Trending
Shark told me well ahead of time that her boys wanted to enter vegetables exhibits in the Hookstown Fair again this year. Grandsons Lamppost Head and The 747 work alongside her on their small garden and help with my big one, so it's legit, mostly, that they enter the produce as their own.
They love winning blue ribbons, but the premiums - the prize dollars - are the vigorish. That's a word I learned from Bob Prince, "The Gunner," who was the Pittsburgh Pirates' rapid-fire broadcaster in my younger days, when everyone followed baseball on radio. Vigorish is the hidden "juice" in making something happen. It's a gambling term: the small but not insignificant fee the bookmaker retains from each bet placed.
Despite having adequate warning to get exhibits lined up, it was a frenetic rush, as always, to prepare and get them entered.
"If you want to enter red raspberries, you need a pint," I yelled to Shark when she and the boys arrived at my garden after church on Sunday afternoon. "Don't pick them ripe. I did that one year and they were a pile of mush by judging time."
I told Lamppost Head to pick lima beans while I picked green beans: "You need 15 for an entry so pick 20." Everybody grows green beans, but not so many do limas. You play the odds.
My mother Ol' Food taught me years ago that all 15, or five, or whatever number of tomatoes, etc., are specified for an exhibit, they should be as identical as possible.
We had eaten, yum, all our crop of new red potatoes, but there were white Katahdins in a bucket at the house. It was easy to find 10 similar white potatoes, five for each boy's entry.
Shark picked garden flowers ("cut flowers" as we say) – the marigolds, zinnas, cosmos and cleomes – and put them in vases to enter in the floral department. She also made a nice arrangement of wildflowers. Having the same idea, I had made a quick drive through the fields to gather ironweed, thistle, goldenrod and Joe Pye weed, and threw them in the back of the truck.
The boys' exhibits I divided into more or less equal halves, and we entered them, 49 in all. We were organized but it still took half an hour.
I almost forgot my wildflowers. Working on the tailgate, I jammed the wilting weeds into a vase and gave it to Shark, who was entering the floral items. That and a vase of cosmos were the only exhibits entered in my name.
On the way home (the Hookstown Fair is only five miles away across the Pa. state line) I got a semi-panicked call from daughter-in-law Miss T with questions about numbers per exhibit. Her youngest, our grandson The Favorite, had said he wanted to enter stuff in the fair, but she woke up late from her Sunday nap and was scrambling.
"Entries close in half an hour," I said. "I'll be right there."
I arrived to find The Favorite sauntering leisurely through their garden with a shovel, on his way to dig sweet potatoes.
"Get a move on!" I yelled. "And don't wash them. Dirt proves you didn't buy them."
No need to prove they weren't ringers. They were scrawny because deer ate the tops, plus they were a dark purple variety.
He and his dad, Seed, dug nice red potatoes and some square lumpish black things Miss T said were supposed to be fingerling potatoes.
We raced to the fairgrounds, getting The Favorite's 21 entries logged in despite running slightly over deadline. His included butternuts, a tree nut which I had forgotten for the other grandsons.
Tuesday was free admission day at the fair for senior citizens. Honey and I went, eager to see how the grandsons fared. The 747 racked up more firsts than Lamppost Head, sometimes on identical exhibits. My wife laughed because just the opposite happened last year. It didn't matter. They will split the premium money, which at six, five and four dollars for first, second and third will be than a hundred bucks.
With no competition, the butternuts took first for The Favorite, as did the "fingerling" potatoes. Even his scrawny purple sweet potatoes won second. His ribbons will earn about $30 from the fair board.
And whadda ya know; my tailgate wildflowers won a blue ribbon, and so did my cosmos. The vigorish is nice, but at my age the glory pleases more.