County Fair
Final Call: Fair Entries Close a Week Saturday
Two dollars, all categories, ribbons as merited. The fair office extends Saturday hours, the 4-H barns report a record, and the pickle category remains, per the fair board, badly underestimated by its own strongest entrants.
MISQUAH — The county fair’s open-class entry books close a week from Saturday — August 1, two dollars an entry, all categories — and the fair office will hold extended hours that final Saturday, eight to noon, for the benefit of the town’s traditional last-morning surge, which the office describes as “reliable as frost and twice as large.”
Enrollment in the 4-H barns has already set its record, as reported here previously, and the open-class categories are filling behind it: quilts, canning, baked goods, produce, photography, and the rest of the long list posted at the office window. The giant-pumpkin category has its entrants, about whom this newspaper will say nothing further this week, the letters page having said enough for everyone (see Opinion).
The fair board’s message this year concerns the categories nobody enters. “Enter the pickles,” said Verna Tho, of the board. “Every year the pickle class is half empty because everyone in this town thinks their pickles aren’t good enough. They’re wrong roughly half the time, and the only way to find out which half is the two dollars.” Her husband Roger, also of the board, endorsed this reasoning and extended it to rhubarb preserves, dinner rolls, and “anything a person has ever apologized for while serving.”
Entry forms require the entrant’s name, the category, and a brief description of the item, and the office asks — annually, patiently — that the description describe the item rather than defend it. “We get essays,” Mrs. Tho said. “The judges judge the jar, not the argument.”
The fair itself opens the second week of August, with the giant-pumpkin weigh-in as its closing act on the final Saturday at 10 a.m., on the scale that has been recertified, as previously and exhaustively noted. The board asks entrants to deliver perishables the morning of judging, livestock per the barn schedule, and quilts any time the office is open, folded, in a clean pillowcase, per the instruction sheet, which exists because of what happened one year to a Dresden Plate that arrived loose in a truck bed, an event the quilt community has not forgotten and will not.