The Bailey Bunch : O.C. Fair Chief Is Building on a Family Heritage

Becky Bailey-Findley recalls how, as a little girl, she spent summers tagging along with her father, who worked in the livestock area of the Orange County Fair.

“I was a fair brat. I literally grew up around here,” she said.

Bailey-Findley, 42, now sits at the fair’s helm as general manager, in charge of the fair’s events and its 1,100 employees. She is the state’s only female GM among the top four county fairs, which also include those in Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

As part of the Bailey clan, she’s a member of the Orange County Fair’s first family, a friendly group that includes her father, Jim Bailey, 67, who manages the fair’s livestock division and has worked there since 1959.

“Our father was an agriculture teacher in Fullerton,” Bailey-Findley said. “And we were exposed to that life there. I remember growing up in the ‘60s, and we would be driving down roads to the fairgrounds, and we kids would play this game of identifying every crop from a distance. We became pretty good at it.”

A brother, Bill, 33, a schoolteacher, assists their father with livestock during the summer, while a sister, Cathy Bailey Wolkenhauer, works in the fair’s accounting department.

But it doesn’t stop there. Bailey-Findley’s niece, Sarah Wolkenhauer, 15, sells ride tickets, and her 14-year-old son, Cary, lends a hand by assisting celebrity entertainers as a volunteer.

Although Bailey-Findley and her father are the only family members who work at the fair full time, fair work has been a Bailey family tradition.

“I do think that once you’ve been around it, you either fight it or join it,” said sister Cathy, 40, who began working at the fair when she was 16. “It was a great way to make money in the summer and I started in livestock working with my dad.”

The family’s love of all things agricultural began with Jim Bailey and his wife, Helen, growing up on Missouri farms.

After Jim Bailey was stationed in the Navy at El Toro, they remained in Orange County, which at the time was an agricultural empire known for its vast orange groves.

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Bailey was a mathematics and agriculture teacher at Fullerton and Sunny Hills high schools and worked at the fair during his summers. Bailey-Findley started working at the fair as a high school student in 1972 by helping her father with the livestock.

Bailey-Findley went on to receive a master’s degree from Occidental College, then taught high school for six years in El Toro. She has also worked at Phoenix House in Santa Ana, a drug rehabilitation organization for teenagers, as an adolescent program director.

At the fair, she worked her way up to exhibit supervisor, overseeing the competitive division. In July 1986, she went into the fair’s front office full time and became deputy general manager. On March 1, 1994, she was named general manager succeeding Norbert Bartosik, who left to become general manager of the California State Fair in Sacramento.

When they were growing up, all the Bailey children raised livestock of some sort, whether pigs or steers for 4-H projects, or just for fun.

“At our house, pigs were never called ‘pets,’ ” Bailey-Findley said. “We referred to them as projects, market projects.”

Now retired from teaching, Bailey-Findley’s father believes it’s his mission to educate youth about the food chain. Too many adults and their urban siblings think that beef is something that comes packaged, and vegetables and other food come frozen or in cans in the grocery store, he said.

“I think that there are many people in our urban community that have no idea where our food comes from. It’s scary,” Bailey said. “But it’s not their fault. I remember a little kid from Santa Ana in kindergarten visited the fair when I pulled a carrot out of our centennial garden. The kid couldn’t believe that. He thought I had put the carrot in the dirt to surprise him.”

At the fair, Bailey has focused his interests at the Centennial Farm, a 2 1/2-acre victory garden opened in 1989 that has become popular with visitors, especially children.

Even if Bailey family members weren’t employed there, they spent time at the fair.

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Bill Bailey, 33, has paid a visit to the fair every year of his life--even when he had to be carried as a 1-month-old in his dad’s arms--except when he went to Denmark one summer on a student exchange program. Through the years, he has seen breeds of steer change from fat and squatty Herefords to taller and leaner varieties as the public’s appetite changed for leaner meat.

When he’s not working at the fair, he teaches fifth- and sixth-graders at a San Diego elementary school. He began working at the fair in 1979.

“There was a time that I lived in Maryland for five years,” Bill said. “And even in those years I came home every summer and worked at the fair. People often asked, ‘Why would you do that?’ Well, it’s in our blood and it’s really hard to explain to others.”