Caricatures and Galaxy Girl

I was done with the fair on Friday. I really was. I’d eaten my fill of food, packed on enough calories to last me for the next week, and walked along the Midway, politely telling the barkers that I couldn’t play their games on account of a deal I had going down with some Nigerian prince. I’d heard the roar of the tractor pulls and the stock car racing on Thursday and had thought about going to see the rock tribute bands on Friday but ultimately decided against it. As an aside, listening to tribute bands is a lot like drinking diet soda. It’s alright, but you know you’re not getting the real thing and it leaves a funny taste in your mouth afterwards. It’s different if the band isn’t around anymore, like the Beatles or the Doors or more or less Led Zepplin, but the tribute bands were covering AC/DC and Aerosmith, two bands that are technically still rocking.

So I had determined that Saturday would be pretty low-key. Nothing fancy at all, and then I remembered the Caricatures. A woman named Kira was doing caricatures for free as part of the fair, and when I saw her on Friday, she had a pretty long line of people. It made me think of how some people wait in line for video game systems and Black Friday shopping deals, and I resolved to come back sometime later when the people who had wanted their caricatures had gotten them and Kira would be a bit less swamped. So I arrived on Saturday afternoon. Surely there would be less of a line on the weekend, when most parents aren’t working and have time to go to something like this? If you can see the flaw in that statement you’re smarter than I was.

Of COURSE the line was still long. It was as long as it was on Friday, if not longer. Still, I was here and I wasn’t going to wait until Sunday, when I more than likely wouldn’t be around Cresco anyway. So I got in line and waited. And waited. And waited.  It was a good half-hour wait, and during that time I realized how many people there are in the world who have t-shirts with slogans that indicate they are from the shallow end of the gene pool. “I can’t understand you unless I have a beer in my hand” was one. “I love MILFs (Mother I’d Like to F***)” being another. I should also point out that the men who wore these t-shirts probably had nicknames like “Terror of the Smorgasbord” at the local restaurants. Somewhere during the wait I started to think that eugenics might not be such a bad thing after all, but this was forgotten as well in favor of watching the artist at work.

If you ever see a caricature artist at work, do take the time to look at what they’re drawing. Kira was remarkably fast, and very observant about a person’s features. She’d obviously had a bit of experience with this kind of thing, and when she was done she’d show the person their caricature, and everyone got a good laugh at how they looked. I didn’t see a single person upset at their caricature, which rekindled my faith in the human race. So Mister “I Love MILFs” is guilty of having less class than a school in July and being more delusional than Kim Jong-Il on LSD, but he could laugh at himself and his foibles. That counts for a lot.

As for my caricature, I learned two things. The first is that you should always, always shave before having your caricature drawn. The second is that I apparently squint. A lot. I am just Squinty McSquintface here. Not in the inscrutable Asian-looking way, either—it’s like my cheeks are touching my eyebrows. So yeah.

Afterwards, I walked toward the pavilion where a local band was playing cover songs. This may sound hypocritical since I mentioned that I’m not a fan of tribute bands, but I liked these guys. They were unpolished, sure, but darn it they were good. They covered a lot of 90s songs, along with a smattering of 70s and 80s songs. They didn’t favor any one musician, and they obviously had fun doing it. It didn’t hurt that their lead singer selected the songs that worked well with his voice, and everyone knew what they were doing. There were one or two missteps, but they recovered quickly. I even whipped out my lighter and held it up. I’m pretty sure no one else had any idea what I was doing, but the band got it.

Finally, I was about to go home until I saw a very tall ladder with a pole on top of it, and a sign saying that Galaxy Girl was going to do some death-defying stunts over 100 feet in the air. Could there be a better way to end my day at the fair? Probably, but it would have involved a bikini model and a bucket of warm chocolate chip cookies. So I waited as the bleachers filled up and people drifted toward the stunt apparatus, which also included a motorcycle attached to a fulcrum, on a mini track suspended about 30 feet off the ground. This was going to be interesting.

