Fairs of the Heart: A Fan’s Notebook : Flower Fanaticism, What to Look for in a Sheep, and Other Essentials of the Season

Want to strike up a conversation with a native at any California fair? Insult a cow. I found this out a couple of years ago when I was leaning up against a fence beside the main show ring in the livestock pavilion at the Big Fresno Fair. Half a dozen very tense 4-H kids were maneuvering their placid Guernseys over the sawdust in front of a small audience of parents, other relatives and assorted hometown rooters, while a lean, solemn female judge in faded blue denims silently weighed the merits and defects of the lethargic beasts. The spectacle looked like an assemblage of overweight French bourgeois spending an afternoon at some favorite gastronomic oasis, and I commented aloud about the avoirdupois on display. “Aw, don’t say that,” the man standing next to me replied. “Some of them cows out there look good enough to take to a dance.”

He was a farmer, and to him most animals, if properly cared for, would outscore Bo Derek. Nothing delighted him so much as a barnful of bleating, lowing, grunting, neighing four-footed guests, each intent on its digestive prowess. The only time he became depressed during the two weeks of the fair, he confided, was toward the end, when the 4-H kids and Future Farmers of America, the junior exhibitors, went home, and the pavilion was only half full. “It’s a damn shame,” he said. “All them empty stalls, and it’s so quiet in here a man can’t think.”

We all have our own reasons for going to fairs. As a city kid, I didn’t discover the pleasures of fair-going until I moved to California from the East 20 years ago. I went out to the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona one September because of the horse races and found out there were other attractions as well--a glitzy amusement zone, big-name entertainers, game booths, junk-food stands. And then there were the displays, with all those animals, vegetables, fruit, flowers and homemade items, most of them for sale. A fair is a cornucopia of goodies and a place to compete, a yearly whing-ding in which the ordinary citizen can win himself a moment in the public spotlight and take home a handful of blue ribbons.

He can also make a buck. California fairs as a whole rank among the top 60 industries in the state, and they share one primary function, that of a trade center. They create a market and stimulate business in their communities. There are now about 80 district, county and citrus fairs in the state every year, and the larger ones attract more than 50,000 people a day on weekends and holidays.

Statistics, however, don’t really tell the story of any fair. That is written primarily on the faces of the people who go to them. People who live in cities tend to forget that we are still members of an essentially rural community, with roots deep in the soil, and I always find it an enlightening experience to be someplace where I am surrounded by citizens who obviously spend most of their lives outdoors. “Now, Wendell, you hush up,” I once heard a mother at the L.A. County Fair admonish her small boy, who had begun to cry at the explosion of light and sound at the opening of a rock concert. “This don’t mean nothing. It’s just Hollywood.”

“I come here every year,” a gray-haired woman from Poway told me at the Southern California Exposition in Del Mar a few weeks ago. “I’ve kept on coming, even though my kids have grown up and stopped showing. I guess it’s because this fair brings the whole area together once a year. It tells us who we are and what we’re up to. I like that.”

The best time to go to any fair is early, before the crowds begin to arrive. Though preparations go on all year, almost everything really crucial seems to be accomplished only at the very last minute. At the Del Mar Fair this year, a couple of days before the gates opened, the atmosphere was very much like that of a big musical on the road, with people buzzing around backstage on mysterious but obviously urgent missions and sounds of preparation in the air. In the amusement area, the action bordered on the frantic, as if the Titanic was going down and nobody had quite figured out where the lifeboats were. The rides, shows and concessions were mostly in pieces strewn around the parking lot, while gangs of roustabouts labored over spaghetti snarls of electrical wiring--hoisting, clamping, sawing, hammering, painting and testing their equipment. They had been drifting in by twos and threes from previous gigs on the fair circuit, and they seemed to be functioning on nervous energy alone. Their bodies and faces were grimy and streaked with sweat, their eyes deadened by lack of sleep. The few lucky ones who had finished lay sprawled by their games and stands, their eyes closed or staring dumbly at the sky.

In many of the exhibition buildings the atmosphere was feverish, as if no one had even considered what had to be done until minutes earlier. Trucks and vans rumbled down the narrow lanes to discharge animals and goods and food. Most of the food stands were still closed, but I found one open near a livestock barn. There I was assured that what I was seeing was typical. “Oh, sure, they’ll be working right up until the gates open,” said the woman pouring my cup of coffee. “Every year they spend months planning this thing, and then it all sort of comes together at the last minute. Don’t ask me how.”

