DOWN AT THE COUNTY FAIR

 

Down at the county fair

Excitement everywhere

Cotton candy, rides and fun,

Looking for some magic there

Down at the county fair.

—County Fair – The Sun Dogs—

 

There are memories that hang around in the backroom of your mind and only come to the fore when something reminds you of them. For instance, when I change the calendar at the end of July each year, my first thought is, “August—won’t be long until the Fair opens.” Despite the fact that I’ve lived abroad for the past forty-odd years, the Fair I’m thinking of is the Auglaize County Fair in Wapakoneta, Ohio.  This past week, somebody posted a vintage piece of film of the Fair from the time of my childhood, and suddenly it all came back so strongly that I even thought I could smell the gamey, smoky, greasy, sugary, leathery, sawdusty, canvassy fragrance of the midway.

If you were somehow clueless about the Fair—say you were from another county, state or planet—then one sure way to know it was in town was that the horseflies usually showed up with it. These weren’t any little messing-around deerflies. They were our large, brown, Ohio, “B-52” variety that looked like vastly magnified houseflies and bit like badgers. If the weeklong Fair was childhood heaven, then the horseflies were a sure sign that “heaven on earth” would never be as perfect as what we’d been told the real thing was going to be.

But there wasn’t a lot of preaching going on at the Fair. It was a place where everybody just wanted to go to let their hair down and have a good time. The kids to play and ride the rides, to pet the animals and stuff themselves sick on carnival junk food, the teens to “cruise” and flirt and dance, and maybe stumble onto a late-summer romance on the midway or at one of the several live-band dances that the Fair hosted, the homemakers to get out and have some fun for a change (even if at the cost of pies baked for the food tents or cakes baked for the cakewalk), the farm implement and machinery salesmen to hawk their merchandise to a captive audience, the town movers and shakers to make political and commercial points with the local population, and the farmers and their families to show off their produce and livestock, and to talk shop and share gossip with other farming families that they only saw from time to time.

When I was very small, the Fair seemed like a huge world, a place with more attractions than you could count, without even taking part in any of the events that took place in front of the tall wooden grandstand. I attended back then with my mother and her mother. My Grandma Myrt had been a farmer’s wife for decades before they moved to town, and my mother, Reba Mae, the second-oldest of four siblings, had also thus spent all of her childhood and early teen years out on the farm.

It was fun to go with them to the Fair because they knew things—rural things, things we town kids hadn’t a clue about. And they knew rural people. At the time, my knowledge of the world pretty much began and ended at the Wapakoneta city limits, so, curious child that I was, I was always asking, “Who was that?” when Reba Mae and Grandma Myrt would exchange warm and friendly greetings with people I’d never seen before, ladies in homespun calico dresses and men in their newest and carefully pressed work pants, or some of the older ones in bib denim overalls worn with a white shirt underneath for the occasion, and the vast majority of the men over forty breaking in a new farm-style straw hat after a year or two of sweating into their old ones.

These were salt of the earth people like my mother’s family, the Webers and the Cavinders, descendants of the German and Scots-Irish immigrants who had first farmed the land here, or, some of them, the older ones, immigrants themselves. My mother wore “town clothes” but Grandma Myrt fit right in here in her calico dress that she’d sewn herself—always in her same favorite J.C. Penney’s or G.C. Murphy’s pattern.

My Grandpa Vern, who, before he moved the family to town when my mother and her older brother reached high school age, had worked as a well-thought-of tenant farmer on three spreads owned by well-known local landholder Charles F. Herbst, but by this time, he had been the superintendent at Wapakoneta’s Greenlawn Cemetery for many years.   He still knew just about everybody in the farming community. Knew them so well that he and my uncles and cousins and I often hunted on their land in the fall. Indeed, he’d buried a lot of the older ones. So it would have been natural for him to spend a lot of time at the Fair each year. But no.

