On a steamy July morning in 1917, at some long-forgotten fairground in rural Ohio, the cane man escorted his son to a well-worn place behind a midway tent. The boy quivered. He could not recall his mischief that day. Finally, his father said, “Boy, somebody has to be the entertainer. Make folks laugh, make them forget their troubles.”
That afternoon, little Harry C. Dearwester had his debut on an apple box, next to a brass scale. To guess people’s weight. For the next thirty years, he accomplished the impossible: he guessed correctly 90 percent of the time—and amazed everyone. They didn’t mind a dose of weighty realism. After all, they had come to the fair to have some fun. Besides, that Harry had a knack. When he grinned, the people responded—even when he informed them that they weighed 250 pounds. That’s why he never left the fair. Where else could a man tell people they were corn-fed and not get punched in the mouth?
Harry’s life paralleled the heyday of the county fair in Ohio; he spent a lifetime walking through dusty midways at fairs from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. Kids bragged that they could beat him at his own game, but they were wrong. He won every time when he saw them smile.
Once, long ago, a kid played Harry’s cane-rack game at the Butler County Fair in Hamilton on a hot July night. His father fed him quarters until he reached the two-dollar limit. The kid couldn’t win. He tossed the rings, but they bounced off the tops of the canes. Then, he ran out of money. Seeing the boy’s disappointment, the cane-rack man tapped the last ring with his fancy cane, and the ring fell over the top of a pretty red cane. The boy took the cane home and displayed it prominently in his small room. Every year after, for years, he returned to see the cane-rack man. Time passed and the boy turned into a teenager, and his thoughts turned to more complicated matters. Eventually, he stopped going to the fair with his parents.
Then one hot day, while on assignment for a magazine in Findlay, the adult “boy” saw Harry Dearwester at the Hancock County Fair. To the boy, it seemed that only a few months had passed since he saw Harry, who was still pleasing crowds of children. The visitor decided to stop and talk.
Harry’s world was inside a wooden orange rectangle, among hundreds of canes stacked vertically and in front of eager kids, who tried to toss lightweight wooden rings over them. Some kids couldn’t throw a ringer if they were standing a foot away from the target. The visitor watched as Harry tried to tip the rings in the kids’ favor, and most of the young ones left with flimsy but fascinating and brightly colored canes. Harry always saw to that. Some, the prized ones, had unusual handles, in the shapes of animal heads.
Ohio’s county fairs were Harry Dearwester’s personal neon world, circumscribed by the midway and a web of cotton candy. But his world changed. As more farms melted into suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s, the county fairs in more populated areas became the ghosts of our agrarian past. The number of Ohio farms declined from 215,000 in 1947 to 78,000 in 2001. The trend continues as farmers encounter low prices and high interest in developing their land.
Not losing sight of their agricultural roots, the fairs keep trying to attract younger people with nonagricultural programs. Some fair boards book heavy metal bands, offer competitions for the best Web designs, and display creative writing. Since 1980, the fairs in Ohio have been transformed as metropolitan areas have changed from rural to suburban. Even in agriculturally predominant counties, the fair is a slicker product these days. And in the many urban and suburban counties, fairs are a slim reason to get together and show off a dwindling number of large vegetables and animals.
The old fair days are lost now in the twilight of our rural past. Harry knew this, yet persevered. He no longer needed the paycheck, but he needed the fair.
He looked older and smaller than I had remembered. I envisioned a strong, large man, but on this day Harry was anything but large. He wore a cheap polyester blue ball cap with the words “Harry’s Cane Rack” on the front, a denim shirt, and plaid pants. White stubble stood out on his leathered, tanned face. When he laughed, deep wrinkles appeared and his smoky voice boomed deeply.
Relaxing with a can of Coca-Cola and a cigarette, Harry sat under a tree and recalled a life on the road, all fifty-eight years of it, mostly at Ohio’s county fairs. He knew he was growing old and that his time was short.
“I’ve had experiences,” he said. “Could write a book and then do another and never tell the same story twice.” He thought of himself as a relic on a now-flashy midway. The kids enjoyed the thrills and lights. His game was a simple one from another time. He looked around—now nothing but electronic games and booths with big stuffed animals and even a device to gauge how fast a person can throw a hardball. This was not Harry’s kind of place, but it was the only place left for him.