One of the people who thought he knew how was Andy Mauro, superintendent of the flower and garden show, a calm, gray-haired man with a ready smile and bushy eyebrows. “It’s a six-month project,” he explained. “We begin by talking to the chief exhibitors and try to come up with different themes. Then we have to figure out where the major exhibits are going to be and create a flowing scene. This year we had over 60 landscapes, with 5,000 entries.” One of the big commercial nurseries structured its exhibit around a 40-foot ficus tree, with live macaws and other wild birds supplied by the San Diego Wild Animal Park. The Cuyamaca College contribution featured a cave construction and a Japanese teahouse, both for sale. More than 200 truckloads of dirt had to be brought in, and for weeks plants had been moving in and out of the grounds. “This continues all through the fair,” Mauro said. “This is an 18-day deal, and a lot of plants have to be replaced. With the cut flowers, it’s every two or three days, and then you have the flower arranging and the daily competitions. It’s a busy time, and you just have to stay on top of it.”

The perishability of many of the exhibits is a problem at every fair. Three years ago, when Mauro first came on the job, he decided to remove the barricades so that people could get up into the displays, where they tend to touch but at least not to pick the blossoms. The risk of damage is more serious with produce. The tiered counters inside the agriculture buildings at the larger fairs bulge with vegetables and fruit that look as if they’ve been harvested only minutes earlier. “One year we had this big pumpkin by the center aisle,” a volunteer guard named Bob Reynolds said up in Fresno. “Nine out of 10 people had to go over and pat that pumpkin.” Pumpkins bruise easily and wear out fast, which means that they have to be constantly replaced. Even so, it’s a chore to keep everything looking fresh for two weeks, and insecticides have to be sprayed over all this delectable-looking stuff. “Visitors don’t know that. Old folks come in here sometimes with shopping bags and load up,” Reynolds said. “Last year one woman just stocked up on zucchini. She’d have gotten real sick if I hadn’t stopped her.”

EVERY YEAR AT FAIRS THERE ARE A LOT of people like Andy Mauro and Bob Reynolds. Some are paid for what they do, others participate for the sheer fun of it. What I retain is always a series of quick, vivid impressions, stories, many of them, with no endings.

One morning I watched a woman named Karen Senn judge junior dairy goats at the Del Mar Fair. Seeing her go over each of the animals before her, it seemed clear that there isn’t anything about goats that she doesn’t know. She delivered herself only of an overall opinion and would not criticize specifically except in private, but she urged each of the youngsters with an animal to ask her about her judging. “Well, she’s a little heavy in the shoulders,” she’d say. Or, “This one’s too hocky, a little too steep in the back.” The kids would nod and thank her and go away with something specific to consider. “I try to be a positive influence on the kids,” Senn said.

I remember the way a man named Ralph Clark judged cattle in Fresno. He was a husky fellow with a big frame that protruded over his belt, and he looked as if he slept with his hat on. He moved with sure masculine grace over the sawdust of the show rings, a cool, appraising gaze on the animals before him--shorthorns, Herefords, Limousins. Clark checked out the length, height, natural thickness, tried to estimate “how much grow is left in ‘em,” then made decisions worth a lot of money to their owners. “This here is all breeding stock,” he said between showings. “Some bulls can be worth up to half a million. And it’s safer than horses.”

Yearling rams are also safer than horses. You control them by holding them firmly under their chins, to which they respond with big, burping bleats of confused satisfaction. The judges here were big men in blue jeans, white short-sleeved shirts and straw cowboy hats who checked the animals’ teeth, measured their width at hip and thigh and cupped their testicles. “They’re developed for their meat characteristics,” one of them said. “You look at the body type and their wool. They got to be masculine, got to show possibilities of reproduction. You look for smoothness, and does it all blend together. See, about two-thirds is in the back--your ribs, loins and hind cuts. Your belly meat, why, there’s nothing there.”

What all these livestock judges do means a lot, especially to the kids. I fell in one day with a group of them from Poway and Ramona. They had come with their animals for the junior judgings and auction. They mucked the stalls, fed and watered their beasts, then groomed them till their coats gleamed. A gangly-legged waif with a mouthful of braces informed me that she was in her fifth year at the fair, this time with a red-haired Duroc hog she had cared for on her parents’ ranch. She stood there one morning, bone-tired and ankle-deep in dirty wet straw, and said she no longer named the animals she brought to the fair, or played with them, because “it’s hard to give them up if you get attached to them. Even the beef--you have them for a year and a half at a time--you get more attached to them. Pigs is only six months.”

