This isn't much of a story. Just a little relaxing possibility on the couch of FS memories for a short spell.
Everybody has some kind of memory of the Ark-Okla Rodeo, either loving the carnival rides on the Hammer or not liking the smell of the manure trapesing through the livestock halls looking at the heifers with blue ribbon prizes and weight/height stats, wondering, since we were really Big City people, in a relative sense, and could not divine why one heifer was "better" than another.
Like with women, the Rodeo was a big deal, and it's charms varied and changed as you grew older. Earliest memories were probably cotton candy and the ferris wheel. A year or two later it was hanging around the aforementioned Hammer hoping to find a quarter that fell out of some loose-pocketed boy who took so much effort to get his date on the infernal ride to make her scream.
Somewhere in the age spectrum you wanted to see the freak show Hairy Lady from the Amazon, later show off your pitching arm knocking five metal milk bottles off a stand with three miserably soft baggy "baseballs", hoping for a stuffed panda, ending up with a plastic token with Roy Rogers in bas relief.
No matter what, it was exotic to us City Dwellers, we had our nice superiority complex all in place over the rural dwellers, although, we felt we somehow had to pay respect to our antecedents and heritage, the truth of which was much more real to us when watching Hopalong Cassidy serials at the New or grand panoramas of Randolph Scott riding across the range, later in life found out to be nothing but a few square miles of space in the Chatsworth Hills.
And beribboned jars of elderberry jelly, heck, what was the big deal? Grandmother did all that stuff anyway.
And the core of it all, also with a bit of displaced excitement, the rodeo itself, getting splinters in your butt while watching Buck Somebody comin' out of chute five on Firefly. Heck, again, Buck Somebody was announced as bein' from Agua Frio, Texas or Whitlock, Arizona, someplace you never heard of and could not identify with.
The City Elders really promoted the Rodeo, I guess there was closer enjoyment to their past, and the Rodeo Parade was a big deal, getting a few thousand people down on Garrison and the spin off of accidentally wandering into Tilles and seeing a dress that was needed, or a sack of Kresses popcorn for little Jimmie, he needed that while waiting for the Camp Chaffee part, they were going to have a halftrack this year with the commanding officer. And lots of horses and riders that some people seemed to know, The Queen, wow, and afterwards, road apples on Garrison that would last for a week until they were squashed to apple sauce and burned up in the sun to dust, possibly washed away by a June thunderstorm.
My strongest Rodeo memory was a parallel thing, only happened once, which was the promotional two day Rodeo Tour. It was a big deal for me, my junior year of high school.
By that time it was known that I could sing Kawliga, I was cheap, and so I was invited to go on the promotional tour. I was to sing at every stop they set up. The Tour consisted of maybe twenty cars of men, a couple of pickups, and a Camp Chaffee 6x6, the most interesting aspect, for me, as a sergeant and a private drove it and in the back was a 30 caliber machine gun.
We would go into a town, find the town center, easy if it was a county seat as that would mean the square and the courthouse. The soldiers would drag the 30 caliber out of the 6x6 and set it up with a belt of blanks. Somebody set up the audio system and mike, all run by a car battery pack, the cars of men would disperse into the gathering crowd to hand out leaflets and schedules. The soldiers would fire off a belt of blanks to attract everybody and anybody out of the stores, barbershops, and lawyers offices. Then somebody would start telling the good citizens that they had to come to Fort Smith for the Ark-Okla Rodeo. At some point little Justin would sing Kawliga, Quinton Somebody would ride his unicycle around, more talk and pleading to come to the Really Big Event in Fort Smith.
Now we wandered down hwy 22, zigzaged down to hwy 10, and and all the ladder rung roads in between, on the way to Hot Springs to overnight. I must have sung twenty times in every hamlet over 1,000 in the swath between Fort Smith and Hot Springs.
Only later, I wondered about some things. We stayed at the Arlington, they put me in a room with some nice old gentleman. BUT, the twenty cars of men, they transformed into boys in Hot Springs. That destination was chosen, I am sure, with odd logic during the planning. I have to admit that I was a bit shocked at what I saw, er, how the pillars of Fort Smith, drunk in the halls at 3 AM, brown paper bags of Four Feathers discarded, a floozy or two, incoherent conversations on the floor all night about how much money they won or lost, and general behaviour that Mizz Thorworth, my Sunday School teacher, would not have approved of.
So, it was an occasion, when our men became boys, and probably a lot of memories that could only be shared with very few, or else they would be in deep kimshee with wifey. We will never know. But after that trip, I guess I became a little wiser about the ways of boy-men, when they were allowed to come out of chute five on Firefly, in the Arlington Hotel, in the den of iniquity of Hot Springs.
I am sure more people from Sallisaw came to the Rodeo than Hot Springs...
No comments:
Post a Comment