“My father spent fifty-five years in the games,” he said. “He was a big man, six feet eight inches and 247 pounds in his shirtsleeves. People listened to him. You understand why. He started out as a bartender in Findlay. Then I became a bartender. He hit the road with the games and so did I, following in his footsteps. He always said, ‘If you can’t swim, stay out of deep water.’ So I did. I stayed with him. The cane rack is the only game I love and the fairest game around. I hate to say it, but I’m the oldest concessionaire in the state—seventy-five years old. Now, I’m the old-timer. There ain’t any others like me. I remember it all. We used to have great crowds when the fairs had the buckin’ bulls. What happened? Humane Society ruled them out. These days, we got the demolition derby. Aw!
“I’ve seen too many changes. You used to be able to sell the American people anything. They’re greedy. That’s no secret. But what they saw and what they got were two different things. All we had to do was give somethin’ a fancy name and the people would flow into the tents to see it. I’ve enjoyed every bit of the fairs, though. I’ve met a lot of interesting people. They say, ‘Here comes the cane-rack man.’ I don’t remember their names, but I remember their faces. When I’m gone I don’t know who’ll get all this junk. I just hope it’s somebody with some sense.”
For thirty years, Harry operated a scale at the fairs. He guessed people’s weight. He learned to read minds by watching the movement of the eyes. He used to say anything to get the people to step up to the scale. “I’d tell them their daddy owned a butcher shop. People would stand and watch me forever. They’d come up in overcoats in September, with pockets filled with heavy stones. I’d just add on a few more pounds and guess right again. I’d say, ‘Lady, I’ll weigh you—horse and all.’”
As people moved closer, he walked among them with the assurance of a beekeeper. Maybe his luck was some genetic inheritance. “To show you what respect my mother had for me,” he said, puffing hard on a cigarette, “she bore and reared me on a fairground.”
Fairs were mainly daylight events then. Farmers rode in on buggies and ate something called Hokey-Pokey ice cream and waffles. Harry paid six dollars to set up his cane rack. If a fair spilled over into the evening, Coleman lanterns had to be strung up along the dusty walkways. Then the fair people left as quietly as they had come. They could pack everything they owned, jump on an express train in Greenville at eight, and disembark in Van Wert by midnight: daredevils, medicine men, cowboys and their bucking bulls. They all climbed aboard the train.
Harry’s father crisscrossed Ohio by rail, just to open his cane rack. He started it in 1892, and for fifty-five years he made it a fixture at Ohio’s county fairs. He refused to take it outside the state. He said he was born in Ohio and he would die in Ohio. Harry took over the game in 1947. He loved the rapid-fire ballyhoo: “Hey, folks, welovetoseeya hook’emandhang’em! Hey, yeah. We got dog heads, eagle claws, rat feet—all canes from old Japan. Try it, three rings for a quarter, ten for a dollar. Hey! Who else and how many … ?”
He saw things unimaginable. A menagerie of animals, hoaxes, freaks. “Once,” he remembered, “a fellow put up a colorful banner at the Montgomery County Fair in Dayton: ‘See the Hairless Dog in a Barrel! Only Ten Cents.’ Well, I overheard an old farmer say, ‘Mother, you wanna go in and see it?’ She said, ‘No, Daddy dear, you go in and look.’ A few minutes later, the old fella walked out, all red-faced and cussin’ up a blue streak. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘there ain’t nothin’ in that barrel but a damn hot dog on four toothpicks!’ By ’43, we had to clean it all up. The do-gooders wouldn’t have any of it. A guy used to sell nickel hamburgers. He’d put so much meal in them that the burgers would turn white as Styrofoam. He’d have to color them red. Some people complained that they was gettin’ a gyppin’, but the owner didn’t care.
“Then there was the guy who had a tent with a big sign: ‘Little People … Alive and in Action!’ People stood in long lines to get in there. They even brought cookies to feed the ‘little people.’ When they got inside, though, they got a surprise: the little ones was all mechanical, see—shoe cobblers and farmers, all doin’ something, going around a track. Oh, there was all kinds of gimmicks then to turn a dollar.”
Harry’s laughter boomed across the midway.
“In those days, people wanted something more,” he said. “So they came to the midway at the county fair. Like to try your luck? They could buy the same old thing downtown for fifty cents, but they wanted to beat ya. Now, all we got is a lot of nonsense.”
Except, of course, for the cane rack game. It is the only game Harry will work. He said, “My game is the only one on the midway that will give the kids a fair shuffle. I can’t take money from the kids and not give them something to take home. Maybe it’s nothing but a memory, but it is something they won’t forget about growing up in Ohio and in this time. They seem to have no childhood; they grow up so fast anymore. The game, though, it is the one thing that keeps them like the kids of my day. It’s a simple game, and it is rewarding. I sum up my working philosophy this way: When a millionaire over in Troy died years ago, a reporter went to the mansion to write a story about all the man’s possessions. The guy had nearly everything. The reporter came back to his news office, wrote up the man’s story, and told the editor, ‘Here’s a hot piece.’ The editor frowned and said, ‘Hell, son, this ain’t news. What did the man take with him?”
