When my gran passed, I was given a small shoebox labeled “bits and bobs.” I figured it’d be old receipts, maybe a cracked watch face or two. But tucked beneath a faded photo of my grandad at some county fair was this – a big, shiny button with a painted winking face, a tiny crown stamped on top, and a bow embossed along the bottom.
No note. No explanation. Just the button.
I asked my dad if he knew what it was from. He just stared at it and said, “Oh, I remember that. Your grandad always kept it in the little dish by the bathroom mirror. Said it was ‘for when the time comes.'” That was it. No context. Just a strange phrase and a weird little smile on his face like he might’ve known more.
The size didn’t match any of the old coats in the closet. I checked his gardening jacket. Nothing. His old church blazer? Nope. I even brought it to a tailor just to see if it was even functional. She laughed and said, “Well, it’s a button alright. But when – “
The Tailor’s Laugh
When what?
She kind of turned it over in her fingers and said it wasn’t made for clothing. The shank on the back was wrong. Too wide, too flat, more like a pin backing than something you’d thread. “This is decorative,” she said. “Novelty, maybe. Or a badge of some kind.”
Badge.
That word sat with me the whole drive home. My grandad, Terry Pruitt, was not a badge-wearing man. He didn’t do clubs. He didn’t do lodges, unions, or any of that. He grew tomatoes. He watched the races on Saturday. He made one joke at every family dinner, always the same joke, and laughed at it harder than anyone else did.
He was not a mysterious person. That was the thing. He was the least mysterious person I had ever known in my life.
And yet.
The little dish by the bathroom mirror. That detail my dad dropped like it was nothing. I kept coming back to it. You don’t keep something in a dish by the bathroom mirror unless you look at it every day. That’s where you put your wedding ring when you wash your hands. Your watch. The things that matter enough to have a specific place.
He’d looked at that button every single day. Possibly for decades.
What the Photo Told Me
I went back to the shoebox.
The photo of my grandad at the county fair was the only other thing that felt connected, though I couldn’t have told you why at first. He looked young in it. Younger than I’d ever seen him in any other photo, so probably early thirties, which would put it somewhere around 1971 or ’72. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and squinting into the sun. Behind him there were striped stalls and a crowd, a banner I couldn’t read because it was blurred at the edge of the frame.
He wasn’t looking at the camera. He was laughing at something off to the left. Mouth open, head tipped back, the kind of laugh where you forget yourself.
My gran wasn’t in the photo. I’d always assumed she took it.
I flipped it over. On the back, in handwriting that wasn’t my gran’s and wasn’t my grandad’s, someone had written: Best summer. Don’t you forget it. – R.
R.
My grandad’s name was Terry. My gran was Margaret. Their friends, as far as I knew, were: a couple called the Hendersons, a man named Doug who died before I was born, and a woman from the church whose name I could never remember. Nobody starting with R.
I sat with the photo and the button side by side on my kitchen table for a long time.
The Facebook Long Shot
I posted both images to a local history group. The kind of group that has eleven thousand members and most of them are retired and very online. I didn’t expect much. I wrote a short description, said the photo was from what I believed was a county fair circa 1971-72, and asked if anyone recognized the button.
Within four hours I had forty-three comments.
Most of them were people asking if I’d tried Google Lens. I had. It pulled up generic novelty buttons from a costume supplier in Ohio. Not helpful.
But one comment stopped me. A woman named Diane Kowalski, who said she was seventy-one and had grown up in the same town my grandad was from, had written: That button is from the Laughing King. It was a traveling fair attraction. A kind of game. They gave those out as prizes in the late 60s and early 70s. Very specific to that circuit. Haven’t seen one in years.
I replied immediately. She messaged me back within the hour.
The Laughing King, she explained, was a booth. One of those old carnival games where you had to land a ball in a clown’s mouth or knock down bottles or whatever. Except this one had a gimmick: you didn’t win by skill. You won by making the operator laugh.
