County Fair

 “We were so close now that the sounds of the fair began to drift over the roar of motors: calliopes bleating, whistles, merry-go-round music, bells ringing, barkers.” Jean Shepherd

As the Porter County Fair prepares to open, I decided to reread Region bard Jean Shepherd’s account of “the Indiana county fairs I have known” in “Wandy Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories.”  Setting the stage, he described the scene the previous evening in Hammond as he and his friends debated whether the monster ride, called the Rocket Whip, addled one’s brains or stunted one’s growth: “The rain drizzled down steadily, carrying with it its full load of blast furnace dust and other by-products of the steel mills and oil refineries that ringed the town like iron dinosaurs.” His “Old Man” loved the dirt track races (“as much a part of Indiana county fairs as applesauce, pumpkins, and pig judging”), while his kid brother favored the Ferris Wheel and his long-suffering mother the quilt exhibit. After surviving a near-gridlocked traffic jam, the family observed a 2-ton prize-winning pumpkin that bore a resemblance to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a pig named “Big Horace” who had tiny red eyes and had eaten half his blue ribbon. A White Sox fan, the “Old Man” was awestruck by a quilt bearing the likeness of shortstop Luke Appling, “the foul ball king.”  

Approaching the thrill ride area, they passed “guys with leather jackets and great mops of carefully groomed, greasy hair ranging through the crowd, looking for fights and girls.” The “Old Man” insisted on taking the boys on the Rocket Whip, “a classic of its kind.”  Shepherd elaborated:

    It consisted of two bullet-shaped cars, one yellow, one red, attached to the ends of rotating arms.  It revolved simultaneously clockwise and up and down. At the same time, the individual cars rotated in their own orbits.  

Trapped in their wire mesh cage, the “Old Man” lost all his change and a prized fountain pen given to him by the bowling team.  Once the operator turned the power on full, his hat flew off and kid brother Randy puked all over him. Passing through the turnstile afterwards with “a bent cigarette hanging from his lips,” he told the operator it was great. Shepherd wrote: “He always judged a ride by how sick it made him. The nausea quotient of the Rocket Whip was about as high as they come.”

My initial Indiana fair experience came as a result of manning the Indiana University Northwest booth at the Lake County fair for several hours in a sweltering exhibition hall lacking air conditioning.  Leaving after dark, I had trouble locating our car since I’d had to park on a winding road rather than in a lot. 

Once I heard that the Porter County fair’s exhibition hall had air conditioning, I volunteered for it for about ten years during the time Phil and Dave were growing up.  It was a good way to socialize with and sometimes meet for the first time professors and staff working the same shift as I. Various displays were giving away pens, bottle openers, fans, and other stuff, and I could sample free Culligan water whenever I got thirsty.  The only drawback was that a Republican booth was almost always located straight across from us.  The kids’ favorite attraction was the pig races; you could bet on a pig and get a small prize if your entry won. A Religious Studies adjunct operated a food truck with his family and would always give me a generous assortment of fried vegetables. Though no longer tempted to patronize the fair, which was cancelled last year due to Covid, I look back fondly at the memories, especially of those pig races.

Jill Semko Underly shared her many memories of the Lake County Fair. “As a 10 year 4H member, I practically lived there. Jr. leaders ran a food stand too. Hopefully those exhibition halls are now air conditioned. They had a great pie stand run by a ladies sorority or maybe it was the homemakers association.” 

Maryland grad school buddy Ray Smock, who gave me Shepherd’s “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” when I was hired to teach at IUN in Gary, wrote: “Thanks for a taste of Jean Shepherd. No matter how many times I read him, I laugh like I did the first time I read him. I laugh because his stories speak universal truths about everyday life, and hearing the truth is always a liberating thing.”

Connie Mack-Ward recalled attending county fairs in Sullivan County while at her grandmother’s in the tiny town of Hymera: “We could see the lights and the ferris wheel looming and hear the merry-go-round music from her house, at the picnic grounds behind the high school on a road that started every summer with fresh gravel but eventually was mostly red clay as the gravel was flung into the roadside ditches by passing vehicles. Every night of the three glorious days the small traveling carnival was there.  When desk approached, we were finally told that we could go now.  We four kids would run and speedwalk all the way there, earnestly discussing which rides we would pick for the three tickets we were allowed to buy each night. My favorites were the chair swings, the Octopus, and the absolute best, the Tilt-A-Whirl. As we approached our destination, we could smell the lubricating oil from the rides, the cotton candy, popcorn, as wellas the fryng chicken  and boiling corn-on-the-cob of the dinners in the Methodist food tent.”