News
Five Days, One Porcupine, and the Biggest Gate in Forty Years
The fair board counted 11,400 through the gates across five days — the best since 1986 — and lost, in Verna Tho’s accounting, one ice machine, one animal, and no children. Sunday’s rain arrived exactly late enough.
AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The county fair closed Sunday at six in a steady rain, and by the time the exhibit halls emptied and the last quilt went home under a garbage bag, fair board chair Verna Tho had the number she had been quietly hoping for since Thursday: 11,400 admissions across five days, the best gate since 1986 and better than a thousand over last year.
“Wednesday was fine, Thursday was good, Friday was the tractor pull, and Saturday was more people than we have chairs, tables, or patience for,” Tho said. “Sunday it rained and we still ran a derby. I have been doing this for six years and this is the first one I would describe as lucky.”
She had, as promised in this newspaper two weeks ago, predicted trouble on the strength of things going well early, and she had correctly predicted the department. The ice machine behind the beer garden failed at 2:40 Friday afternoon, at the start of the hottest stretch of the fair, and was replaced within ninety minutes by a borrowed unit from the Northern Tap hauled over in Deb Pavek’s truck. “I said it would be the ice machine,” Tho said. “It is always the ice machine. Next year I will say it earlier and louder.”
Also lost, briefly, was a porcupine (see below), which was recovered without injury to anyone including the porcupine. Not lost, at any point, was a child — a statistic the fair board tracks with more attention than the gate and mentions less often. Three were reported missing over five days; the longest interval between report and recovery was eleven minutes; all three were found at the same location, which was the Forest Club building, looking at animals.
The shaded seating behind the exhibit halls — twelve borrowed picnic tables under a canvas fly, the first such structure since 1951 — was, per Tho, “the single best thing this board has done in six years, and I want it on the record that From the Files told us it had been tried before and abandoned, and I want it further on the record that we have no idea why anyone abandoned it.” It will go up again next year. The fly stays with the pavilion inventory. The tables go back to whoever owns them, which the board is still determining.