The speakers blared out a mix of very hard rock and remixed theme songs. The one that really caught my attention was the techno James Bond theme. Perfect background music while a daredevil performs. Then, out came Galaxy Girl in a white jumpsuit, kind of like Evel Knievel. People not up on their pop culture might not know who he is, so I’ll just say he’s a stunt man who makes the cast of “Jackass” seem safety conscious. Anyway, Galaxy Girl climbed up the ladder, up to where the ladder became a steel pole, and unhooked a trapeze bar that was swinging there. She hung on it, first by two legs then by one leg and then held herself on the trapeze by her hands. Then she climbed up the pole, which had to have been sturdier than it looked, because that thing swayed while she climbed it. It swayed a lot, and I freely admit if I were in her place I’d hold on for my life at that point and wait until the pole settled the frick down. Galaxy Girl didn’t slow down, though. She climbed to the top, stood on a ring that was attached to the pole unaided, and then did a handstand on the pole. To be honest, it wasn’t all that impressive. I understood the risks involved, and I would personally not want to fall 100 feet. But just standing up there and doing  a handstand seemed kind of anticlimactic.

The motorcycle-fulcrum was a lot more impressive, though. The act consisted of Galaxy Girl’s partner, Jake Rocket, driving around the mini track on his motorcycle while Galaxy Girl, who had shed her jumpsuit to reveal a more revealing outfit, swung around on the trapeze, using the centrifugal force to showcase some spectacular trapeze work. Then she hung by her neck and spun, using only her neck to support her. She called it the “helicopter,” which I found both descriptive and impressive. If I would have to do that, they would have to change the name to “twisting corpse.” Then she swung from her toes. Technically, she swung from her metatarsi, but I don’t think anyone in the audience was in the mood to split hairs. Then she performed some trapeze maneuvers while Jake Rocket sped up his motorcycle, leapt the track, and spun head-over-foot, or handlebar over taillight, in mid-air. It was a great way to finish the act.

Afterwards, both Galaxy Girl and Jake Rocket stuck around to ask questions, although Galaxy Girl was undoubtedly the star of the show. I went over to Jake and asked him a few questions, but I was most interested in why he did what he did. Let’s face it, with almost any other job you have a good sense of why people do what they do. It’s a mix of hard work, passion and plain luck. Daredevils, though, they put their well-being on the line time after time, and only for the amusement of the crowd. Obviously, they have to enjoy it, but how on earth do they get into this?

Jake gave me the answer. “It’s all I know how to do,” he said.

The extended version of the answer is that he’s been working with and riding motorcycles since he was a kid, and he just kept going from there. He’s ridden inside those steel spheres with other motorcyclists, done some jumps, and finally he’s here. He actually designed the motorcycle-fulcrum device himself.

Galaxy Girl gave the same answer. She’s done something similar to this since she was six, and she married into a family of daredevils. Both Galaxy Girl and Jake Rocket said they enjoyed what they do, but I caught a bit of wistfulness in their voices, as though they didn’t quite have a choice in the matter. It’s understandable—you can’t really do death-defying stunts and then say that the skills you learned somehow transfer to accounting. But it seemed that both Galaxy Girl and Jake had somehow been destined to do this. It also seemed that being a daredevil stuntperson is one of the last family businesses in America, and that the old joke about children of circus performers running away to be accountants is probably not that far-fetched. I walked away from the show with Galaxy Girl still signing autographs and posing with girls who looked up to her as a role model and guys who didn’t disguise the fact they thought she was really hot. For some reason, I felt really free, like I could go anywhere in life. All I had to do was leave.

Come to the Fair, Come to the Fair

For the next few days you can feel something different about Cresco. A certain energy, where kids are more hyperactive than normal and adults go “meh, again?” That’s right, until Saturday the Mighty Howard County Fair is back in town.

County fairs are interesting things. They’re much less of a spectacle and have less statewide importance than a state fair, but in their own way they’re arguably more important. Until the fair ends, visitors from all over the county converge on Cresco, and the normally calm town bustles a bit. It’s one of the few times I can honestly say I have trouble finding a parking spot in Cresco.

