Above: Ultimate Power.

Some people possess power, but not many. Not real power. You know what kind of power I’m talking about. I’m talking about people-crushing power. Ultimate Power. Like many of you, my personal and professional lives don’t afford much in the way of Ultimate Power. However, Mike Paulus’s life was very different in the summer of 1985 …

… or at least, I think it was the summer of 1985. I know it was sometime in the mid-eighties. And in the summer. At any rate, I will never forget what happened to me back then – every detail is forever burned into my mind … apart from the year, that is ...

As a youth, I attended St. James the Greater Catholic Elementary School. I have no idea where St. James the Lesser Elementary School was located, but screw them. I was from The Greater. Every summer, St. James the Greater Catholic Church hosted a “summerfest” style event where members of the parish and school volunteered to plan, build, and run a fundraising carnival. There was a beer tent. There was charcoal chicken. And most of all, there were games – lots and lots of games designed to entice kids into annoying their parents into spending money on little red tickets.

All the small-town carnival classics were there. The “ring toss” booth. The “throw a ball in a bucket” booth. The “throw a dart at a wall of balloons” booth. The “Holy Sacraments Super Quiz” booth. (I made one of those up.)

At one booth, you could throw softballs at milk bottles made from the heaviest lead known to man. Pshhh. Even as a kid, I knew those “milk bottles” had never held milk – unless the animal it came from was some sort of mutant cow with radioactive udders.

We also had that one booth where kids scare the crap out of a table-full of goldfish by repeatedly pelting their little glass bowls with ping pong balls. If the kid is lucky enough to actually lob a ball into a bowl, the poor fish gets the pleasure of being scooped into a plastic bag so it can be carried around for the rest of the day, boiling in the hot summer sun. If the fish is lucky, it’ll get hurled into the air and onto the roasting blacktop – water balloon-style – thus bringing its misery to a splattery end.

    All the great prizes were available to our carnival’s winners: the super-skinny banana clip-like sunglasses. The cheap, unusable yo-yo. The “mind-bender” puzzle so horribly manufactured there was no way in hell you could ever solve it. The little picture of Jesus in a little plastic frame. (I didn’t make any of those up.)

We kids loved those prizes. And at one booth in particular, I got to be the person deciding who got them. There are many names for this booth, this game of chance. Different regions of the country and different cultures of the world have their own labels. I choose to call it The Booth of Ultimate Power.

There are others who call it Gone Fishin’.

The premise of The Booth of Ultimate Power is deceivingly simple. A happy carnival-goer. high on grape soda and fluorescent blue cotton candy, approaches a sheet of cheap plywood painted with an underwater scene – fish, seaweed, treasure chests and the like. They are given a wooden stick with a piece of string tied to it, a clip affixed to the end of the string. This is the fishin’ pole. The carnival-goer tosses the clip end of the string over the plywood/underwater scene. The fact that they are actually fishing from beneath the surface of the “water” will not occur to the carnival-goer, because now they are fishin’. And the Ultimate Power Play begins.

In the summer of 1985ish, Mike Paulus sat upon a little stool on the other side of that plywood. When the clip appeared over the top of the barrier betwixt me and the common folk, it was my duty to grab a prize, attach it to the clip, and give the string a little tug. And that was my power. I decided who went home with the cap gun and who got the stupid booklet of puffy Rainbow Brite stickers. I could give my friends the good stuff, and my enemies the Great Work! No. 2 pencil.

Unfortunately, I had only one, maybe two friends. But that’s OK. Ultimate Power was my friend. What more could I need?

So as you can see, these church and small-town festivals are important to kids. They are tent polls helping to protect the memory of summer. They are threads in the canvas of American childhood. And they afford today’s youth some people-crushing power. So let’s do what we can to support them.