d try to work more carnival style, with the show only a couple days behind the advance man, and keeping the jumps down so that the two of them could coordinate a little better than we’d done out west earlier in the year.

To make a long story short, it didn’t work all that well. There were a number of reasons for it; some of the towns we played were so poor that hardly anyone had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. More important, in my mind, was the fact that this was the era when stock car racing was on the rise and it seemed like every little town had a clay track that had been scratched out of the dirt. Some of them were really bad – but nobody knew from midgets, or cared much about them either. While we were almost always on one of those little clay tracks, we hardly ever drew enough of a crowd to make the nut, except on the weekends when we ran double dates with the yokels.

Finally, we were down in a little town in central Alabama. It had rained for a couple days and from what Frank could make out from the papers we were in for several more days of it. We had just this one date left on the schedule and we never got out of the tourist court. The little clay oval that was all they had for a track was so wet we’d have sunk a midget out of sight just trying to run on it. It was cold, and there was only one of the rooms in the tourist court that had heat, and we were all gathered in it to try and get a little warm while Frank and Carnie were talking about maybe heading down into Florida.

"Oh, the hell with it," Frank said. "Let’s just load up and get on the road. As far as I’m concerned, the season’s over."

Carnie was still all for pushing on for a bit, but he looked around the room and without anything being said could tell from the look on our faces that he’d lost the vote. I don’t think it took us ten minutes to get in the vehicles and be heading out of Talladega, Alabama.

Yes, you NASCAR fans reading this, you read that right. We hung it up for the season at Talladega – just something like twenty years before they had the fastest track in NASCAR, or anywhere else, for that matter. But an awful lot changed in that twenty years and things have changed an awful lot after that, too.

It was slow going up those country roads that day, but we started to make a little better time once we got over to US-27, which was a much better road. We pulled into Chattanooga, Tennessee after dark, and Frank found us some decent rooms in an honest to Pete motel that was fairly new. What was even better, he took us all up the street to a fairly nice steak house, and on his dime, to boot. We all had a decent meal, and a few drinks to celebrate the season being over with.

Once we were done eating, Frank stood up to say a few words. "First, I want to thank all of you for hanging in there through the season, especially this last tough couple of weeks. I won’t know until I’ve had a chance to go over the books with Vivian, but we had a pretty good season, all in all. I think I can say that overall it was better than we expected, and every one of you helped contribute to that. So, I’m going to give everyone that’s been with us since sometime in May a hundred dollar bonus for hanging in there, and fifty bucks to those that joined since the first of June. You all earned it, mostly for doing all you had to do and then some."

We all gave a big cheer at that, of course. A hundred bucks was a lot of money to us back in those days. Once the noise settled down, Frank went on. "The last few days, I’ve been going over the books from the season, and I got to wondering who won how much when they finished in the money, so I added it up. I figure that’s about as good a way to determine who wins the MMSA season championship as there is. So, anyway, I decided that the season champion deserves to keep the trophy we use every night, and just to be real nice I’ll throw in an extra hundred on top of it."

I didn’t think I was in the running, partly from joining the show late, and then from getting a slow start, although I’d picked up a bit through the fall. I was right. "Taking third place for the season, and an extra 25 bucks, is Mel Austin," Frank told us. "Mel joined us late but really went to it, and if he’d run from the beginning the way he’s run all fall he probably would have won it."

I got a nice little cheer for that, and Frank went on, "Second place is Rocky Turnupseed. Rocky didn’t win all that many times, but he sure managed to be around in second and third a lot, which made up for it. He gets an extra fifty bucks." There was a nice cheer for that. Rocky wasn’t a high profile kind of guy, but he always managed to be around when you needed a hand, and he was well liked by all of us.

Frank pulled the trophy out from behind the table. "So, that gets us down to the question of who the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association Champion for 1950 is," he smiled. "He actually wins it by a pretty good margin. He had a lot of wins, and was in the money fairly often. Several times I thought about dropping him down a sixteenth, but he always seemed to realize I was thinking about it and he wouldn’t make the feature, so it saved his butt. Hoss Korodan, you get the trophy."

There was quite a bit of cheering about that. Hoss was a special friend, but he was a friend to everybody, and he always pulled more than his share of the load. He was the guy who took charge when both Frank and Spud were gone, but he was always easy going about it.

After the cheering died down, Frank went on, "It’s a long time between now and when we get going again in April. There’s a lot of work to do. All the cars need to be gone through thoroughly, and we’re probably going to build a couple new ones. The trucks all need work, too, but I think they’ll make it back to Livonia. Carnie and I have still got a lot of work to do to get the season organized for next year. Although there’ll probably be some strange faces around when we get going again in the spring, I hope I’ll be seeing all of you again when the time comes."

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