Before I go on, I should say that my experience with fairs has been kind of mixed. When I was growing up we had the Expo, which turned out to be the shorthand way to say “Oscoda County Fair and Great Lakes Forestry Expo.” At least that’s what I thought it was, until I Googled “Oscoda County Fair and Great Lakes Forestry Expo at the end of the last sentence. Now, it seems that the Oscoda County Fair and the Great Lakes Forestry Expo may be conjoined into one event some years, that they may be separate events other years, and that the Expo may be held at the Oscoda County Park, while the Oscoda County Fair is held at the Oscoda County Fairgrounds, about five miles away or so. I can think of all kinds of reasons for the division, but this has gotten a lot more complicated than I ever dreamed it would be. For now, I’m lumping my memories together as “The Expo.”

The Expo had everything that could hold a kid’s attention. You had huge vehicles the DNR and Forest Service used to fight forest fires, vehicles that by all rights belonged in a G.I. Joe cartoon. You had displays where people would give you stuff for free, cool stuff like lollipops, keychains and ball-point pens. When you’re a kid, it doesn’t take much to excite you. There were all sorts of booths where people sold arts and crafts, and I remember my brother Andy and I being drawn on one particular occasion to a wall where there were—get this—magnets painted to look like Masters of the Universe action figures and characters from Peanuts! This put the ball-point pens to shame. Andy and I begged Mom and Dad to let us buy one, and they eventually did. Andy got a He-Man magnet that showed He-Man striking a heroic pose with his shield and battle axe. I bought Snoopy holding his supper dish in his mouth. Looking back, I have a sneaking suspicion that may have been a character defining moment for both of us.

Regardless, the Expo was a kaleidoscopic blur of events, even later in life when the veneer had finally worn off, along with a lot of the paint and maybe one or two boards. I remember seeing a classmate of Andy’s being one of the main events, which was her basically singing Country-Western using a karaoke track without the benefit of a karaoke screen, which sounds mean but it’s not like you can just round up a band on short notice. Mostly I remember adults wandering around with the “Meh” attitude before anyone came up with “meh’ as a concept. Back in those days you’d usually call it “terminally bored and sick of seeing the same thing for the past ten years but you’re in a rut and it’s something to do and somewhere around the eighth year you just got the feeling you were expected to go there or else you’d be seen as a hermit and antisocial and very likely a communist so I’m here ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?” There were still kids there, and they were still happy. There were also teenagers, mostly just excited that something was going on in the area.

Personally, I’m still in the mindset that the fair can be fun, even if you’re not a teenager. At the very least, it’s interesting. This is why I bravely went to the Mighty Howard County Fair not once, but twice in order to experience it fully in order to write about it. It was a sacrifice, but nothing’s too good for the blog.

First things first—the name. I don’t know where northeast Iowa gets this “mouse that roared” quality from, but I like it. It’s the same kind of verve that made someone in Iowa open up a coffee shop without a Starbucks logo. It’s the kind of spirit that made Leuthold sell trendy, fashionable clothes. Something about this region just makes people say “I can do anything that you can do in a big city and just as well albeit a bit smaller.” It’s why the Koreanna restaurant in Decorah serves sushi and expects it to sell. For that matter, it’s why people buy sushi from Koreanna. 

When you’re a kid, the best thing about a County fair is all the rides. You want to go on every ride at least twice, although you eventually settle for going on one ride and watching the other rides at least twice. This keeps you looking forward to next year when your mom and dad may let you go on another ride. Once you’re an adult, you can go on as many rides as you like. Of course, by then you’ve seen the endless news reports that the local news likes to broadcast during the summer about how fair rides are as unsafe as getting on a plane with a pilot named Alfred Qaida. Even if you’ve never seen one of these reports, which I am convinced the news broadcasts just to screw with its viewers during the summer, you may still become intensely aware that you are placing your well-being in the hands of someone who may or may not have a high school diploma or GED equivalent. I don’t want to discriminate against high-school dropouts, but I remember the kids in high school who ended up dropping out, and I wouldn’t trust them with my socks, much less my life.

