Fair Days

My sister said she and her husband had gone to the Knox County Fair all four days/nights last weekend.  It helped that their oldest was there with the grandchildren, but they would've gone anyway, for it's an important social event of the year.  It has always been so, though many changes have occurred, of course.

For all my school days, the fair signalled the beginning of the school year around Labor Day; instead of mid-August, it was the tail end, usually at the start of September.  Admission was 50 cents for me, maybe more for adults, which is why we could afford to go both daytime and back again at night.  We went from hillside bleachers to a concrete grandstand with roof at the west end where the ballfield was, and that's where the grandstand acts were each afternoon and evening, regular circus performers, comedians, musicians, sometimes with local talent thrown in.  On a portable stage jugglers and acrobats went through their routines, the one held like an amber fossil for me the flagpole guy bending himself into pretzel shapes at the top of a swaying flagpole bending deeply with his weight.  I remember the quality as being very high, not Ringling Brothers but better than the traveling carnivals that traveled around our area.  Today I understand it is country music acts every night.  Glad I grew up when I did.

When I was in high school, the major nightly event was the dance in the pavilion.  Back then Big Bands reigned, and having someone like the Bobby Layne Orchestra was equivalent to our own Glenn Miller as we danced to "In the Mood," "Sentimental Journey," "Darktown Strutters Ball," "Cherokee," "Margie."  Not all were big bands, but that was the kind of popular music played.  Sometimes we had a local/regional group like Larry Erbst's, who played for most of our dances in Center, but never on the big weekend nights, Saturday and Sunday.  Then we'd have a major orchestra with more than one of everything, sax section, trombone section, trumpet section, oh, yeah.  I had been brought up on dancing by Mom, who loved it and taught me how to fox trot, waltz (the best!), polka, schottische, even the varsuvienne (but not the jitterbug or the cha cha or the bunny hop), and I was consequently one of the best dancers, who also loved it enough to get out on the dance floor first--always a hangup for others--and to dance every dance.  Mom was a great partner, especially for the waltzes, though she outweighed me enough to swing me around.  I was virtually forbidden to go outside--where the drinking was going on--unless I had to cool off, staying by the pavilion doors.  I knew anyway that Mom and Dad would tell me whom I danced with the next day, if I hadn't already told them.  Dad's garage-welding shop-filling station was Gossip Central--I didn't need the recent news item that men gossiped as much as women--since he came home with juicier stories than Mom from the courthouse, also a gossip focal point.  Of course, at intermission, we headed for the church luncheon stands or drove out to the six-mile corner and back with all the windows open to dry our sweaty clothes.  (I wish I could lose water weight now as I did then.)  NOTE:  The six-mile corner was just that, east of Bloomfield at the T-intersection, south to Wausa, north to Crofton, or taking a correctional jog to go on east to U.S. 81.  Several country stores still existed, some even with gas pumps, which was the case then at the six-mile corner.

The midway had the regular carnival rides and gambling games for prizes.  We generally had the same franchise every year and complained mightily when we didn't.  Uncle Larry took me for my first octopus ride when I was little, and I passed out, so he had them stop and carried me off, where I whoozily greeted Mom.  The octopus became a high school favorite.  I didn't much care for the ferris wheel because of my acrophobia--my head starts to lift in floating dizziness at aerial movie highjinks, and I didn't really enjoy the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building, though I like flying, oddly--and because of jerky friends, like J.B., who deliberately rocked the seat.  The Tilt-A-Whirl was fun, gravity plastering me against the back of the netted compartment.  I don't know the name of the bullet-shaped contraption, one on each end of a huge revolving arm, so that the compartments turned and could be upside down, clearly the case when I lost everything out of my pockets and recovered very little after the ride.  (I was always warned about the carnies, who obviously led hard lives.)  When I was small, I favored the merry-go-round and the little cars endlessly circling; I even liked the merry-go-round later and got to deal with all the children's rides again when my sisters were little, for I was generally the one to shepherd them while Mom and Dad visited with dozens of people, the major adult attraction of the fair.

I was never that good at gaming, throwing balls at well-worn stuffed creatures or shooting pellet guns at moving ducks or tossing hoops over prizes, best at lobbing coins into dishes so that I brought home more of those than the rare kewpie doll or stuffed animal.  What I and the folks and Gramma and Grampa and everybody else really liked was the bingo stand, a dime a card, corn kernels as the markers, at which I won at least three blankets among the better prizes, good ones that we had for years.  I think there were two stands because the game was so popular--you'd hover behind someone to take the spot--but I don't recall whether they were church-run like the food stands by Bloomfield's major churches, each with a different reputation, or whether the American Legion or such a group ran the bingo.

We went through every building, naturally, from the animals on the east to the agricultural and crafts displays on the west, also where the all-important school building was, with its exhibit clusters by school in a kind of walled maze as we walked around each corridor to find our own work, our own school, and count the ribboned purples, reds, whites.  That was important in a kind of fine arts competition. The school building was always the best for me, the one I often went to first, the only one I returned to, crammed with art work from kindergarten up, full of displays with unusual materials, pictures from different kinds of seeds, papier-mache volcanoes, the wonderful imaginations of children drawing, painting, scribbling, modeling.  Only the crafts of women--quilting, knitting, crocheting, flower arrangements, sometimes paintings--approached the creativity of the schools.

The county fairs are generally for the farm kids, the 4-Hers, with all their riding horses, livestock, and projects, and I think that's the major emphasis now.  I did belong to a 4-H group briefly, a Gardening group, when the County Agent, who lived in Center, got all the boys in town together for that purpose.  I think we had some kind of fair display but honestly don't recall.  We lasted only one year, Oscar requiring too much fussiness from precise measurements to journals.  I did most of the family's gardening anyway, first with Dad's help, and then by myself, though Dad was always big on tomatoes.  (In his last years he would buy as many as a 100 plants to set out and pamper, and we'd just shake our heads.)

I will add that the animals building became a must-see early for me because that's where we bought my first dog.  Actually, my first dog was a female mongrel low to the ground, as seen in photos when I was about two.  I vaguely remember her, mostly crying when she was gone, learning later that Dad had to take her out north and shoot her.  Anyway, Mom and I saw this toy dog in his puppy group, a little mostly-black-with-white Oriental terrier with corner teeth that stuck out like bulldog fangs, and she bought it for me.  I can remember how that little puppy drank so much milk when we got him home that his belly distended and his legs simply slid outward till he lay against the floor.  That was tiny Zippy, the smartest dog I ever had--and I always had dogs thereafter--who would play hide-and-seek, jump at the sink when he wanted water, did tricks.  Mom later accidentally drove over him coasting in from grocery shopping at Freddie's.  I went looking for another puppy every year at the fair, but the people from Hartington, I think, no longer raised that breed, and I don't remember where I got my next one, Jigger.

The county fair was also the best time to get cotton candy and caramel corn, though the Boltons had that stand on Bloomfield's Main Street during the summer anyway, the best caramel corn ever.

I should also mention that occasional rarities came with the midway, thinking specifically of a truck display at the south end next to the parking area that had a tank with a whale, another first.  Biggest fish I ever saw growing up..  Weird, but that was the point.  Another reason the Knox County Fair was a special end to summer.