Excerpts from Eleven Days in August
1973
"How many miles left?" I ask an anxious customer whose hanging binoculars
peg him as a car race fan who has just exited the stands to grab a bagful of sandwiches.
It's a race day in 1973 and we're about to get blasted.
"Only about thirty when
I came out just a minute ago," he says with a smile, hurriedly pocketing his change and
quickly walking away with his sandwiches.
"Amatore, do you have enough fire? Better
get ready; big push coming." Dad is looking at me with an expression that says he's concerned
that his twenty-nine year old son will fall behind. His worry is justified; when the race
ends, thousands of fans will pour out of the stands and many will rush directly to Mille's
for a sausage sandwich.
Business is brisk right now but in a few minutes they'll be
three and four deep along our entire front and sides with every one of them waving a cash-filled
hand trying to get their order taken. It's no time to run out of sausage but it's been getting
busier and tougher to keep up every year. Ten minutes later, I dump another full bag of charcoal,
bringing the coals right up to the brim of the grill. There's a slight breeze from the southeast
and, within a few minutes, I've got tremendous heat. Now, just as the emerging race crowd attacks
our stand, I'm slapping spits of sausage onto every open spot on the grill - front and back, top to
bottom. Five minutes later, as quick as I can move, I'm sliding cooked sausages off of spits into
the old Nesco warmer and the women in the kitchen are forking them out and making sandwiches, also
as quickly as they can; before I can even replace the cooked spit with a raw spit they're calling
out "More sausage!" and I frantically jockey the spits around on the grill like a guy playing hide
the pea. It's a chess game played at super-speed and I'm trying to plan three to four moves ahead,
always seeking that elusive, constantly shifting, hottest spot for my next spit while guessing at which of
the others will be ready after that, and thus worthy of the second and third hottest spots, which
are also constantly changing and moving. Dad's ringing up sales and making change and looks over... "Amatore,
put another spit on," and I tell him I'm cooking as fast as I can and I notice that the waitresses
are having to act as referees, determining which person in the jammed crowd is actually next to be served - a
situation of empowerment that is difficult and, for the most part, thankless.
In the midst of all this,
my wife Mary who has been walking the fairgrounds with our three children, Therese, Jennifer,
and Matthew, rushes into the stand; she’s frantic. She tells me they were in the jam-packed Trade
Mart building, just behind our stand, and someone snatched our youngest, Matthew, who turned two just a
few months ago, and disappeared with him. "What do you mean? How did that happen?"
Over the next few
minutes, she describes a nightmarish experience when she and our young children had stopped to look at an
exhibitor's coloring books. While asking our girls about the books, she had let go of Matthew's hand -
for just a second - and in that instant... he was gone. She first looked under the table, expecting to see
that he had crawled there, then she began to yell for him and for help from the people around her. A
woman standing nearby asked if he was the little blond haired boy in the white shirt. She then says that,
just a few moments ago, a man with a mustache picked him up...the man had a teddy bear.
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