So what’s left for the adults? The food! When you become an adult, eating fair food is as big an adventure with going on the fair rides. It’s got a similar chance of killing you, but the reward is fried heaven. The Howard County Fair doesn’t have a whole lot of food on a stick, but like any good Midwest fair it has frying down to a science, not to mention decent brats. I’m personally fond of the smoked giant turkey drumsticks and the ribbon cut potato chips, but just as much I like buying from the local organizations that sell the food. When you have the choice between spending your money in front of a brightly lit trailer that offers everything your little heart, throat and stomach could desire or a simple tent with four or five volunteers frying up brats and meat and selling it on behalf of the 4-H club or the Methodist church, I personally like to see what the locals have to offer. I’ll admit to being emotionally manipulated, but I think the volunteer work makes the food taste better. This did not stop me from getting some mozzarella sticks at one of the brightly-lit trailers, though. Mozzarella sticks can overcome a whole bunch of faults.

On a whim, I decided to strike up a conversation with one of the vendors—the one who supplied me with the Mozzarella sticks. I learned two things. One, it’s hard to keep a vending trailer looking new. This trailer had a few years of use on it, and it showed more inside than outside. Second, the guy running the trailer owned a restaurant in Missouri. He does this because he gets to see the Midwest, although he included Texas in his definition of “Midwest,” and because he gets a little stir crazy when he’s confined to his restaurant for most of the year. The fairs are kind of a godsend to him. It was kind of interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes.

More to come…

Houses and Graveyards

I should preface this entry by saying there are things to do in northeast Iowa. Lots of things. On the other hand, when you are a comic book aficionado and the nearest comic book store is down in Cedar Falls, you take Highway 63 to the borderlands of northeast Iowa, which is how I spent my Saturday.

The last time, I talked a lot about Waterloo and Cedar Falls, but precious little about Highway 63, which is kind of a shame because you stumble on some interesting mysteries of rural life when you drive down it.

I’ve already mentioned Highway 63’s split personality, where sometimes it is a 55 mph highway and other times it is a four-lane 65 mph expressway. What I don’t recall writing about is the surprising number of houses that are right off the highway.  Most of the time you’ll be looking at the endless fields and buildings off in the distance, and then suddenly you see a house. With one exception, I’d estimate they are all around 30 yards back from the road, which seems like a lot until you see a house sitting there as you fly by.  It makes me feel like an intruder somehow—when you drive past houses in a city, the highway is usually separated from the houses somehow, even if it’s just a backyard. But these houses sit with their fronts to the road, beckoning to hundreds of faceless strangers going much too fast to really consider stopping.

These houses always make me curious. How long have they been here? Were they here first? Did they want to be located right next to the highway in the middle of nowhere? I could see a number of scenarios. It was likely the owners had been living here for some time. The highway is confused enough as it is, and that could be the result of the Department of Transportation figuring out just where it could be an expressway and where it couldn’t. It’s not like Highway 63 passes through towns, just by houses. Imagine waking up one morning to discover people can drive 65 mph by your house! So much for needing an alarm clock to wake you up. So much for going to sleep, for that matter.  The people who live there either have to be insomniacs or the soundest sleepers in Iowa.

I’m not sure why people would choose to keep living there, to be honest. I’d feel too exposed. But then, being exposed is part of prairie life. I suppose being able to see your neighbor’s house from five miles away isn’t so different from having cars zip by your house when I think about it.

Slightly harder to explain are the graveyards I see by Highway 63. There are two or three very old graveyards, which you can tell without having to examine them too closely. Some wonderful gothic headstones mark the graves, and a lot of them have been worn away by time and the elements. This I can understand. Like the houses, they were probably here before the highway grew into what it is now. However, then there are the two or three new graveyards. The property has been marked out, but the graveyards have yet to break the double-digit threshold. And like their older counterparts, they lie by the side of the highway. I don’t have it on good authority, but I can imagine that people follow the driving laws pretty closely when they drive by those patches of land. The state police should designate the property next to these graveyards as self-check points where you can go to make sure you’re following all the laws, down to testing the visibility of your headlights. For that matter, they should put neon lighting around the grave markers of everyone who died in a traffic accident.

