Considerations

Three stories
oft told, the bottle, the sword, and the snakes. Summer carnival, Northern Illinois circa fifty-eight or thereabouts, Merry Go Round, Ferris Wheel, Cotton candy, hot dogs and hamburgers, French fries, popcorn, beer, soda, coffee, deep fry, peanuts, pretzels, pizza, snow cones or ice cream, and the crookedly catawampus games, in a canvas kiosk alley of sharpies, crying the whiles of a cornucopian wealth of bric-a-brac prizes.

Of the four of us only Dicky would play games because he always had lots of money, being he worked all the time and he stole from his boss at the gas station, and from the church we later would come to find out.

The coke bottle game caught Dicky's eye. It was a coke bottle, the original weighty green glass classic of the time, leaned toward the player at a 45 degree angle, in the crook of a metal post. The object was to stand up the coke bottle using a hot dog fork that was about 24 inches long. And this the concessionaire proceeded to do as a demonstration. Stood it right up, as if he had done it using his hand alone. No problem as easy as sly.

First try a quarter - second fifty cents, third try 75 and the fourth and thereafter a dollar. The prizes were first a plastic bauble, then a kewpie doll, then a medium size stuffed lion, a giant stuffed Panda and finally a gold watch. At any time that the feat was achieved, one got all one's money back, plus the prize of price or all the prizes, if it was on the tenth try and thereafter.

Each time Dicky would ease the bottle up almost upright, then it would teeter backward of its own momentum, wobble and fall over backward. He passed the gold watch plateau and the ten dollar mark and then twenty and thirty. He passed the forty dollar mark for 43 tries, when he started asking us for money. Of course Dicky was a generous guy, but this was principle. This was a huge 40 plus bucks.

The next evening was Saturday and Dicky wanted to go to the carnival again. Dicky went straight for the bottle game, and I would have been too embarrassed to show my face around there, having been taken for near fifty bucks like five-hundred now. Dicky walks straight up to the concessionaire and asks him for a free try. He obliges - no problem. Dicky stands it up the first time.

It was some years later when I realized that the coke bottle concept had ramifications that were further found in the mythology of King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone.

The legend was that whosoever shall pull a particular sword sheaved in a stone in a church yard, out of the rock would be king of England. The shear magnitude of the reward would provide ample reason and motive for the strongest and mightiest in England, to attempt to accomplish the feat. And of course with such a prize they would try mightily.

Many stories there are, but the one I remember was Arthur just back from the Crusades, rode into a town where a joust was being held. Arthur having no sword but wanting to compete, remembered he had seen a sword in a rock in a church yard riding thru town, and so rode back and pulled it from the stone. He didn't know it would make him king. He rode back to the joust and everyone immediately recognized the old rusty sword from the church yard, and Arthur was proclaimed king.

There was a story told by a fellow who had been in the army and they sent him to one of the countries in Central America. "Have you ever had any experience with snakes?" they asked him. "No", he replied. So they made him an instructor on the subject of poisonous snakes, that his military students might encounter in the local landscape. He was told on his first day, that the very live snakes he would be using for class demonstrations, had the venom removed and were harmless. He used these snakes in classes for a year, and on his last day he mentioned to his replacement, who was a biologist and had considerable training with reptiles, that the snakes were not poisonous.

"Oh no" ! said the biologist, "I don't know who told you that, but these snakes are still poisonous and are some of the most dangerous snakes in the world." This fellow telling the story finished by saying that he was never bitten and he did not teach that last day.

On a twelve inch wide plank one foot off the ground, one can run, jump, dance a jig. But put that same plank ten, twenty or thirty feet in the air, and one may not even be forced to crawl on one's belly across it, without the incentive of a machine gun.

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