I cut it open in my garage. The second I saw what had been hidden inside that machine all those years, I understood why the carnival folded so fast, because it was a solenoid, a battery box, and a coil of wire running up into the striker.
That strength tester was rigged. Rigged to let people win.
There is a button on the back leg, low, where the operator’s knee sits. Press it and the resistance drops by about a third and the bell rings for anybody, and there is no way to tell from the front.
Bolted in the same box, wrapped in oilcloth, was one page in pencil.
The signal list. Any boy under twelve. Any man with a hand or an arm that is not right. Any soldier. Any fellow whose girl has been standing there watching him miss. Charge them all the same dime and give them the bell, and do not tell them, ever, because the whole point is that he thinks he did it.
Underneath, a list of names in a different pen, added over years, about ninety of them, with towns and dates. People he had given the bell to on purpose.
Alvie Trask ran that show from 1946 until 1968.
In August of 1968 a fair board inspector in Illinois opened that base looking for a coin fault and found the wire.
A gaffed game gets a show pulled off a route, and it did. Three fairs cancelled inside a month and the booking agent dropped them, and a carnival that loses its route in August does not make it to spring.
Here is the part that has stuck with me since March.
He never explained it. Not to the board, not to the papers, not to his own people. He took the fine, lost the show, let everybody think he had been robbing rubes for twenty-two years, and then bolted the reason into the base of the machine and put it in a warehouse.
Because the second he explained it, every one of those ninety men finds out he did not ring that bell.
His granddaughter is seventy-one and grew up knowing her grandfather cheated people and lost the family show over it.
I drove that page to her in April. She read it at her kitchen counter and had to hold onto it.
Nine of those ninety names have been matched. Two of the men are living. One is ninety-one, in Vincennes, and his daughter asked me not to tell him, and I have not, and I think about that once a week.
The machine is restored and working and it is in the county museum in Rockville. The solenoid is still in it, still wired to the button.
They let kids ring it on Saturdays. There is a volunteer whose whole job is standing at that back leg with his knee against the wall.
The card on the case does not say a word about how it works, and that was the granddaughter’s condition, and the museum agreed to it in writing.
A whole show went under because a man would not explain himself. He had ninety reasons written down in pencil and he decided every one of them mattered more than his own name did.