THE FAIR OF 32

The County Fair.  We go every year - never miss.  This year we asked Ol Ed which Fair was the best in his experience.   

Transcript

THE FAIR OF 32               2956 WORDS

By James R. von Feldt

All Rights Reserved

The County Fair.  We never miss it.

Tuesday morning, Mel Ebert, Max Heck, and I met cousin Clifford at the Fair Grounds.  We have been doing this event together for several years now.  Mel is a row-crop farmer but also has a small herd of Angus. He’s the beef expert of our coffee group at the Gas & Grill.  Clifford knows farming and sheep.  Max is an expert on horses, especially farm draught horses.  He also farmed, which means corn and soybeans around here.

The fairgrounds are right at the west edge of Bloomfield.  It didn’t take us long to drive the eight miles.  We go early on the fair’s first day to see the animals arrive.  Also, that’s when the kids prepare their yearling calves for the 4H beef show.  It’s a ball.  

The young uns have been practicing cleaning up the animals at home, but this is an entirely different atmosphere, and the huge animals are skittish and sometimes don’t respond the way they were trained.  It takes a while. 

The Fair provides a pen just for cleaning.  The kids have a hose, running water, and cleaning materials.  But first, they have to get the animals under control.  Then they wash their calves down and brush them to a super shine.  When they are happy with their appearance, they parade the animals back and forth, up and down the runway.  It’s practice for the final judging.  

Amy Morrie was the youngest and smallest that we watched.  She looked like a toddler in there with her calf giving commands.  She was telling that huge animal what to do, and it was doing it.  It was a delight to watch and comical too.  

Next, we did a tour of the 4H building.  It was loaded with crafts the kids had been working on for months.  Also on display was a wide variety of vegetables to be judged.  Sheriff Davis’s best tomatoes were on display.  Beckie Hilbert’s Apple pie was there too.  It had fetched eight hundred dollars the previous evening at the Annual Fair Auction.  I wanted to get a bite of that pie.

About ten o clock or so, we met old Ed in the swine barn.  Ed is over 100 now and still getting around.  He’s a legend around here.  The kids were soaking in all his comments as he went from pen to pen answering questions.  He was a judge for years.  The kids listened with total attention to his remarks.   

The animals were beautifully groomed.  To us, they all looked like blue ribbon material. 

We took Ed for coffee under the pavilion tent to chat about the crops, weather, and old times.  He’s always got a story or two to tell.  Sheriff Davis arrived and immediately joined us.  I think he had been checking out the tomato competition in the 4H building.  My Brandywine tomatoes give him a run for the money.

It was Max that asked the question.  

“What was the most memorable Fair you attended?” he said, looking at Ed.

Ed thought for a while as we sipped our coffee.  He wasn’t in a hurry.

He closed his eyes as if to see the past, then began in a low voice.  

“The Fair of 32.”  

I was ten years old in 1932.  The fair was right here where we’re sitting.  These buildings weren’t here.  The race track wasn’t enclosed as it is now.  All this – he pointed at buildings all around us.  All this was in the open, with no bleachers, just a track for horse races.  That was very popular then.  

Automobiles were around, but hardly anybody could afford one.  It was the time of the great depression.  Horses and mules were common.  Almost everyone used horses to farm.  I can’t remember farmers having tractors until after the depression and the war had raised the price of corn.  

We came to the fair that year in a horse-drawn wagon.  We were prepared to camp out on the fairgrounds the week of the fair.  Many of the Davis County farmers did that then.  It was an annual event, like a reunion.  Something we looked forward to.   

We set up over there.  Ed pointed to the west.  Down by the creek.  There was plenty of pasture for the horses and water.  We had a tent, but I slept with my friends under the stars most of the time.  

The Carnival came to town on a train that year.  My friends and I were at the train station when it came in.   It was a special train full of circus people and animals.  It took them all morning to unload, but by noon they lined up at the train station and a parade headed for Bloomfield.   A band led the way.  There were jugglers, people dressed in costumes I had never seen before.  I remember a lady with a giant snake wrapped around her, a lion in a red wagon pulled by clowns; more animals in wagons followed; two elephants with people in costumes riding on top.  I had never seen anything like it before.  

The next day the carnival tent was put up right over there.  Ed raised his arm and pointed to something he saw in his head.   He was pointing to the middle of the parking lot.  We waited for him the continue.

“It was huge, “he said.  The tent had a high wire suspended from poles.  Trapeze artists were way up in the air, swinging back and forth.  They didn’t have a net.   Jerry Deeks was my best friend then.  We snuck in under the tent the first night and saw some of the lion tamer act, but then they caught us and threw us out.

