Attribution: flydime, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that it is apple season and admits that he might have fetched an apple or two in his puppyhood, so he can identify with the keeper’s account of the great apple fight one autumn night in the back alleys of Barron, WI.
It was a spontaneous thing with no clearly defined sides but suddenly it seemed that every high school kid from miles around was either ducking them or throwing baseball-sized apples at one another as they sneaked through the dark streets and alleys.
The keeper was driving his ’32 Chevy with friend Darold in the passenger seat as the main apple thrower and cousin Rob in the back seat as observer. As they approached the alley next to the poolhall, Eddie Schmidt stepped out from behind Yureco’s shoe shop and prepared to throw an apple at them. Eddie was the pitcher on the high school baseball team and it was too dark to see whether or not he went into a full windup, but in any case the apple he threw smashed through the plate glass windshield of the keeper’s vehicle and continued on to hit Rob in the stomach in the backseat. Rob would later claim that the apple came with enough velocity to knock the wind out of him, but that was immaterial at the time. What mattered was that the keeper’s car was full of shattered pieces of glass and a contrite Eddie Schmidt stood next to it apologizing and assuring the keeper that he would pay for the windshield replacement. He never did, probably because the keeper never asked him to pay the $12 plate-glass windshield replacement cost. (Plate glass was outlawed in vehicles manufactured after 1937.)
The apple fight did not reach the dimensions of Spain’s Le Tomatina Festival when everyone throws tomatoes at everyone else, which is probably a good thing considering the differing textures of tomatoes and apples.
The apple fight memory comes back with the apples in Phyllis’s salad, and so the keeper has to tell her about it. Probably “again” since she has certainly heard it before, maybe about this time last fall.
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