A tight-lipped, stubborn old kraut—hey, I can say that because I’m stubborn old half-kraut myself—Vern was wont to hold grudges. For example, he didn’t speak to his sister Clara—I didn’t even know I had a Great-Aunt Clara until I was in high school because no one dared mention her name—for twenty years. And by then both of them had forgotten what they’d quarreled about.  So anyway, one of the people Vern had a mortal grudge against—no one including my grandmother knew why—was the Auglaize County Fair’s secretary-general, Harry Kahn.

Whatever the grudge against Mr. Kahn might have been, it ended up passing through the racist social filter through which Vern sieved anybody and everybody who wasn’t a white Christian. And since Mr. Kahn was part of the infinitesimal community of Jews who had been brave enough to make their homes in homogenous Wapakoneta, it hadn’t taken much for Vern to put him on his rather ample blacklist. (Moon Man Neil Armstrong would also have the dubious honor of making that list, since Vern was the first person I ever heard espouse the conspiracy theory that the whole moon-landing was “cooked up by Hollywood,” adding that “everybody knew that Armstrong kid was a damn liar”). But since Mr. Kahn was a very popular and influential member of the local community—he was also secretary of the town’s Chamber of Commerce—there was very likely some point at which Vern had felt himself slighted besides, and therefore, mortally and permanently offended.

Anyway, when asked why he didn’t go to the Fair, which was right next door to the cemetery, and where all of his old farming buddies were sure to be hanging out, his curt response was that “while Ol’ Picklenose was running the place,” he’d be damned if he’d be caught dead in there. Speaking of being caught dead, it would be the fate of poor Mr. Kahn for my grandfather to be the last person to look down at the lid of his coffin before shoveling dirt into his grave, when Harry passed away at the age of seventy-seven in 1968.

A decade later, my grandfather himself would pass away and in a further irony of local history, would be laid to rest forever at the feet of his former landlord, Charles F. Herbst. Indeed, there too now lie along with Vern my grandmother, father, mother and brother, who passed on in that order.

Being where it is, you really can’t miss our little family plot next to a tree, on the sunny south side of Mr. Herbst’s tomb, because the monument that marks his grave is a veritable landmark. The Charles who was the originator of the gargantuan monument was the father of the man whose farms Vern had worked, also called Charles F. Herbst, like his father before him. The tomb’s first occupant died in 1910. The second, Vern’s former boss, Charles F. Herbst III, in 1947.

There’s a 1917 newspaper article that accurately describes the enormous tomb marker and provides some interesting historical notes. Turns out it is an exact duplicate of a monument erected in Toledo, Ohio’s Woodlawn Cemetery. At the time, that first one was boasted to be “the largest polished stone monument in the world.” Meaning the one in Wapakoneta was the runner up for that title back then. Whether that boast is accurate or not, I have no idea, but the Herbst monument is indeed monstrously huge.

Nearly sixty feet tall (about the height of a five-story building) and crafted in solid granite weighing more than one hundred sixty tons, the oversized tombstone was constructed by stonecutters in Barre, Vermont. Representatives of the Toledo cemetery monument company that had installed the one there traveled to Greenlawn in 1917 to oversee the Herbst monument’s installation. The sections of the monument were so huge that they had to come to Wapakoneta from Vermont by rail, on a special railway car constructed to carry such oversized loads, on tracks that would be acquired that same year by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. 

The railroad also had to build a special rail spur to get the sections to the edge of the cemetery from the main line. Two carloads of hauling and hoisting machinery and specialized tools had to be brought in to negotiate the last fifty feet to where the monument stands today, more than a century later. And even then, the wrought iron arch over Greenlawn’s entrance as well as grave markers and tombstones along the path between the cemetery entrance and the grave site had to be temporarily removed to allow the massive cut and polished stones to pass.

The site for the monument had been prepared in advance for its erection. Those preparations included the creation of a fourteen-square-foot concrete platform that extended eight feet underground.