We didn’t have the money for a ticket.  Money was real short those days.  It was the worst time of the depression, but us kids didn’t know it.  We had food, clothes, and a place to live on the farm.   

Ed paused again:  Corn was fifteen cents a bushel. Hoover was president. Roosevelt was going to be elected that fall.  Henry Wallace, one of our own from Iowa, was going to be Secretary of Agriculture, then later, he became Roosevelt’s vice president.  People around here knew him and his family.

Lots of things were happening in the world too.  I heard the adults talking about Japan’s invasion of China.  We talked about that in school.  And the first national gasoline tax of one penny a gallon.  That upset many people, even if they didn’t have a car. Things were so bad in cities that fifteen-thousand World War I Veterans invaded Washington DC.  The DOW was at forty, the lowest ever.  They said that twenty-five percent of Americans were out of work, but it didn’t seem like it to us on the farm.

Ed stopped again as if in a trance.  He was back in time.

After a pause, he began again, “I remember this fair mainly because of a horse.“ 

We came to the county fair on Monday.  There were horse races that night, and me and Jerry saw some of them.  

When we were setting up our tent, a man rode his horse to the creek next to where we pitched our tent.  He met my folks, and we invited him to eat with us.  We got to know him.

His name was Bo Derrick.  He told us he was from Keosauqua, about 30 miles away.  He wasn’t a farmer.  He told us that he bought, broke, and trained horses for a living.  He looked the part.  He was skinny, about average height, and wore a western-style hat.  His boots were unusual for those days.  The heels were high – like a western boot.  He explained that they helped him stay in the saddle while racing.  He told us he took horses to county fairs to race.   Later that night, we would see him win a race.  It was exciting.

His horse’s name was Prince, and he looked it too.  He was beautiful, an all glossy black, well-appointed horse – tall, maybe sixteen hands or so.  Not like any we had seen around here.   Some people in town had horses that pulled carriages or riding horses, but most were common working horses.  

Jerry and I helped Bo set up his place next to ours.  We also got to feed, water, and walk Prince.   We thought a lot of that horse.  

Tuesday morning, the circus train came to town.  Early that morning, we helped with Prince, but then we headed to town, to the train depot.  We wanted to see the circus come in and unload and then the parade.  I guess everybody else did too.    A lot of people showed up.  

Later that night, we watched Prince win another race at the Fairgrounds.  We got to help cool him down after the race.  The Carnival tent was set up by Tuesday night.  

Wednesday morning, after helping to care for Prince, Jerry and I walked to town.  We didn’t have anything special in mind to do. We just wanted to look around.   The events at the fair didn’t get started until evening.   

We were sitting on the Court House lawn eating a sandwich mom made for us when we saw a carnival guy fighting a farm boy.  We could tell carnival people by their clothes.  Their shirts and pants looked different from the coveralls we wore. 

Sheriff Holbrook came out of the barbershop with lather on his face and stopped the fight, but we could tell the carnival guy was still mad at the farm boy.   We didn’t recognize either one.

There were a lot of people in town that day.  Wednesday was the normal go-to-town day if you lived in the country.   It seemed like an unusual number of folks were coming to town - probably to go to the fair.  The teams and wagons were lined up around the square.  Many people were outside the stores, on the boardwalk, talking to each other.  The shops were full, and the kids were playing on the courthouse lawn.  We recognized friends from our town and joined in.

When we got hungry, we made our way back to the fairgrounds.  We saw the circus guy that was in the fight.  He was walking ahead of us.   

Clouds were gathering towards the west, and it began raining before we got to our tent.  The circus had a show that night, but there wasn’t much of a crowd.  There were no horse races that night.  

Late that night, Bo came riding in on Prince.  It was dark and raining.  I woke up because I heard loud words.  I could see out the front of the tent.  I saw Bo and somebody else arguing and waving their hands.  They quieted down, and I went back to sleep.

Thursday morning, everything was wet.  Jerry and I helped Bo with Prince; we now exercise Prince all around the fairgrounds.  We would run ahead of him with a lead rope.  He would follow us, prancing as he went.   Every once in a while, we would stop to rest.  People would come up to admire Prince.  

Some of the admirers were circus people.  Jerry asked a very fat lady if there was a job we could do to earn tickets for the show.  She sent us to the horse corral.  Jerry asked a giant with tattoos on his face about a job while I held Princes’ reigns.  Circus people gathered around Prince and talked.  I couldn’t understand their language.   

