THE BELL CURVE:Fair more than rides

One of many records I’m not proud of is my nonconnection with the Orange County Fair. I’ve lived in Newport-Mesa for 48 years without ever attending the fair. But all that changed last Tuesday.

It just seemed time.

I’m not against fairs. For many years I enjoyed the annual street fair in Columbia City, Ind., where my family spent summers while we rented our house in Corona del Mar. Fair Day was a big event in rural Indiana, and I never missed it. The only clue it offers to my avoidance of our county fair was my steadfast refusal to join my kids on the Ferris wheel.

That attitude dates back to a week after I received my discharge from the Navy in San Francisco at the end of World War II. While we were driving back to the Midwest, we encountered a fair I couldn’t resist. So we stopped, I climbed on the Ferris wheel, and when we lingered for what seemed to me far too long at its high point, I threw up. After 1,800 hours of piloting Navy aircraft, I barfed on a Ferris wheel.

So maybe subconsciously I haven’t wanted to be thus endangered again. Ever.

But when we hit the fairgrounds last Tuesday, I was drawn immediately to the rides, monsters that brightened the sky with screaming passengers who paid up to five bucks a head to be shaken, jolted, suspended upside-down and otherwise maltreated. I was astonished at the sophistication of these devices designed to mock basic physics for stomach-churning thrills. The roller coasters and thrill rides of my day would be seen as typewriters in the current world of computers today.

The only comparison I could draw was an exercise in flight training called an inverted spin. It was the last test we were subjected to in both the primary and advanced flight stages. In it, the flight instructor stalls the plane at the top of a loop, throwing the plane into a spin from which recovery requires the student to reverse the normal function of his controls. We looked forward to this maneuver with dread, and at the Orange County Fair I was watching teenage girls and senior citizens who should know better actually paying for similar abuse.

No amount of money or even World Series tickets would ever get me on one of these things. And I have grown to believe it is not the barfing incident but rather my disinclination to be put into aerobatics over which I have no control that sends me to other venues more my speed.

These would include such widely diverse attractions as the Peking Acrobats and pig racing. The acrobats exhausted me in the first five minutes with surreal agility and confounded me when I realized they would perform this program twice more before bedtime. As for the pigs, I couldn’t hang in for their race despite one of the favorites being named Sloppy Joe, on whom I would have spent a bundle had he been a horse.

In-between the acrobats and the pigs, I ate ridiculous amounts of unhealthy food, resisted basketball games where the hoop was barely large enough to contain the ball, petted a bunch of goats and marveled at the variety of creativity in the Home Arts and Crafts Gallery, where I’m thinking about entering my Playbill collection for next year’s fair.

Sure, I’m going again. But not on any of those demented daredevil devices.

The “In Theory” topic last week grew out of a wistful and poignant description of the journey of Los Angeles Times religion writer Bill Lobdell from the clarity of a firm and powerful religious faith to a cloud of doubt and questions that are causing him to take a hard and critical look at what were once absolute convictions — and the sadness that has accompanied this knowledge.

If you didn’t read Lobdell’s piece, I strongly recommend you look it up. It is written with wonderful clarity and feeling. All this is of special interest to me for two reasons. First, it was editor Bill Lobdell who brought me to the Pilot eight years ago; and, second, I enjoyed the pleasure and satisfaction of having him as my student when I taught nonfiction writing in the English department at UC Irvine.

He was good then, and he’s very good now.

I would like to say a tentative good-bye to an old friend who arrived in Corona del Mar the same year I did — and has been a constant and helpful home for peaceful reading and occasional research for me for many years. The Corona del Mar public branch library, which opened in 1959, has taken a hit from the growing clientele at the central library, and the writing is on the wall that the CdM branch will probably be history soon, some of its resources moved to a new library component at the Oasis Senior Center.

This makes sense, and is not to be grieved. But it remains another piece of the past that apparently is not going to outlive those of us who embraced its warmth and nearness.