Seeing the Old Home Town

Source: School, Church, and Home Games
Category: AN INDOOR SPORTS FAIR



Down the line next to the baseball diamond came the bowling alley,
where everyone who was not a fan or a golf fiend was taking a hand at
the sport. This alley was laid on a long board table, and the game
played with tenpins and small wooden balls. Six balls for a nickel they
sold here, and because the sport needed something to speed it up a bit
they linked it with the food table next door. The best cooks in town
presided over this. You paid your money for your tenpin balls, and
proceeded to run up a score by counting the numbers on the pins you
knocked down; the pins were set far apart to make it difficult. Then
you took your score to the food table, where certain numbers of points
brought you a glass of jelly, a can of mince-meat, a box of cookies, or
a jar of mayonnaise. That bowling alley certainly did appeal to the
women!

And if there was ever a more successful grab bag for the children than
the quoits game, the Ashton Welfare Committee wants to hear about it.
They called it a Good Luck booth for it had a horseshoe-shaped opening
with a row of numbered pegs across the back. The kiddies bought the
quoits, little wooden horseshoes cut from cigar-box wood, and tossed
them over a peg. The number of the peg corresponded to a numbered tag
which was handed out to be redeemed at the parcel-post window near the
aerial mail plane.

This aviator, by the way, was an official of the Cupid Airline, so he
advertised on his aeroplane, which was painted on a large curtain with
a hole cut out where the seat would be, and the wheel of an electric
fan poked through at the front and set going for a propeller. His mail
bag hung over the side of the car inside of which he stood in aviation
uniform, and for ten cents you could get your fortune in a small white
envelope out of the mail bag if you were a man, or in a pink envelope
if you were a girl.

But say, for a real scream, you had to take a sight-seeing trip in the
auto! It was worth twice the toll. Dottie Earle had charge of it, and
she made one of the funniest guides you ever heard. "This way, ladies
and gentlemen," she would shout through her megaphone; "get your
tickets for a tour of the city in the most magnificently equipped
sight-seeing autos that ever ran on three wheels and one cylinder! Only
twenty-five cents, two bits a ride! See the birthplace of Ashton's
mayor, the history of Ashton's past, its chief industries," and so on.

When her tourists assembled in front of her machine, which was a real
car, at least the front half of one, an old relic which the garage had
just about decided to scrap, its latter half hidden behind a dark
curtain, Dottie led them back of the curtain where the sights of Ashton
were hidden. In another black curtain were a series of holes not any
larger than a quarter, and behind each was one of the sights, a cradle,
a picture of the town dump, a scrubbing brush and a large pen-knife for
the sights already mentioned. For the Home Team she had a snapshot of
the Warren twins, for the competitor of the Herald, a telephone, and so
on with eight other "hits" on town topics and characters. So many
guffaws and squeals of laughter came from behind the curtain that they
had to call in a "traffic cop" to keep the crowd outside quiet.

The "traffic cops," by the way, were boy scouts. They had dark blue
costumes of cheap drill, trimmed with white braid, and wore white
cotton gloves and shiny badges. They really did have power invested in
them by the committee to preserve order and keep the crowds moving. At
one point they were allowed to stand with a semaphore and hold up the
crowd, not allowing anyone to pass who could not show a certain number
of tags from the various booths. This tag system was to insure that all
would play fair, for there was so much fun just watching other folks
spend money that the tightwads might never have taken their hands out
of their pockets or opened their purses.


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