We got a job.  We carried water and hay to their horses and helped clean the area.  We got a pass to the big tent that lasted through Saturday.  

There were horse races again Thursday night, but Bo didn’t race Prince.   He said the track was too wet.  We got to see all the shows in the big tent that night.

Early Friday morning, we exercised Prince, then went to work feeding and watering the circus horses and other animals.  We didn’t get done until lunchtime.  We ate with the circus crew and animal handlers.  The circus performers didn’t have their costumes on, so you couldn’t tell a clown from a lion tamer or trapeze artist.   The food was different, but we ate it anyway.

Bocchino, the giant with tattoos, was our boss.  He had a thick accent.  He was in charge of the horses, and we worked with him.  Four of the horses were trained for an act under the tent.  Riders would stand on the horses as they raced around and around.  The riders would jump off the horses onto a platform and then jump back on their backs as they ran around the ring.  

That afternoon Jerry was carrying hay for these horses, and the guy we saw in the fight came up to one of the horses with a heavy stick and started to beat the horse.  Jerry yelled at the guy.  The guy turned on Jerry and knocked him down.  I heard the ruckus but didn’t see anything.  I was hauling water for the elephants.  Bocchino heard the noise and grabbed the guy.  A fight ensued, but this time the guy used the heavy stick and did some damage to Bocchino.  Others came running and stopped the fight, then took the guy off.  He was acting crazy.  Bocchino was bleeding.  His arm looked broken.  Jerry had a bruise on his back, but he was ok.

We heard the circus people talking about the crazy guy but couldn’t understand what they were saying.

Jerry and I watched horse races that evening.  Prince raced again but couldn’t get out of the pack this time.  Another horse won the race.  Bo was mad.  He said the other riders corralled him on purpose.  After we walked and cooled Prince down, we went to the tent show.

It was the same as the night before but was still exciting, especially the high-wire act where they would leap from one swing to another.  It took your breath away every time they did it.  It looked like they were going to fall, but they didn’t.  At the same time, the clowns were running around doing crazy things.  Everybody laughed at them.

That night Jerry and I were laying on the grass outside our tent counting the stars when we saw someone sneaking up on Bo’s tent.    We couldn’t see who it was.  It looked like he was throwing something at Prince.  Bo heard the noise and got out of his tent to see what was going on, and the guy attacked Bo.  They were rolling on the ground, kicking and hitting.  My dad and others from nearby tents came running to see what was up.  Three men separated them but didn’t know what to do next.  It was the guy from the circus.  They told the guy to go back to the circus.  He was belligerent and threatening but eventually left in the darkness.

Bo was bruised.  His nose was bleeding.  Prince wasn’t hurt.

Later that night, Jerry and I told my dad about what had happened.  He told me not to go near the circus area and that he would take care of it in the morning.  Jerry and I stayed up real late that night talking.

Saturday was the last day of the fair.  Wagon loads of people were coming even before noon.  It seemed that everybody we knew was there.  This was the biggest day of the fair.  All of the fair animals were on show.  The judging was done, and the blue ribbons were awarded in ceremonies and then affixed to the stall or pen of the winning animals.  Everyone seemed upbeat and having a good time.  

The horse races began late afternoon.  Prince was racing in the last race.  The horses gathered at the starting post.  The starting shot rang out.  They were off and running.  Prince was in the front row next to the rail.  He wasn’t ahead, but he was open. As they rounded the first turn, a strange thing happened, a man jumped over the inside rail and stood there swinging a large stick.  The wall of horses was coming as fast as they could go.  We could see what was about to happen, and no one could stop it.

At the last minute, some horses saw the danger and began to crowd the others.  It was too late as the mass of horses smashed into the man, and the front ones crumpled to the ground.  Riders were flung from their saddles.  The crowd screamed and raced to the scene.  

When everything was untangled, several horses were limping, including Prince.  Many of the riders were injured. One couldn’t walk.  Bo was on the ground, but I saw he was getting up.  One horse had a broken leg and would be shot.  The crazy man was lying on the ground, not moving.  Sheriff Holbrook was on the scene talking to circus people.  Eventually, they came with a stretcher and took him away.

The races were over.  The mood had changed completely.  We were supposed to stay at the fairgrounds that night, but dad decided to pack us all up and head back home.  We got home well after midnight, tired but full of memories.

That was the fair of 32

Ed was still for a moment, then all of a sudden popped out of his reverie and exclaimed;

“Did you see what the kids did back there with the swine?  Isn’t that great?”

Well, that’s it for now.

From where the corn grows tall, and pigs fly.

Take care.

All my love.

Grampa Jim