Partners in Grime and Crime

I don't remember the first day I met Alice, but she and her parents and brother, Doug, lived 3 houses down from mine. Mr. Dugan, as I mentioned before, was next door, and next door to the Dugans' house was Sally Ann's house. Then, there was the big ante bellum house that had been converted into duplexes, and Alice and her family lived in one of the duplexes. Alice was two years younger than I, so I'm thinking that maybe I was at least 6 before I met her. And I suppose that's one reason we spent more time playing at her house than at mine; her mother felt more secure having her home than down the street somewhere.

Alice and I became best friends quickly, and we loved swinging in the swing on her front porch. We even learned how to turn the swing upside down somehow, sit down in it, and it would flip back to the upright position. It was as if we had our own amusement park ride! You see, there were no year-round amusement parks - no Frontier City, no Disneyworld, no Six Flags - only the once-a-year Monroe County Fair. The fair people came to town in September, and school was dismissed either a day or part of a day so we could all go to the fair. My favorite ride then - and still today - is the Tilt-a-Whirl. I just knew that one year Santa Claus would bring me one for my back yard. I just don't know why I never got one!

My parents and I would usually go to the fair once - on Saturday. They would literally drag me through the "exhibits." I hated looking at endless jars of plum jelly, pickles of all kinds, dried ears of corn, cucumbers, green beans, other canned vegetables of every sort, and everything else anyone could preserve in a jar and take to the fair. They all had some kind of ribbon on them, and I always wondered why one jar of pickles had a blue ribbon and another had a red or white ribbon. They all looked like pickles to me, and was Miss Somebody embarrassed that Miss Somebody Else got a blue ribbon and she got a white one? The ribbons were right out there in front of everyone to walk by and read their names. How boring for a young girl who was in a hurry to get to the Tilt-a-Whirl. And the needlework was even more boring than the jars of pickles. Please, daddy and mama, please let's get out of here!

It didn't take long to get from the exhibits to the rides, because I wasn't allowed to participate in any of the "gambling" games - trying to knock down milk bottles, trying to pop balloons, trying to toss nickels into glass dishes. However, I could pick up rubber ducks, because you got a prize every time. The ducks had numbers on the bottom and each prize had a number, so your prize depended on what number your duck had on it's bottom. Funny that I never did see anyone get one of the "big" prizes - it was always a plastic Hawaiian lei or a big pencil or something like that. I wasn't allowed to eat any real food from any place except maybe the concession of some local group, such as the American Legion. Those people were clean, and you never know where the fair people's hands had been. I was, however, allowed to have cotton candy and candy-coated apples. There was only pink cotton candy, and the apples were coated with some type of red gook - not the good, thin candy coating you're probably thinking about. This was thick, tasteless stuff, so I usually spit it out and got down to eating the apple.

But, I digressed from Alice, didn't I? Alice and I spent many fall days at various Monroe County Fairs as we were older, and I will talk more about Alice soon.