JamesHoag.com

When I was a senior in high school, it was time to do the yearbook for the class. Our school had the tradition of picking all the “Best of…..” and “Most Likely to….” type of stuff. We were all gathered together in the library. One of the first things we voted on was “Most Likely to Succeed”.  I was nominated and I accepted. The vote was made and so for 1960, I was put down as the Most Likely to Succeed. Which is, I think one of the best categories. We went on and voted for other stuff, like Best Athlete and Best Dancer and Best person on the newspaper club and on the math club and on the spanish club. There were 20 or 30 different categories and they all had to be nominated and voted on.

Then we got to the “Most Optimistist” and I think one of the cheer leaders got that. Next was “Most Pessimistic” Someone said that Jim Hoag should have that category. Well, our counselor was a very wise woman. She said “I don’t think any one student should have more than one award.” She looked over at me and asked me which award I would like. Either Most Likely to Succeed or Most Pessimistic. If Homer Simpson had existed back then, I would have said “Duh”, let me think about that. Well, it took me about 1/2 nano-second to decide on that one. I was glad the Most Likely to Succeed was done first, because I wanted to keep that.

I smiled sweetly and told the counselor I would prefer to keep the Succeed award. So, I did and they were forced to give the Pessimistic award to someone else. Darn. I came out OK in that one. Too bad, I didn’t learn anything from it.

Dad

Barb and I are watching the movie from the 40’s called “State Fair”. It’s about a family that goes to the Iowa State Fair back in the days when fairs really meant something. It made me think of a story that I had forgotten until now.

Every summer, on the farm, one of the highlights of the summer was to go to the Calhoun County Fair. I think it was in August and we went every year. The Kader’s would take animals to be judged and we kids would get to go, too. I begged my mother until she gave me some money and then we could ride as many rides as we could and get cotton candy, etc.

My cousin’s Sharon and Dick and I would run around together all day and have a great time. The best part was that we weren’t working that day. It was like a vacation. One year, Sharon came running excitedly up to me and said she’d got to know the operator of the Merry-Go-Round and he would give us a free ride. We were to get on the ride, mount a horse and then when the ticket taker came along to pick up the ticket, we would just point to the operator and the ticket taker would go on and we’d get a free ride.

Well, it worked perfectly. The guy came along. I pointed to the operator and he nodded and went on his way. We rode the ride and got off. It was after the ride was over that Sharon told us that she had never talked to the operator at all. She had made the whole thing up. She thought it was a great trick to play on us and expected us to get kicked off the ride. It backfired and we got the ride anyway.

We laughed about that for days.

Dad