Pigs, however, also have endearing qualities. One boy sat in a stall with his arm around the neck of a big red sow he’d brought along just to show. He scratched behind her ears and patted her quivering rump. “Look at her eyes,” he said. “Can’t you tell she’s smarter than any dog?”

But many of the animals exhibited at local fairs are for sale to people who will slaughter them. A 12-year-old, freckle-faced blonde named Darlene Minor had come to the Del Mar Fair with 14 goats, all breeding does, as well as a pig and a calf. “I started her two years ago with non-market animals,” her mother, Kathy, said. “But when Darlene saw the prices that were paid for market animals she got a lot less upset about

maybe losing them.” So fairs can also be an education in the hard realities of capitalism.

One of the aspects of fairs that has always impressed me is the monastic dedication of many of the participants. Pat and Sue O’Brien, for instance, were at the Del Mar Fair by 5 every morning with their roses. They would spend the next four hours preparing their cut flowers for the daily judgings, which took place before the public was admitted to the grounds. Pat works as a welder in the naval station, Sue is a nurse, and they were raising two children. Eleven years ago, they got into roses--so many of them, about 250 bushes, that their yard in Chula Vista has no room for grass. “Roses are not a low-maintenance-type plant,” Pat said. “You got to spray them, feed them, prune them. Every bug under the sun loves them. Mildew is the worst.” Pat waters, fertilizes and sprays; Sue cuts. “Our bloom cycle was perfect for the show here,” Pat said, “but it’s a matter of luck. You could be two weeks off.” The luck held for the run of the fair. Every day the O’Briens garnered ribbons, mostly blues.

The judges at fairs give out prizes each day in all categories, even if not all of the entries are up to snuff. They also invariably turn out to be supremely qualified at what they do. Gerald Weland, for instance, has been judging dahlias for 25 years and has catalogued about 38,000 varieties. He measures the plants with metal rings and checks them for color and form and such qualities as looseness and facing. “This is a pretty average bunch,” he said one morning as he surveyed what looked to me like glorious blossoms. “But we’ll find some to give a prize to.”

Rose judges Dr. Maynard Lemrow and his wife, Marilyn, have been raising the flowers for 35 years. They talk to each other about “symmetry” and “substance” and color and size, but to Maynard it’s really like looking at girls. “See, this one’s stockings are hanging down,” he said, “and this one’s neck is a little weak, and this one has spilled soup on her dress. There are no prom queens here, but we want to give (the entrants) a prize to encourage them.” So once again, even on an off day, Pat and Sue O’Brien won Best Rose of the Day.

But what fairs are really all about is this: the expression on the face of a middle-aged housewife named Gloria Hamilton, whom I ran into one morning at the art show in Del Mar. She was standing in front of her prize-winning entry, “Sidewalk Artist,” a large oil on canvas depicting a little girl scrawling figures on a suburban sidewalk. At her husband’s suggestion, she had submitted the work for possible inclusion in the show, one of 356 accepted in her category out of 1,091 entries. “I was overwhelmed when they took it,” she said. Priced at a modest $425, the canvas not only won a prize of $250 as the Manager’s Choice but also sold quickly.

Hamilton had begun studying art while growing up in Columbus, Ga., but her career was interrupted by marriage and raising five children. With her husband Bill’s support, she began to paint again about 10 years ago. Now she tries to work daily, using her dining room in San Diego as a studio. “I paint mainly children,” she said, “because I feel a real affinity for them and because I love trying to recapture moments in my own childhood and reminding others what it’s like to be a child.” Her 9-year-old daughter, Lindy Sue, has served as a model for some of her canvases, including “Sidewalk Artist,” and she has also used a neighborhood 4-year-old, who will “do anything for a banana.”

As we strolled through the exhibit area, Hamilton explained that she feels more confident about her work now and that she hopes she has established herself as an artist. “If nothing else, this will keep me painting,” she said of her prize. The look on her face at that moment was the same look I had seen so often on the faces of the kids in the livestock barns and show rings, the old women picking up blue ribbons for their quilts and dolls in home arts, the veterans of previous fairs holding reunions and reminiscing, the farmer’s wife in the grandstand whose son had just sold his champion hog at auction--the innocent wonder of it all.