I have always found that unquestionably monumental, all solid granite structure daunting to say the least, and not just a little creepy. Its three massive base sections, mounted one on the other, are topped by a singularly funereal dais with four columns, one at each corner and covered by a stone canopy. Installed amidst the columns and under the canopy is an enormous armchair, chiseled from a block of sheer granite to resemble a finely upholstered piece of furniture. The chair’s immutable presence clearly represents the ghostly absence of its owner. Above the canopy rises a church-like polished hexagonal spire topped by a large urn-like granite ornament. Not surprisingly that lugubrious structure has been the subject of no few Wapakoneta urban legends.

It always seemed strange to drop by the usually serene cemetery to briefly visit Vern at work, as I sometimes did, during Fair Week and, amid all that silence, to be hearing the sounds of tinny music, noisy attractions and grandstand loudspeakers carrying through the still summer air from next door. On those days my grandfather always seemed even more on edge and out of sorts than usual.

When I went with Grandma Myrt and Reba Mae, we always got stuck just inside the entrance to the Fair. That was where the so-called “industrial buildings” were. Mother and daughter always had a keen interest to meander through those buildings and take their time viewing plants, crafts, garden vegetables, giant pumpkins and squash, and chatting with old friends while I sighed and groaned and nearly died of boredom, wanting to move on up the Midway to the rides and treats.

The only thing there that I always remember being impressed with was the incredible variety of maize on display. In the US, we use the word maize to describe only the primitive, non-hybrid coarse grain that we also call “Indian corn”. The now common yellow variety we refer to as corn, and even-rowed, yellow roasting ears are what we tend to think of when somebody pronounces that word. 

It was while working with a mostly British or British-rooted staff at an English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires that I first discovered all corn is referred to as maize in England. So what was with the sixteenth-century nursery rhyme that went, “Little Boy Blue come blow your horn / The sheep's in the meadow the cow's in the corn…”? What was that about? I mean, it wasn’t like they said, “The cow’s in the maize.” Well, an erudite British colleague, gleefully informed me, barely able to contain his delight at having caught me out, “In sixteenth-century England, the generic term for grain, but especially for wheat, was corn.”

So, wheat was actually corn? Or was this just a clever Brit “taking a piss” with a gullible Yank? Better not ask.

Anyway, there in the industrial buildings, there was always a vast array of the ancient varieties of maize. Knowing only the tidy yellow roasting ears that my mother served with plenty of butter and salt a few cherished meals each summer, or the delicious ivory-colored sweet corn that my Grandpa Newland harvested from his garden each year, the multi-hued Indian corn looked like something from a storybook. I found it gorgeous—every color of the rainbow, and then some, and its kernels a chaotic crazy-quilt that refused to conform to rank and file.

Once I could finally usher the two women out of there, I would grab my grandmother’s hand and seek to hustle them further along to where things got interesting. When I was still small, I had no interest in the “scary rides”—I was a pre-teen when, for the first time, I accepted my cousin’s challenges to ride the Ferris wheel and the Round-up. It wasn’t so much my fear of the motion itself as it was of the kind of vertigo that might cause me to throw up (I was rather readily puky as a kid), especially after we started hitting the food tents and snack wagons.

But I loved the merry-go-round, back then a stunningly vintage if shop-worn work of art. It boasted a variety of beautifully hand-painted wooden horses mounted on brass poles, these last polished to a buffed natural glint by thousands of children’s hands from several different generations. There were also white-painted bench seats adorned with elegant book-end swans on either side of them where mothers could sit if they decided to go along for the ride. The music the bright-colored, canopied carousel made when it ran wasn’t the ta-ching, ta-ching recorded pop music of today’s cheaper, static imitations. Rather, it emanated from a mechanical “band” in the central core of the machine, a sound akin to a circus calliope, accompanied by a pneumatically operated bass drum and cymbals that played wheezy, jaunty carnival tunes to which the horses rose up and down in a simulated canter.