The thing is, I’ve driven past graveyards before. The majority are not along a highway, not in the middle of nowhere  and if they fulfill any of the previous two conditions they have something more solid separating the graveyard from the road than a thin wrought iron fence. I don’t understand why whoever is in charge of placing graveyards chose to place the new ones next to the road. I also wonder how the people who live in houses next to the road feel about the placement of these graveyards, and what they think it says about their houses. Regardless, I will not pick up hitchhikers on Highway 63. I know that picking up hitchhikers is risky in general, but on a road where graveyards are just to the side there’s a whole new dimension of risk involved, not the least of which is falling for a beautiful woman to whom you give a ride and then discovering she died twenty years ago. Talk about falling in love with someone unobtainable…

I can’t let this entry end without mentioning the creepy phenomenon of people putting up crosses and makeshift memorials on the roadside where people have apparently died. I get that this marks the spot where the person was last alive, but if there is one thing I don’t want to do to a spot where someone I loved died it is to sanctify that land. Also, if you die in a traffic accident I can’t imagine that your last moments would be altogether pleasant. If I happen to die away from home and anyone wants to commemorate me, set up a shrine in the manga section of the nearest Barnes & Noble. I’ll feel a lot better about it.

Outside of the creepiness, some of the memorials can be a little frightening just by their location. There is a 20-foot cliff face as I take Highway 9 along the outskirts of Decorah that has 20 crosses at the top, gazing out over the motorists. For the life of me, I do not know how a person died up there, particularly if they were driving a car.

Then there are the roadside memorials that spring up in more common places, like in the depression next to a curb or on the side of a stretch of road that has clear visibility and no sign of a curve or intersection for miles. If you ever need your dose of paranoia fuel, that last one is particularly high-octane. I can think of a few ways someone would wreck their car on a straight patch of road, and a lot of them are out of my hands.

For all that, though, I did get to Cedar Falls and back with no accidents, no events, and enough reading material to keep me occupied for a week at least. Of course, I may not have a lot of time to get to them this week. There’s a fair in town, and wait until I tell you about that!

The Tragedy of the Ridgeway School

One of the events of Kuntz Days in Ridgeway was the “tour” of Ridgeway Elementary School. The description on the flyer was “A discussion of the future of our school.” As I walked to the school, I thought that this would be about drumming up support for a millage election or an introduction to some refurbishing plans and a plea for donations.

Instead, I arrived in the school’s lobby and found…nothing. The lights were off. The classroom doors were open, showing vast expanses of bare linoleum. In the lobby sat an old man dressed in a black and gold garrison cap and a matching windbreaker. He talked with the people in front of me about how he thought the school building could be made into apartments. Then the people in front of me walked into the school, and I followed them.

A little girl in the crowd had apparently gone to the school, and from what I picked up the school had been closed down the year before. Her parents and relatives all asked her what had been in each classroom, and to hear her remembering who had taught what class in what room was kind of heartbreaking.  She had obviously had some good memories in this place, and now it was abandoned.

Before closing down the school, the people in charge had taken all the equipment they deemed necessary. Whiteboards had been removed from the blackboards, leaving evenly spaced circular pockmarks of adhesive, and most rooms had nothing in them. One had an old wooden desk that would have been considered old in the 1970s, and there was one classroom with a few chairs thrown in the center, as though they had been grouped together and forgotten.

Then I got to the library, and I started to get mad.

You could tell it was the library for two reasons. The first was because of the shelves in the room. The second was because the books were still in them. Stacks and stacks of children’s books, gathering dust in an abandoned school building, for some reason considered less important to take than tables and chairs. I was incredulous. How could they just let the books rot here? Couldn’t they have donated them to a library or sold them or even given the things away to children who could have gotten some use out of them? But no, they just sat there, waiting in vain for some child to pick them up and discover the worlds they contained.

