A Romantic Affair

The Los Angeles County Fair draws an estimated 8,500 strangers each year to work in its vast, pseudo city. For the fair’s 24-day run, the populace of this surreal village work, eat and play together, forming a kind of temporary family.

But after the last child is dragged out of the park by the last frazzled parent, and the closing music act makes its final curtain call, the fair-day friends revert to the silence of strangers on an elevator.

Most people pack up their bags and slip out the gates with only the slightest of goodbyes, workers say. But for an elite fraction of fair people, that ephemeral, carnival-inspired family becomes permanent.

Over the fair’s 69-year history, couples have met, fallen in love and married at the Fairplex. They have strolled the grounds with their fingers interlaced, toddled about in varying stages of pregnancy and recruited their progeny to join their large annual family.

For couples such as Fairplex administrator Doug Lofstrom and his wife, Nancy--a board member’s daughter--the family’s roots are already planted in fair history. Other romances develop more randomly, as with food servers Yolanda and Jose Sanchez, who happened to be looking for extra cash when they were trapped in Cupid’s cross-hairs.

“Everybody gets together here,” says Yolanda, 41, smiling slightly and recalling how she and Jose, 40, met last year at the Lucky Cuss Saloon by the fair’s grandstand stage.

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She worked the register, he worked the grill, she says. And amid long work days and half-hour lunch breaks, the co-workers fell into what Jose calls a “19-day romance.” Within three weeks of their first date, they were married.

“I wasn’t looking for a husband,” she says. “That was the last thing I was looking for.”

What she was looking for, Yolanda says from behind the counter of Marsha’s Chicken stand, was “supplemental income. A lot of people are, that’s why they’re here.”

Eavesdropping co-workers Staci Johnson, 36, and Renee Villerreal, 27, nod in agreement.

Money is the key motivator for working the fair, Johnson says, but she seems inspired by Yolanda’s tale. “I want to find a man,” joked the happily married Johnson. “Now it is my turn.”

For some, the fair means neither extra cash nor love--well, not in theory anyway.

The Fairplex’s year-round activities provide a steady job and a regular income for at least 175 people. But yes, insiders say, some of those employees do fall in love.

Doug Lofstrom, 47, joined the Fairplex staff in 1991 after 11 years of working the administration side of fairs in Hemet and Orange.

He came on board as one of four vice presidents at a time when the Fairplex was reorganizing its administration and tackled his job as exhibits and facilities coordinator impressively.

In fact, Doug so impressed people that in 1992 he was invited to join Fairplex’s board member Jack Todd at a dinner with Todd’s wife and his daughter.

It wasn’t a set-up, says Todd, who has been on the board for 24 years. “I just knew he was a nice fellow,” he says. “I didn’t know it would lead to this.”

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Showing up an hour late, Doug met with the sniffling, cold-ridden Nancy, now 38, and her parents in the Directors Dinning Room, a VIP hall that sits inconspicuously atop Anthony’s restaurant on the fairgrounds. It’s about as out of the way a place as can be found at a carnival, and one to which the Lofstroms often return on the anniversary of this first date, Sept. 24.

When the fair ended, Doug and Nancy started dating, and within a few months they made their nuptial plans--for a fairgrounds ceremony, of course.

The couple married April 10, 1993, in the Fairplex’s Forest of the Redwoods, which they now privately refer to as “Church of the Redwoods.”

Doug’s youngest son from a previous marriage, Dustin, is working as a roving guard in this year’s livestock area. But Pomona-born Nancy, who has gone to the fair every year of her life and worked various jobs there, distances herself from her family’s “office” and prides herself on having “a life outside the fair.”

She does visit often. And when Doug can schedule it, they walk through the redwood forest and eat an anniversary dinner on the fairgrounds.

Yolanda and Jose also have a special on-site meal planned for their first wedding anniversary, Sept. 27. “We’re going to eat right over there,” she says, pointing to Ernie’s BBQ stand by the racetrack.

Scheduled to work as a manager of a fish and chips booth that day, Jose says the couple will prove its commitment to work through life’s obstacles: “She’ll place the order,” Jose says. “Then she’ll come get me, and we’ll take my half-hour lunch break together.”