My other favorite ride was no less equestrian. In fact, it was more so. It consisted of a sort of large mechanical merry-go-round with a series of spoke-like, vertical hitching posts to which a number of Shetland ponies were tethered. Each wore a saddle, harness and bridle of well-maintained black leather with fancy silver trim, and, once the operator mounted up a batch of kids on them, he would set the string in motion and the ponies would walk slowly and obediently around in circles until the operator decided the ride was over. The kids, town kids, none of whom had any riding experience but this, would sit in the saddle clutching the pommel and imagining they were Roy Rogers or Dale Evans for five minutes or so before being unceremoniously pulled off of the ponies’ backs and placed on the packed and rutted ground again to return to their mothers.

Shetlands are hardy little ponies bred for endurance and hard work. Their history as beasts of burden in the coal mines of Britain and the US is a sad one. But in our neck of the woods, their lives were usually as saddle ponies for rural kids. Indeed, Reba Mae had often ridden one to the one-room schoolhouses where she got her grammar school and junior high education before moving to town.  This, then, was, literally, a walk in the park for them.

Still, if I today saw these stocky, beautiful little mounts being subjected to this boring, humiliating and exploitative task day in and day out while the concession owners took them on the rounds of the different county fairs all summer long, I’d be outraged. Back then, however, not knowing any better, I delighted in the ride, feeling like a cowboy hero and wishing that my mount and I could break away, jump the railings that surrounded the attraction, and ride off together to parts unknown.

For a few happy moments, this was my little steed, and I didn’t waste any time in trying to let the pony know I loved it, caressing the soft, brush-like bristles of its shaved mane, petting its small, velvety ears, and patting its sinewed neck. The warm smell of the pony, the fragrance and squeaking of the saddle-soaped leather, the solid feel of the animal beneath me and the gentle clomp of its steel-shoed hooves on the packed dirt would stay with me all year until Fair time came around again. And every time we walked past that ride on the Midway during Fair Week, I would want to stop a moment and see how “my pony” was doing.

Noon found us at the Methodist food tent for lunch. It was a large, re-purposed World War II mess tent. Cooks and servers congregated around serving counters and grill in the center of the tent, while seating was on long picnic benches pulled up to oilcloth-covered wooden tabletops that lined the tent’s outside perimeter. It seemed strange to see men who ran the stores downtown and ladies whom I only saw in church on Sundays sporting aprons and posing as servers and preparers in this ad hoc eatery.

Strangest of all was to see my dad’s mother, Grandma Alice, so completely out of context there instead of home in her own immaculate kitchen. There was not a great deal of love lost between her and my mother. There was always a polite formality between them, as if my mother was seeking to uphold certain boundaries, despite calling her “Mom”, just as she did her own mother. More formal still was the relationship between her and Grandma Myrt, who barely knew each other except by sight. They exchanged friendly greetings, each asking the other how she’d been, but that was about the extent of it, with Grandma Alice always calling my other grandma “Myrtle”, and Grandma Myrt calling her “Mrs. Newland”. But Grandma Alice and I had a close relationship, so it was always a celebration when we saw each other.

Reba Mae had already made her contribution to the church tent with two of her renowned rhubarb pies and a lemon merengue for good measure. Grandma Myrt’s dessert donation had gone elsewhere, since she was a Lutheran, as my mother had been before she married my dad, who was from a staunchly Methodist family—well, except for his father’s sister, my Great-Aunt Mame, who, to Whitie’s chagrin, was a Christian Scientist.

The food was hot and delicious and delectably homemade. My choice was usually the shredded chicken or roast beef sandwich, both dripping with their own gravy, accompanied by Grandma Alice’s scrumptious potato salad. When it was time for dessert, I was sure to want a slice of my mother’s rhubarb pie, but she’d subtly let me know I should choose someone else’s. I invariably chose my Grandma Alice’s wonderful peach pie, made with fruit from her own tree and syrupy with sugar.

In a state of post-luncheon lethargy, we would retire to the tree-lined yard behind the industrial building. This was the area where John Deere, Ford and a host of farm implement dealers parked brand new tractors, combines, spreaders, seeders, disc harrows, plows and sprayers among which members of the farming community could browse while they were relaxing and enjoying the Fair. It was a good opportunity to get their ear and maybe sell them some new gear for the coming harvest. 

