much of a beer-drinker, and, if so, how many bottles did he usually put away in the
course of an evening? Was he a belcher? It was believed that a good belcher was a bit
tougher to beat over the long haul.
All of this and other information was sifted, the odds laid, the bets made. How
much money actually changed hands during the week or so following pie-night I have
no way of knowing, but if you held a gun to my head and forced me to guess, I’d put it at close to a thousand dollars–that probably sounds like a pretty paltry figure, but it was a lot of money to be passing around in such a small town fifteen years ago.
And because the contest was honest and a strict time-limit of ten minutes was
observed, no one objected to a competitor betting on himself, and Bill Travis did so
every year.
Talk was, as he nodded, smiling, to his audience on that summer night in 1960,
that he had bet a substantial amount on himself again, and that the best he had been
able to do this year was one-for-five odds. If you’re not the betting type, let me
explain it this way: he’d have to put two hundred and fifty dollars at risk to win fifty.
Not a good deal at all, but it was the price of success–and as he stood there, soaking up the applause and smiling easy, he didn’t look too worried about it.
‘And the defending champion,’ Mayor Charbonneau trumpeted, ‘Gretna’s own
Bill Travis!’
‘Hoo, Bill!’
‘How many you goin’ through tonight, Bill?’
‘You goin’ for ten, Billy-boy?’
‘I got a two-spot on you, Bill! Don’t let me down, boy!’
‘Save me one of those pies, Trav!’
Nodding and smiling with all proper modesty, Bill Travis allowed the Mayor
to tie his bib around his neck. Then he sat down at the far right end of the table, near the place where Mayor Charbonneau would stand during the contest. From right to
left, then, the eaters were Bill Travis, David ‘Lard Ass’ Hogan, Bob Cormier, principal John Wiggins, and Calvin Spier holding down the stool on the far left.
Mayor Charbonneau introduced Sylvia Dodge, who was even more of a
contest figure than Bill Travis himself. She had been President of the Gretna Ladies’
Auxiliary for years beyond telling (since the First Manassas, according to some town
wits), and it was she who oversaw the baking of each year’s pies, strictly subjecting
each to her own rigorous quality control, which included a weigh-in ceremony on Mr
Bancichek’s butcher’s scales down at the Freedom Market -this to make sure that each
pie weighed within an ounce of the others.
Sylvia smiled regally down at the crowd, her blue hair twinkling under the hot
glow of the light-bulbs. She made a short speech about how glad she was that so
much of the town had turned out to celebrate their hardy pioneer forebears, the people who made this country great, for it was great, not only on the grassroots level where
Mayor Charbonneau would be leading the local Republicans to the hallowed seats of
town government again in November, but on the national level where the team of
Nixon and Lodge would take the torch of freedom from Our Great and Beloved
General and hold it high for–Calvin Spier’s belly rumbled noisily–Goinnnngg! There
was laughter and even some applause. Sylvia Dodge, who knew perfectly well that
Calvin was both a Democrat and a Catholic (either would have been forgivable alone,
but the two combined, never), managed to blush, smile, and look furious all at the
same time. She cleared her throat and wound up with a ringing exhortation to every
boy and girl in the audience, telling them to always hold the red, white, and blue high, both in their hands and in their hearts, and to remember that smoking was a dirty, evil habit which made you cough. The boys and girls in the audience, most of whom
would be wearing peace medallions and smoking not Camels but marijuana in another
eight years, shuffled their feet and waited for the action to begin.