I have by and large tried to keep from putting my personal opinions in this blog. I have tried really hard, because this blog is supposed to be about the interesting , wonderful and occasionally ridiculous things that go on in this little corner of the United States, but I have to say something here. In 2010, the Department of Defense received 705 billion dollars to keep functioning. That’s about 20% of the Federal Government’s budget. Education, on the other hand, nets a whopping 3% of the government’s budget. According to the Department of Education’s website, about 10.8% of each state’s education is funded by the Federal government. The rest comes from the individual state.

With this recession, Congress has talked an awful lot about needing to cut programs, especially programs like social security, Medicare and Medicaid. To be fair, about 20% of the U.S. budget goes to Social Security, and 21% goes to Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP. But with all the screaming politicians have done about us needing to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, along with everything else, the Defense and Security budget remains untouched. Because, after all, we are surrounded by big scary enemies lurking out in the world who are going to kill us if we take so much as a five spot from the Defense budget. Meanwhile, schools across the country are being closed due to lack of funding.

If you look at the more successful dictatorships in human history, you might notice they have two main strategies for controlling the population. Keep them scared, and keep them stupid.

Draw your own conclusions.

Kuntz Days in Ridgeway

If there’s one thing that is becoming synonymous with summer, it’s the local round of fairs. As far as I can tell, almost every state has a state fair. One of the exceptions is unfortunately Michigan, whose state Fair was shut down in 2009. But out in the breadbasket of America, the state fair is alive and well. It is particularly alive and well in Minnesota, which has the third largest fair in the United States. The first two are in Texas, which seems fitting somehow. If you’re curious, the Iowa state fair comes in at 18.

The next step down from state fairs are the county fairs. In northeast Iowa two of them dominate the public consciousness. Howard County, home of Cresco, has a large one that lasts for a week. So does Winneshiek County, home of Decorah. Both feature roughly the same things—livestock, fair food, rigged games you’ll have fun trying to win and fair rides which were last inspected for safety sometime in the 1970s, a fact you’ll only really think about when the g-forces are hitting your body at the apex of the ride. Have fun!

After the county fairs are the much less well-known “town celebrations.” These are fairs offered up by towns. Ostensibly they celebrate an aspect of the town, but the reality is everyone loves a chance to get out and party. So in Lime Springs you have Sweet Corn Days, in Chester you have Old Settlers Days, and in Ridgeway you have Kuntz Days.

Over the weekend, I had the choice of going to either the Old Settlers Days or Kuntz Days, or heading down to the comic book store in Cedar Falls. But I was curious. What kind of events do they have? What do they celebrate?

My first choice was Old Settlers Days in Chester, but then I saw a flyer for Kuntz Days in Ridgeway. A little asking around revealed that one Everett Kuntz had written a book about Ridgeway or something to that effect. Then I went to the Howard County website and looked at the events of the day for Old Settlers Days. The events in question were not quite even remotely connected with Old Settlers. The main event was a Tractor Pull. Another main event—a Children’s Tractor Pull. While this had every opportunity for comedy, I decided to go to Ridgeway instead. After all, someone wrote a book about Ridgeway, a community that is most known for being between Cresco and Decorah. According to Wikipedia it has around 300 people, give or take 100. So I headed out to Ridgeway, waiting to see just what would be in store.

Usually when I drive through Ridgeway to get to Decorah, it’s a quick two-minute drive through Highway 9. I enter around an area owned by the Winneshiek Co-op and exit around the Winneshiek Park, a name which I would think Decorah might take issue with. It’s not often that a small community establishes its park as the county park, but Ridgeway had done it. Perhaps there was something to this town of which I was unaware.

As I had so many times before, I zipped into Ridgeway passing the Winneshiek Co-op grain silos. Two minutes later, I zipped past Winneshiek park without seeing any sign of a celebration. Crap. I turned my car around and drove back along Highway 9, only this time I turned down a random side street. I knew from experience there was some kind of community, and the town was small enough that if I went down enough back roads there would have to be some sign of a celebration if any existed.

