Backyard Carnivals for Charity

For a couple of years in the early 1970s, when I was between Kindergarten and about second grade, the phenomenon of the backyard carnival hit my Milwaukee, Wisconsin neighborhood and spread like wildfire.

It’s a good thing there was no literal fire anywhere near these carnivals, as they were basically festivals of cardboard. For those too young to remember, let me explain. I remember you had to send away or call a phone number from television to order these “backyard carnivals” to raise money for some kind of charity, which escaped my memory for decades afterward. What came in the mail was a package of folded up cardboard “carnival booths”, signs, paper tickets, and possibly cups for drinks and popcorn. That was about it.

I try not to research anything for short memoir pieces, but I just cheated a bit and found out from Google that these “carnivals” were to benefit the MDA, or Muscular Dystrophy Association, Jerry Lewis’s famous charity for which he invented the famous telethon. It’s no wonder I did not remember the charity behind these carnivals, as, at the time, I was too young to understand what a charity even was, let alone Muscular Dystrophy, telethons, or Jerry Lewis.

What I remember best is that it was becoming a trend up and down my street. Every warm weather weekend for weeks, maybe months, some house had a backyard carnival behind or in front of it. This was not what someone might envision nowadays, with pony rides and bouncy houses.

It was games in booths made of cardboard, like Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Ping Pong Ball Toss (into cups), Clothespin Drop (into a bottle), some kind of game with a spinner with an arrow that landed on numbers, I think, and a “fishing booth”. This was a tall (to me), cardboard wall that you cast a plastic fishing pole line over and a kid on the other side put a prize on it for you to reel in.

This short-lived phenomenon captivated my childhood imagination because it was a chance to do a very grownup thing: RUN YOUR OWN CARNIVAL! Oh, sure you could “play carnival”, with your friends, imagining you were running a carousel or Ferris wheel, but that wasn’t real. These carnivals, as flimsy and temporary as they may have been, were REAL! ACTUAL HUMAN CUSTOMERS had to pay REAL MONEY for REAL TICKETS to your carnival!

Hey, we didn’t have video games, OK? This was a thrill!

It was only when I was a customer at these carnivals that I learned I should not have believed the hype. The whole event usually lasted less than thirty minutes and the prizes were cheap plastic toys like pipes that blew bubbles, three inch squirt guns, and, on one occasion, 45 rpm records you could “catch” at the fishing booth. I had no interest in records at the time.

I don’t know where these “forty-fives” came from, but I imagine some teenage sibling came home after the carnival was dismantled from their yard and became enraged looking for a record collection which was now in children’s toyboxes all over the neighborhood.

I soon gave my record away to my teenage babysitter because my ears could not even take in whatever music it was. I was still listening to Disney and Mister Rogers records. My babysitter loved it and was very happy I gave it to her. Like going to my friends’ carnivals, I felt very grownup, having a record to give to a grateful teen. I was “outa sight” for one evening.

Now, I wish I knew what record it was! My guess is it was music my parents did not play around the house, so probably soul, funk, or progressive rock, rather than the John Denver or Joan Baez music that my parents were so fond of.

At this point, you may be wondering if I ever had my own backyard carnival. The baffling answer is, uh, I’M NOT SURE! Memory is so weird sometimes. I had wished so hard for my own carnival for so many months, maybe years, and had repeatedly asked my mom to order one, that I can picture having one, but that may have been my intense imagination rather than reality. I know my mother said “No” to the idea many times.

I also know that my younger sister and I combatted Mom’s rejection with elaborate pretend games during the long Milwaukee winters in which we turned our entire house into a pretend carnival for our toys, and also for us pretending to be Disney characters. I think we played carnival outdoors as well, so it really tangles up my memory of having or not having had a real carnival of my own.

We are talking about fifty years ago here, and my parents weren’t ones to take pictures of my childhood activities, so I have no evidence. I wouldn’t have had any money from the carnival to spend because it was supposed to be sent to charity.

But it was never about the money. It was about going into business for myself and being the center of the neighborhood’s attention for one glorious afternoon. I'll never know if I actually threw a backyard carnival for charity in the early 1970s, but I’ll always have that carnival residing in my cluttered closet of memory.

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This story was originally published on Medium.com.