His solution?

Make Janks Field less isolated by improving access to it and making it a center of legitimate activity.

The council not only saw his point, but provided some funding and put Fargus in charge.

They threw enough money at the problem to bring in a bulldozer and lay a dirt road where there’d only been tire tracks before. They also provided funds for a modest “stadium” in the middle of Janks Field.

The stadium, Fargus’s brainchild, consisted of high bleachers on both sides of an arena.

A very small arena.

The county ran electricity in and put up banks of lights for “night games.”

On a mild June night a little over two years ago, Fargus’s stadium went into operation.

It was open to the public unless otherwise booked for a special event. Anyone could use it day or night, because the lights were on a timer. They came on at sundown and stayed on all night, every night, as a deterrent to shenanigans.

Fargus’s “special events” took place every Friday and Saturday night that summer. Because the arena was so small, there couldn’t be anything the size of basketball games, tennis matches, stage plays or band concerts.

The events had to be small enough to fit in.

So Fargus brought to the stadium a series of spectacular duds: a ping-pong tournament, a barbershop quartet, a juggling show, a piano solo, a poetry reading, an old fart doing card tricks.

Even though the events were free, almost nobody showed up for them.

Which was a good thing, in a way, because Fargus’s big plan for the stadium hadn’t included a parking lot. This was a major oversight, since most people drove to the events. They ended up parking their cars every which way on Janks Field. Not a big problem if only twenty or thirty people showed up.