To Her, Almost Any Craft Is Fair Game : From needlepoint to art made of recycled frying pans and bottles, Earline Campbell does it all--and much of it wins prizes at the Orange County Fair.

Nearly the first thing one sees when walking into the Home Arts and Crafts Hall at the Orange County Fair this year is a glass case full of machine guns. And the hall staff members are all walking around in military camouflage outfits. Can our nation have become so brutal that home crafts--once the domain of quilts and cakes--have come to this?

Well, not yet. It turns out that the guns and garb are concessions to the 1940s theme the hall was assigned (other halls represent different decades; it’s all part of the fair’s 100th-year celebration). Outside of that nod to World War II, it is indeed business as usual in the exhibition hall, with a “desktop publishing cover page” category being the only other intrusion on the tradition of Christmas ornaments, jellies, woven wares and other hand-crafted niceties.

On the fair’s opening day last Friday, a group of young children were admiring a three-foot tall plaster Indian, with tomahawk, who looked sadly stoic, as might anyone whose head was made to bear a brass lamp fitting topped by a fluted shade.

“Somebody made this thing!” exclaimed one tyke. Had he noted the photo accompanying the first-place ribbon, he might have gathered that its maker was standing right behind him, enjoying this scene.

Earline (“My parents were expecting an Earl, but I surprised them”) Campbell seems to have her name and picture all over the place. She entered in 13 categories this year, and, as has usually been the case since she first began competing at the Orange County Fair 1984, many of her entries are prizewinners. From painted busts of Elvis to needlepoint to glass etching to art made of recycled frying pans and bottles, Campbell has done it all.

Conspicuous in an outfit ablaze with strawberries and polka dots, she was wandering through the hall to find her creations and also to enjoy the work of other entrants.

When she turned 54 recently, she said, she realized that she had amassed 54 first-place prizes--though her success in this year’s competition has since jacked up that number to 62. She now has 23 second-place and 13 third-place awards as well. Among those are 16 division first-places, two second-place grand prizes and one third-place grand prize. But a first place grand prize--for something judged to be the best craft overall--has thus far eluded her. Nevertheless, she is one of three longtime crafts entrants to be given the Hall of Fame award, a new prize this year honoring exceptional participation in the fair.

Campbell, an entirely sweet, slightly frazzled Fountain Valley registered nurse, says that not having won a grand prize doesn’t bother her at all.

She’s been coming to the fair since she and her family moved to Orange County in 1971, but it took years of her children’s prodding to persuade her to finally enter.

“I don’t really like competition,” she said. “If you win, it means someone else didn’t, and I don’t like for people to feel sad. That’s why I don’t enter every year (she usually takes every third year off) because I do win a lot, and I don’t want to discourage other people who are in my types of crafts. You should spread the fun around.”

Campbell, who works a graveyard shift at a hospital, says she spends at least one hour a day working on her crafts--often the whole day if she’s not working. Rather than focus on perfecting any one craft, she prefers exploring others too. The depth of concentration she applies to her work is obvious in the finished products.

The Indian lamp, for example, shows a detailed paint job (the lamp was store-bought; she was judged only on its decoration) accompanied by fine beadwork, feathers and even eyelashes glued onto the long-suffering fellow. In a dioramalike 3-D painting of a stagecoach fording a river, she used flayed cotton balls dusted with chalk to represent the spuming water. A sweat shirt became a multimedia event, being adorned with a painted parrot, glitter and metal studs. She winds up using most of her handiwork as gifts.

Campbell loves seeing other people enjoy something she’s done, and she also loves being part of such a typically American event. “I was born on Washington’s Birthday and married on the Fourth of July, so what do you expect?

“It’s wholesome,” she says of the fair. “The people you meet here are friendly and happy and down-to-earth. They appreciate the simple things in life, though I suppose there’s also sections of the fair for the more modern far-out groups like the rides and bands. You meet a lot of nice people. Sometimes you’re just looking at the same thing as someone else and you start talking, and it winds up becoming a friendship.”

As if on cue, as we were speaking a very elderly woman slowly rolled up in a wheelchair and gave us a big smile. She just wanted to say hello. It turned out that she was Louise Buck of Beverly Manor in Seal Beach, and was celebrating her 100th birthday that day. That morning the fair had hosted a party for her and some 50 other centenarians, and Willard (“I just can’t stop pestering old people”) Scott was there to feature them on NBC’s “Today” show.

In a voice softer than a gnat’s buzz, Buck said she was from St. Louis, something Campbell was thrilled to know: “That’s where I’m from! It’s a great state for fairs. Maybe that’s why it’s in my blood,” she declared.

She said she can spend days wandering through the fair enjoying the exhibits and old-timey events. And she lives for fair food, particularly the cream puffs conveniently available next to the crafts hall. She’s persuaded her grown son and daughter to enter fair events. When a local radio station recently was giving away fair tickets to whoever could name the most orange items, she and her daughter Colleen came up with a winning three pages’ worth--including Daffy Duck’s beak. She loves this fair!

Lately, it’s been looking particularly good to her.

“In my business in hospitals, there’s a lot of unhappiness,” she said. “And then the economy’s bad. When I first was becoming a nurse, my dad told me, ‘If you’re a nurse, you’ll always have a job.’ He’d be amazed now at how hard it is to get to work a five-day week. Sometimes I hope someone will see my work here and hire me to do it, because it’s hard to get by with this economy. I can get down about that, but this fair always brings me up. You meet people and keep your mind active, and you won’t stay depressed for long. It’s a great antidote to the world.”