Ledger Inquirer Special Edition: Is the Greater Columbus Fair worth it?
The midway is like Wall Street. You have to spend money to waste money.
The fair’s in town, so the boss sent me on a special assignment -- take $100 of the paper’s money and see how long it takes to blow through it on the midway at the Greater Columbus Fair. No rides. Just cruise the midway and maybe have something to eat.
The premise was to head out and expose the crooked carnies who set up rigged games that are impossible to win to cheat families out of hard-earned cash in the midst of this economic morass.
In the end, the C-note was gone in less than an hour, but after about a half hour and $50, I was lugging an armload of stuffed animals.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of the games still border on the impossible, at least for me. One, a ball toss into a plastic tub, shut me out. Another, a shooting gallery featuring air-powered BB machine guns, also produced no reward. You had to shoot a red star out of a paper target with a load of 100 BBs. I dropped $15 there and didn’t win so much as a trinket. (Tip to fair-goers: The gun in the center of the arcade shoots about an inch to the right.)
But minutes earlier, I dropped another $15 at a dart-throwing game and parlayed my winnings up to a nice prize. Then I knocked over a few Dixie cups with a cork gun and traded up to a handsome tiger at another booth.
That’s how they rack up the business, luring you to keep playing to get a little bit better stuffed animal. Win two small ones and you can trade up to a medium. Two mediums will get you a large one, etc.
I picked the tiger because of Auburn, and managed to keep much of my winnings SEC-related, racking up a bulldog and a gator along the way. Why would someone who pulls for Auburn and UGA choose a gator? Well, I had a plan for it, but the lady at the BB machine gun range wouldn’t let me follow through with it.
I went into this assignment recalling the days when you threw beat up old softballs at bottles spray-painted silver and obviously filled with lead so they were impossible to knock over unless you pitched at least at the AA level. Or ring-toss games where the targets were spaced so perfectly that you could never win.
So, why the change?
John Kaczmarek has been with the Dixieland Carnival for about two years, since the small business he owned in Pittsburgh went under.
“That’s when I went back to my roots,” he said.
Turns out his father had been in the carnival business and he’d lived the life on the road from the time he was 11 until he enlisted in the Army at age 19 in 1966.
Guess where he did basic training?
“Man,” he said. “This place has changed.”
Kaczmarek said the business he’s in has changed, too, in a couple of ways. Most important to him, the company now provides the carnies with bunk houses.
“In the ’60s, you slept where you could find a spot. Usually on the ground,” he said, pointing to the blacktop behind the counter of his arcade.
Many of the games have changed, too, he said. At some point the people who run the business apparently realized that leaving people irritated by impossible games wasn’t working anymore.
“You don’t want to frustrate people,” he said. “You want people to walk away with something.”
And I did walk away with an armload. But don’t think that means the fair people have been endowed with generosity.
All the stuffed toys I won were from Kelly Toys, a manufacturer that sells stuff to carnivals and other purveyors of plush wildlife.
I went to their website and burrowed down to their wholesale catalog. There, I found the crown jewel of my evening’s foray -- a 17-inch stuffed tiger that, through trading up at two arcades, cost me $24.
Made in China, it sells for about $1.25.
Times may have changed on the midway, but the bottom line hasn’t.
Most of the games are familiar. You toss balls, shoot guns, throw darts or shoot hoops. But one was new to me.
At the Coolidge Home Boys arcade, two cinder blocks are suspended by ropes about three feet off the ground. For $2, you get two beer bottles (empty) to throw at the blocks, which are swinging back and forth. For $5, you get a whole six pack of empties.
Redneck recycling, of a sort.
There I met Chris and Laura Whitley, who had brought a group of about 15 youngsters down from LaGrange, Ga., for the festivities.
I asked Chris if he thought the games along the midway were above-board.
“They seem to be pretty straight up,” he said. “I think they’re fair.”
When I told him about my mission to see how long $100 would last, he laughed.
“We went through a hundred when we came through the gate.”
Mike Owen, 706-571-8570 or mowen@ledger-enquirer.com.
This story was originally published October 14, 2011 at 12:06 AM with the headline "Ledger Inquirer Special Edition: Is the Greater Columbus Fair worth it?."