Two blocks later I found exactly what I was looking for. To be honest it wasn’t a big celebration. It wasn’t even a medium-sized one. Let’s face it, in a town where there are 300 people you can’t expect a big turnout. I’d say maybe 200 people were there, but that might be overstating things a bit. Still, this wasn’t about numbers, it was about celebrating. I parked the car and immediately grabbed a brat, potato chips and soda sold by the Ridgeway fire department to begin partaking in the celebration. I’ve always thought bratwursts are the ideal standard of fair food, at least for adults. They’re portable in a way hamburgers aren’t, and they have a number of ways they can be topped. They’re also taste a lot better than a hotdog. Hotdogs taste kind of bland, and they’re all about the toppings you can put on them to disguise the fact that you’re eating a hotdog. Brats, though, brats are salty and meaty, and in my opinion a little sauerkraut and mustard only enhances the flavor, although you really shouldn’t put on much sauerkraut and mustard on your brats. If you do, you should at least make sure you have a place to sit down so the kraut and mustard doesn’t get all over your hands and on your jacket. These are the kinds of tips Miss Manners never talks about, by the way.

As I was trying to wipe the excess mustard and sauerkraut off my hands and my jacket I arrived at the community center, where all the action was. In the street there were a bunch of kids’ games, like musical chairs, a beanbag toss and a “fishing” wall. There was also a bouncy castle that seemed to work intermittently, causing the adults on at least one occasion to rush to it and hold it up while trying not to panic the children inside while the owner got the blower working again. This is another aspect of small town life that makes me smile—if this had happened at the Minnesota State Fair, the attraction would have been shut down for fear of lawsuits while they tried to figure out what the problem was and convince people it wouldn’t happen again. Here, though, as soon as the blower was working, the kids got back inside and the adults let them. Sometimes bouncy castles fail, and when they do you deal with the situation and then get back to celebrating.

The center of the Kuntz Days celebration was the Ridgeway Community Center. It was easily the nicest building in Ridgeway, and true to its word it had a lot of community stuff going on. The local 4-H had a bake sale in there, and I bought a cookie to show solidarity. In another section there was a nail-biter of a bingo game going on, or so I judged by the fact that everyone was staring at their bingo cards as though the instructions to the Ark of the Covenant were written on them.

Far more interesting, though, was the collection of photographs taken by one Everett Kuntz. As it turns out, my source was wrong—he did not write any book about Ridgeway. Instead, he took a lot of pictures of the Ridgeway community circa 1939. By a lot, I mean enough to cover three tables. According to one website on the subject, he had over 2,000 negatives when he finally got around to getting them developed. At some point later, they came to the notice of one Jim Heynen, who took the pictures, created some vignettes about what was going on in them, and published the book as “Sunday Afternoon on the Porch: Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942.” You can find it on Amazon if you’re so inclined.

The photographs do what photographs do best—preserve a moment in time. And with any photograph of people you don’t know, there’s a sense of mystery. There’s a shot of a young man and a young woman on stage, with another man dressed more formally seeming to announce something. The title is, “The Engagement.” Just like that, there’s a story there—who were these people? How did they meet? What did they do to support themselves? What was the wedding like? Did they have a happy marriage?

There are other photographs—people working, people taking, people living their lives before World War II, unaware that someday people in 2011 their lives would be a snapshot of what might be considered a simpler time. It’s very alluring—you can see how people could want to visit the world in those photographs, where people were friendly with each other and where everyone is smiling or busy working on something. No wonder people want to return to the “Good Old Days,” which never seem to be the days that are ahead. But those people had their problems, too. The date was 1939, the waning days of the Great Depression. Two years later, the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor and we’d be introduced to one of the monsters of history.

Really, though, the photos are an excuse to get together and party. That’s a good thing. One of the things Everett Kuntz’s photos shows are people getting together and enjoying one another’s company, and there are quite a few reasons not to do that as it is. I think a community getting together and getting to know their neighbors is well in the spirit of what the photos convey, and I think it’s something Mr. Kuntz would appreciate.