Ventura County Fair : Volunteer Finds 51-Year Home at the County Fair

For years, it seemed that Lena Simitzi was the home arts department.

“She was just Miss County Fair,” said Eva Sandoval, a home arts volunteer for 35 years. “You saw her everywhere.”

Simitzi has volunteered at the Ventura County Fair for 51 years--longer than anyone else working at the fair this year.

Visitors can find Simitzi, a Ventura resident, still helping out occasionally as a hostess at the Professional Arts Building, as polite and friendly as she ever was as home arts superintendent.

But at 84, Simitzi is frail and tires easily. Fair colleagues say she is one of the last of the Old Guard, the women of Ventura County for whom the County Fair was not only a volunteer opportunity, but a series of social events and an outlet for the organizational energies that often found no other venue.

“She’s such a lady, so soft-spoken and sincere,” said Marcia Weaver, superintendent of the professional arts department. Weaver’s mother, Adah Callahan, also volunteered at the fair for years alongside Simitzi. “People aren’t ladies like that nowadays. That time is gone and it will never come back.”

Simitzi began offering her services at the fair in 1943, when fair organizers came to a PTA meeting at her son’s school in search of volunteers.

She signed up and was soon made a judge in the clothing and textiles division.

“I judged buttons, if you can believe that,” she recalled, laughing.

She eventually rose through the ranks to become superintendent of the home arts department in the 1970s. Home arts encompasses everything from homemade quilts to brownies to table-setting competitions.

Under Simitzi, the ladies of home arts continued a tradition of holding a yearly tea, a luncheon and a fashion show. The women arrived in dresses and heels. Many wore white gloves.

“Home arts was very social,” said Barbara Schneider, the longtime superintendent of the floriculture department. “It was a different attitude, a different feeling all the way through.”

Today, all the departments operate by one set of standards--considerably more casual than in earlier years. But when Simitzi ran home arts, it was her little kingdom.

Part of what brought her back every year was the satisfaction of organizing successful, meticulously organized exhibits out of the yearly jumble of entries and mothballed displays.

“That is a pleasure,” she said. “Everything is a mess, but by the time you cleaned it up and everything--oh, that was beautiful.

“Then you think all the work is worth it.”

In those days, the same volunteers--or “the girls” as Simitzi calls them--returned each year, forming a home arts sorority of sorts with its own customs and traditions.

“For many of the years, we would get a lot of the same people, and they were very dedicated,” Simitzi said. “Now, many people will work for a few years and kind of quit.”

Simitzi herself scaled back after her husband, John, grew ill in the early 1980s. He died in 1991.

She misses her summers supervising baking contests and display set-ups at home arts, but tries to be philosophical about it.

“There comes a time when you have to give it up and let someone else take over,” she said. “You can’t monopolize.”

The volunteers who know Simitzi from years ago continue to smile at the mention of her name.

“She is very personable, a very loving lady,” said Geneva McEwen, a home arts volunteer for 24 years. “To me, she’s one of those ladies who never met a stranger.”