AGGIE OCTOBER

for Ann Wainwright


As a child, every October I was taken to the local (Essex*) county fair by my father who had gone to agricultural college a few miles away - the Essex Agricultural Institute, known as The Aggie. He would first always bring me to the pigpen where rotten potatoes were piled for visitors to throw at the pigs who happily ate them, rot notwithstanding. After throwing a few, I soon lost interest - because the pigs just couldn't be deterred from eating the potatoes to avoid being bopped by them. Potatoes bounced off the pigs & were soon eaten, because to the pigs, potatoes were eats, not bops.
 
Held in rural Topsfield Massachusetts,- it was called the Topsfield, rather than *Essex County Fair. People came to it from about a 25mi radius. We came from urban-industrial Lynn, about 25mi south, where my father worked in a large GE plant as a parts-inspector of large naval gears since WW2.

At the Fair, a series of real, red barns were filled with exhibits of farm equipment, prize-winning farmyard animals, crop vegetables, curiosa - massive insect models, - jams, jellies & honeys, flowers, herbs, and baked goods:  breads & pies.. My favorite was always a murky, tart apple cider that I thought I could only get at the fair.

Strangely, I don't recall the massive, distorted squashes & pumpkins that now attract even the international news-media (SKY TV reported on them in metrics). This year, the largest, winning squash (900 lbs) was dirty yellow, & looked distressingly like Jabba the Hutt in STAR WARS.

But by 13, I went to the R.C. Xaverian Bros-run prep-school nearby (fund. 1907) , a class step up that my father couldn't aspire to in his day (b. in 1911 in Glasgow, the Great Depression.). As you might expect, it changed my life, which my father never fully accepted because I didn't become the doctor he had aspired to be - he looked exactly like Robert Young as TV's MARCUS WELBY, M.D. - but instead became the writer you're reading.

- Bill Costley, Jr.