As a child I did not mark time by the calendar, but by holidays and events through the year. For me a year began in September with the start of school and then was divided up in my mind by chunks. Months didn’t matter, but the distance from the first day of school to Halloween did. Then the next hurdle was Halloween to Thanksgiving, which was the day that instigated the anticipation of Christmas. From Christmas, through Valentine’s Day seemed like a bright spot in the rainy winter, the next bench mark was the annual TV showing of The Wizard of Oz, which always meant that Easter was around the corner. The main thing about Easter, besides an egg hunt and a basket of candy, was that there was a week off from school. Once Easter was out of the way there was the final haul to the last day of school—always a triumphant day and just a hop, skip and a jump to Placerville’s self-created holiday time known as Wagon Train Days.
Wagon Train Days coincided with the El Dorado County Fair, so there was quite a to-do in town. Main Street merchants decorated their shop windows with a pioneer theme and there were parades. The important parade was made up of a group that would follow the old pioneer trail in wagons and teams of horses, camping along the way and finally riding into Placerville’s Main Street lined with the citizens cheering their arrival.
The other parade was for kids, decked out in pioneer costumes, which were judged and awarded ribbons. The group of kids at the top of Morrene Drive, known first as “The Top O’ the Hill Gang,” won the blue ribbon many years in a row. I was generally the leader and instigator of parade participation for this group––to me it was another chance to perform. This time our concept was to emulate the big headed characters seen in a Disneyland parade and so we fashioned our own big head masks out of paper grocery bags. The group started out with Kim and Kristin Sullivan from down the road and me and my brother Mark. Then the mothers started talking to each other and we gained Heidi and Jason Knochenhauer from next door as well as Scott Youngdahl from across town. Our group story was that we’d walk the parade route single file, with Heidi as a helpless pioneer girl being held up by a band of big headed outlaws, each with a gun in the next one’s back. Then followed the sheriff with a gun pointed at the outlaws.
Mrs. Knochenhaur volunteered to fill out the entry forms and took it upon herself to name us “The Top O’ the Hill Gang.” I wanted to protest, more so because I wasn’t consulted than any real opposition to the name, but there was no use. Somehow our big heads and little visual story charmed the judges because we won a blue ribbon in the group category.
Over the next few years I took a stronger hand in our presentation, making more of a theatrical show out of it. We built a train engine out of cardboard and staged a train robbery one year—blue ribbon. Another year we built a piano out of cardboard, had a kid inside of it with a tape recorder playing Scott Joplin, and had a western saloon scene with saloon girls and outlaws that came in to make trouble. The outlaws shooting off their cap guns caused the piano to run away from me in fright and we all went chasing after it—blue ribbon.
All this was followed by the county fair with displays of crafts, baking contests, blue ribbon wines, the Miss El Dorado beauty pageant and nightly entertainment on a stage set up before an expansive hill blanketed in cool grass. However, my chief interest was the carnival, a tawdry little midway of rides that was more fun than anything that happened the rest of the year. When I was 14 and had outgrown the children’s parade, I devised a street performer act with my trained dog, Penny, and Drama Club pal Laura. The entertainment director liked the idea, but didn’t have room in the budget for us, so our pay was free admission to the fair, which wasn’t too shabby. One day a year at the fair was never enough, but now I could be there for the whole week.
Dressed in goofy hats and colorful clothes, we ran through our act several times a day to small but appreciative crowds in picnic areas. Laura and I quickly found the repetition of our act to be more drudgery than fun and we spent more time just prowling around the fair. The next year I tried another act with my brother Mark, still working only for free admission, but this time as Marcel Marceau style mimes. We dressed in blue striped shirts, suspenders, berets and proper mime makeup. We went through routines like playing invisible tug of war, being trapped in glass boxes and picking invisible flowers to hand to old ladies who blushed with delight. We also had a spot in a variety show in which we recreated our famous routine from our “youth.”
A few years prior, my brother and I devised an ingenious act for the Old Coloma Theatre’s annual 4th of July variety show called Firecrackers. The sketch was a pantomime of a couple at a party. Mark was in drag playing my wife and when his attention was diverted I slipped a little poison into his drink. After a toast, Mark went through comical convulsions and died, eyes wide open. The rest of the routine was all about how I would pass off my wife as still being alive when party goers would come along. We went through all the ways I could puppeteer a dead body into looking alive and ended the skit by dancing him off stage. For two pre-teen kids to come up with this routine, struck the audience as pretty hilarious, but two years later when we looked taller and older the charm had worn off. For some reason, the county fair crowd barely made a snicker at our antics and after a smattering of polite applause we decided to retire the act. We were more successful as street mimes opening invisible doors.
Independence Day in Placerville never held any special allure for me as a kid. Perhaps it was because we always did something different. I can only remember actually bothering to go to the fireworks display at the fair grounds a time or two. I loved fireworks, but other shows I’d seen had been more spectacular. There were other things to do, however, such as Coloma’s Firecrackers variety show of dancers, musicians, comedians and patriotic songs. Often we went out of town with the grandparents or visited far away friends, though one year sticks out in my mind for a simple reason. This particular Independence Day we went to the apple barn of family friends. Placerville is next door to the town of Camino, which is lovingly known to all of Northern California as “Apple Hill” because of the concentration of apple farmers there. On this 4th of July we ran through the orchards playing hide and seek, had a wonderful barbeque picnic on checkered oil clothed tables, and there was watermelon and apple pie.
That night the sky was unusually bright with stars and as we all sat around the farmhouse porch looking up to the heavens I lamented not having any fireworks that year. Our hostess said something that stuck with me and I repeat it often: “Who needs fireworks when you’ve got stars?”
The last remaining chunk of the year was from Independence Day to my Birthday at the end of August and then it started all over again with the first day of school. I still think of a year as September through August rather than beginning from January 1st. Even if Halloween, Christmas and The Wizard of Oz are of enduring importance, they would be any place. However, in Placerville the real highlight was the Wagon Train Days—those simple joys of parades, blue ribbons and county fair carnival rides—not Disneyland, no, but something that captured our imaginations none the less. Who needs fireworks when you’ve got stars!
Blue Ribbon Winners, 1979
No comments:
Post a Comment