Up-to-Date Touches and Old-Time Fun at Fair : Pomona: Los Angeles County event is expected to draw more than 1.5 million visitors during its 68th run.

Sounds like your basic county fair: carnival rides, horse racing, ice cream melting in the sweltering temperatures of a September in Pomona. And then there’s the virtual reality dinosaur ride.

Ah, well, even traditions as great as the Los Angeles County Fair, which began its 68th run Friday, have to change with the times.

The nation’s largest county fair was born in a beet and barley field in 1922 and has continued every year since, except for a hiatus during World War II.

Fair-goer extraordinaire Happy Moore has been to the event every year since her father helped found it with nine of his friends. “It’s incredible how much the fair’s changed over the years,” said Moore, who works handing out credentials. “Back when my father started it, there were just two huge tents in a field.”

Moore, who declined to give her age, is an unabashed booster of the annual extravaganza. “There’s always something new to see at the fair,” she said.

These days, the fair has grown into a 24-day extravaganza that draws more than 1.5 million visitors annually to the Fairplex, a sprawling 487 acres with vast exhibition halls, a hotel, two fire stations, police headquarters, child-care center, art gallery and racetrack.

In addition to the traditional cotton candy and Ferris wheels, the fair features more than a thousand merchants demonstrating their latest gadgets in the place where the Frisbee made its debut in the late 1950s.

More modern touches include a fanciful “trip to the stars” with a galactic exhibit sponsored by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The fair has become an education in itself,” said Sid Robinson, Los Angeles County Fair Assn. spokesman.

Numerous stages and venues will offer a stream of entertainers, including world-class gymnasts, Chinese acrobats, skating daredevils, dancing horses and the jousting knights of Medieval Times.

“The live entertainment, with the upgrading of the facilities in 1980s, has evolved from a few stages into entertainment in every corner at all times of the day,” Robinson said.

Music from around the globe from Dixieland jazz, mariachi and calypso to gospel, rock ‘n’ roll and country-Western. Among the headliners are country music’s female vocalist of the year, Pam Tillis, singer Rick Trevino and the Tokens of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” fame.

The fair is also changing culturally to attract the region’s diverse population, officials said.

For the second year, a Latino Independence Weekend, Friday through Sept. 17, will celebrate Mexican Independence Day, and the independence of other Latin and South America nations will be celebrated during September.

Efforts to attract big-name Latino stars led to a jump in attendance of Latino fair-goers last year, from about 29% to 39%, fair organizers said.

“It’s really America’s fair when it includes everyone who makes up America,” said Luisa Campano, the fair’s special-markets manager.

Among the big names are top headliners Bronco and Graciela Beltran, stars of the ranchera style of country music.

For those who want thrills and chills, some of this year’s rides go beyond the usual carnival fare. The virtual reality dinosaur ride, called Dino Island, a simulator where riders encounter dinosaurs and “sudden seismic activity.” And the nightmarish 160-feet-high “Ejection Seat,” a reverse bungee, catapults riders into the air on huge cords.

On the ground, contests abound, with competitions for everything from father-son look-alikes to natural redheads. Fair-goers whose talents tend toward the more eclectic can compete for prizes in the art of hog-calling, cooking Spam luncheon meat, shearing sheep, churning butter or carving wood.

From Thursday to Oct. 2, insatiable horseplayers will find at least a dozen races daily for thoroughbreds, quarter horses, Appaloosas and Arabians. During the 19 days that horse races are run, the track rates as the fourth busiest in the country for wagering, fair officials say.

To ease the crush of crowds as large as 130,000 on peak weekend days, fair officials extended the schedule to four weekends a few years ago.

The Fairplex offers 200 acres of parking lots with 40,000 spaces, but organizers encourage visitors who come on the weekends to let the train take the strain. Metrolink service will be offered on Saturday on the train’s Los Angeles-to-San Bernardino route, making a stop at the fair’s own station.

But the best way to avoid the crowds, Robinson said, is “to come on a weekday--or this first weekend.”