Food, Rides, Animals and Games--All Are Fair Play

Where do you go to see Thimble, “the smallest horse you may ever see?”

Or Big Al, the 100-year-old alligator with a three-foot-wide belly, who’s ready to snap whenever his owner wakes him up with a spray of water from a hose.

The same place, of course, that you go to see a demonstration of the new Multi-Grater kitchen appliance or to have your personality Laser-Scanned--”It’s Fun. It’s Amazing. It’s Personal.”

If you were one of the estimated 15,000 there for the first three days of the San Fernando Valley Fair at Devonshire Downs, you would have also seen:

The Ferris wheel. Table settings. Landscape exhibits surrounded by the facades of kitchen cabinets. Kids (old people too) sticking their fingers in cotton candy. Teen-agers washing, feeding, cleaning and showing their cows, sheep, chickens and pigs. The pathetic struggle of Snow Ball, the white pig, to climb entirely inside her water trough, which only had room for her head. The equally pathetic wince of her sleeping roommate, Frosty, when Snow Ball landed on her.

You would have heard:

Rock ‘n’ roll music everywhere. The nonstop bleat of Cry Baby, a prize-winning black-faced lamb. Roosters crowing. Children imitating roosters crowing. Camp counselors desperately barking orders at disappearing kids.

If you were just a touch stealthy, you might have overheard Virginia Lavell and the women of her quilting bee discussing their husbands as they stitched.

And barker Gary Brumm would have told you that three-ball pool (“Call all shots; no slop; no scratching; no missing after break”) is a pretty simple game.

It’s all happening at the fair. Through Sunday.