You had thirty seconds. You could do anything short of touching them. Jokes, faces, impressions, physical comedy. If you got a genuine laugh out of the operator, you got a button. If you didn’t, you lost your coin and walked away.
The operators were trained not to laugh. It was nearly impossible.
The buttons were rare. Diane said in all the years she went to that fair, she’d seen maybe three or four people win one.
The Thing My Dad Said Next
I called my dad that night.
He picked up on the second ring, which is unusual for him. I told him what I’d found. The fair. The game. The button being a prize for making someone laugh.
There was a pause on the line.
“Yeah,” he said, very quietly. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“You knew?”
“I didn’t know the details. I just knew it was something he was proud of. He never talked about it much. But when I was a kid and I asked him about it he said – ” Another pause. “He said the man running the booth had the most serious face he’d ever seen in his life. Like the world owed him something. And your grandad decided he was going to crack him.”
“Did he say what he did? What the joke was?”
My dad laughed. Short and quiet. “He said he didn’t tell a joke. He said he just stood there and did the face.”
“What face?”
“I don’t know. He did a face at me when he said it. This sort of – ” My dad made a sound that wasn’t really describable. “This sort of very solemn, very dignified, completely stupid expression. And then he said that was it. That was all it took. The man absolutely lost it.”
I didn’t say anything for a second.
“He kept the button because he was proud of it,” my dad said. “He said it was the best thirty seconds of his life. Which your gran was not thrilled about, apparently.”
For When the Time Comes
I went back to the phrase.
For when the time comes.
I’d assumed it meant something serious. Something coded. The way old men say things that are meant to carry weight. I’d been building a whole theory around it: a secret, a promise, something unresolved.
But sitting with it now, I thought maybe I’d been wrong.
Maybe it was just a joke. His joke. The one he made to himself, every morning, looking at a button in a dish by the bathroom mirror. For when the time comes to do the face again. For when someone needs thirty seconds of complete, committed, deeply stupid sincerity.
He’d kept it because it was the proof. Not of a secret. Not of a mystery. Just of the fact that he’d once stood in front of a man who’d decided not to laugh, and he’d made him laugh anyway. With nothing but his face.
Terry Pruitt. Tomato grower. One-joke man. Champion of the Laughing King, sometime around 1972.
The Part I Didn’t Expect
Diane Kowalski messaged me again two days later.
She said she’d been thinking about the photo, the one with the R on the back. She asked if I knew a man named Ray Cobb, who’d been a friend of my grandad’s in the early seventies. They’d worked together at the same plant, she thought. Lost touch when Ray moved north.
I didn’t know the name. I asked my dad.
Long pause.
“Where did you hear that name,” he said. Not a question. Just the words, flat.
“Someone in the local history group. They recognized the photo, maybe.”
Another pause. Then: “Ray was his best friend. Before me and your uncle were born. They had some kind of falling out. I don’t know what it was about, your gran wouldn’t talk about it. He wasn’t mentioned in the house.”
Best summer. Don’t you forget it.
So the photo wasn’t taken by my gran. It was taken by a man my grandad had lost. And he’d kept it in the same shoebox as the button, the one thing he’d been proudest of, the thing he’d looked at every morning.
Two objects. One box. One friendship that ended and apparently never got explained.
I don’t know what happened between them. I probably never will. My grandad died without saying, my gran died without saying, and my dad only knows the shape of the silence.
But I think about Ray Cobb, whoever he was, standing behind a camera at a county fair in 1972, watching his friend make a stone-faced carnival man collapse laughing, and writing on the back of the photo: Best summer. Don’t you forget it.
The button sits in a dish on my windowsill now. Not by the bathroom mirror. I’m not quite there yet.
But I look at it.
—
If this one stuck with you, pass it along to someone who knew a quiet man with a strange little object they never explained.
If you’re still in the mood for a good mystery, you might enjoy reading about what happened when someone opened a back room door they weren’t supposed to or perhaps the time a child showed up to a school carnival dressed as a Victorian professor. For another heartwarming tale about family, check out this story about a grandpa who hadn’t left the house in a year.