Harry always reminded his young workers that honesty mattered. They looked around the midway and chuckled. It wasn’t exactly a paragon of truth. Next door, a man named Pitcher John sold lemonade and reclaimed the ice. “He’d put a little chain on each pitcher so you couldn’t walk away with it,” Harry said. “After you drank your lemonade and left, he’d gather up the ice and hose it off and use it again. He had a sign: ‘All you can drink for a nickel.’ But he saved money on the ice. One hot September day, a boy drank five pitchers. Pitcher John said, ‘You got any more boys like you at home?’ The boy said, ‘Give me another one!’” Pitcher John, all the wiser, just smirked.
A man named Foxy claimed he had an animal that looked like a groundhog and shrieked horribly. Then, a big wind blew open a tent flap to reveal an old man pulling furiously on a long rosined string to produce the shrieking sound. Never mind, Harry told his boys. They won’t stay in business for long. And most of them didn’t.
Yet, they were all Harry’s friends, every last showman and con artist. When the sheriff closed Red’s striptease show in Marion one night, Harry thought of a plan to save his friend from certain bankruptcy. “I told Red to go into town and get himself two dummies, a man and a woman, and bring them back to the fair and put up a big sign. He should call his show ‘The Ruination of Temptation: Why Young Girls Leave Home.’ Yeah, that would do it up right, I told old Red. Well, he took my advice and folks lined up for two hundred feet. Men tried to ditch their wives and sneak into the show. Oh, it was wonderful until the sheriff came. He thought he’d close up Red again. The sheriff paid his quarter, but all the old buzzard found was two mannequins holding cigarettes and glasses of Co’-Cola.”
As Harry sipped his drink, a plump boy of twelve walked up and said, “Need any help, Mister?” Harry stared at him and said nothing. Then the boy said, “What do you pay, anyway?”
“Now, I’m going to tell you somethin’, young man,” Harry said. “When I was a kid your age, I never asked how much money was involved. I worked for a man and then collected my pay and was satisfied with it. How much do you think you’re worth an hour to pick up them rings and put ’em on a stick?”
The boy’s eyes darted. “Uh …”
“Well?”
“Uh, I’m just askin’ for a friend.”
“Well, come on!”
“Uh—six dollars?”
“Six dollars! An hour?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Harry wiped his forehead and said: “Son, for six bucks an hour, I’ll pick up my own rings. In fact, I’ll go to work for you for six an hour.”
He has picked up his own rings, too, and considered it all in a good day’s work. The traveling was the hardest part. It had been lonely, too, despite the characters who surrounded him. Then Harry met Pauline in 1945. One day she pitched the rings and smiled. They started talking and soon began dating. They went everywhere together around their hometown, Findlay, until the warm weather came again and, one day, a new stock of canes arrived. Harry felt the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to head out on the road. It was an itch that he could not stop. “Well, kid,” he told her straight, “I got to leave you. Fair time, you know. Time for me to go.” Pauline smiled sadly and said she’d try to understand. She felt crushed, and her feelings showed. As Harry started to walk away, he felt the magnetic attraction of Pauline’s affection. He turned to her and stammered, “Well, uh, I … let’s get married. I guess you could go with me. I got a nice mobile home.”
For thirty-nine years they ran the cane rack as partners, driving to county fairs in Ohio and returning to their house on Kibby Street in Findlay for the autumn and winter. When Pauline died, Harry cried. It was as though his life had ended; he did not know how to react. Two weeks later, he set up the cane rack as usual at the Butler County Fair in Hamilton. What else could he do? He said he felt as if somebody had just cut him in half, but he had to go on with the game. He knew no other way. The work gave him purpose.
“This is the place for me to be, at the cane rack,” he said. “There will always be another fair for me, somewhere.”
He picked out a red cane and handed it to me. “A souvenir,” he said, breaking into a familiar grin. “But this time, kid, you don’t have to toss no rings. It’s yours.”
As I walked away, I turned to look back at Harry Dearwester one last time. He had stepped into his little wooden rectangle again and started hustling canes. For a moment, time failed to move. Harry seemed perfectly timeless.
His voice grew softer as I walked farther: “Hey, folks! We got dog heads, eagle claws, rat feet, and some canes from old Japan. Hey! Who else and how many? Who else and how many … ?”
At that instant I heard the fading echo of a forgotten Ohio.