For me, this area was as interesting as the Midway. I loved tractors and combines, and here at the Fair, nobody bothered the kids who climbed all over the machinery. While Reba Mae and Grandma Myrt sat a while on a bench in the shade, I left behind my cowpoke fantasy and became an Ohio farmer, taking advantage of the opportunity to sit in the sky-high driver’s seats, grab the big wheels at ten and two, and pretend for a time that I was plowing or harvesting the back forty. Though the towering green and yellow John Deeres were always an attraction, I also fell in love with the smaller, more compact, sober grey and red Fords. They seemed more like a tractor that, given the chance, a boy could handle.

When I was about fourteen, I one early autumn got to indulge this fantasy for a couple of Saturdays, when my cousin Mike and I rode our bikes out to the spread of a young farmer he knew and the man let us take turns driving a Ford tractor pulling a hopper next to a combine to catch the grain it was harvesting. When I think back to this, it seems incredible that the farmer would trust two town kids to do this with only minimal instruction, considering that we were involved with thousands of dollars-worth of farm machinery. But he did. We evidently did a good job, and it remains a pleasant memory—the dry itch of the chaff on the skin under my shirt, the sunshine beating down and the sweet fragrance of the harvested grain—that is still with me today.

Once my mother and grandmother were ready to move on, it was off to the animal barns where pampered livestock competing for blue ribbons was kept. I envied the older farm kids who worked the Fair, some of whom got to sleep on cots in the barns and stay on the fairgrounds all week long. There were common animals my mother had taught me the names of—Jersey, Hereford, Holstein and Guernsey milk cows, Hereford and Angus beef cattle, spotted Poland-China hogs, Rock Island Red and Leghorn roosters, ponies, quarter horses and sleek Standardbreds, and so on. But there were also breeds that townsfolk only saw at the Fair. In the poultry barn, for instance, angora rabbits and silver chinchillas, ebony Ayam Cemani chickens that laid black-shelled eggs and the Onagadori variety with their elegant and colorful plumage, Bantam roosters and Cornish hens as well as geese and ducks of every kind.

But of these rarer animals my attention always went to the extraordinary draft horses that had once tilled the fields and hauled wagonloads of grain to market, but that now were impressive equestrian show breeds. They were like the classic horse on steroids—Belgians and Clydesdales and Percherons, towering animals weighing a ton or more and as tall as a full-grown man at their withers, their powerful backs so wide no rider could straddle them. They were sleek and shiny, brushed to perfection, many of their tails and manes carefully curried, braided and festooned with bright, tiny ribbons. Their hugely-muscled legs and incredibly broad chests and necks were impressive, and as a little boy, I remember the daunting sensation of feeling that I could walk under them and barely have to bend.They always brought to mind the stories my mother had told me about her days back on the farm, when Vern still used horses to cultivate the fields. At the end of the day, she would run out to meet him as he was leaving the fields and he would lift her up and set her on the work-lathered neck of the draft horse so she could ride it back to the barnyard.

Throughout the day, my sister, brother and I badgered Reba Mae to spring for every sugary treat the Midway had to offer—by order of priority, cotton candy (the split-second fuzzy sensation of it in my mouth before it dissolved away to nothing was irresistible), perfect, shiny, cinnamon-candied or sticky butter-carameled apples, broad, flat ribbons of multi-flavored saltwater taffy (we always had to make sure we procured a large supply of taffy to take home to Whitie, since it was one of his all-time favorite candies), and greasy, sugar-powdered waffles.

We had to wait and dream a long time between visits to the Fair as small children because my mother and grandmother were busy ladies who could usually only spare a day or perhaps, if we were very lucky, two days out of the entire week that the Fair was in town. So as the afternoon drew toward a close, a kind of desperation set in when I thought about the sights and activities I’d missed out on.

That was back, long ago, when summer, and especially Fair Week, were an almost magical time.