Event Goes to Pieces, Then Goes

It was the morning after.

Not a snow cone in sight. No more cotton candy being spun.

The sounds filling the air weren’t from calliopes and shrieking kids but from mallets breaking down metal poles. Trucks, motors idling, were backed up to the commercial and youth buildings, rear doors splayed open.

The Hot Dog on a Stick booth did about 8 mph down Main Street, towed by a Ford pickup. Next stop: the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona.

This fair, one of the most successful of the some 100 Ventura County fairs, hadended at midnight, hours earlier.

In the morning light, Cinderella removed her glass slipper and pulled on her work boots. Time to take it all down.

“It was the best, the smoothest fair we’ve seen,” said Teri Raley, the fair’s publicist. “The weather was flawless, everyone was relaxed, it had great energy.

“Everyone behaved,” she said.

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Raley said attendance was up 5.7% over last year, to 270,257. And entries were up in virtually everything across the board. The livestock auction was up 30%--it took in $392,789. Carnival rides were up almost 10%, she said.

Although the “flawless weather” hovered in the 80s during the 12-day fair’s second week, no heatstroke victims appeared at the first aid station. Band-Aids for blisters were the overwhelming medical problem.

On the day after, everyone was taking down a booth or a carnival ride or picking up a quilt, jar of jam or a project from a competition.

“Our kids in JRP did great,” agreed Jim Davis and Rudy Lopez, Correction Services Agency officers with the county’s Juvenile Restitution Project. “They took first place in their division--a landscape in the floriculture building. This is the first time they won first place,” Davis said. He and Lopez supervised the youngsters as they packed away their entry.

Emma Klein, 7, beamed as she headed out of the Youth Building with three blue ribbons in one hand and a bundle of three prize-winning crafts in the other.

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“This is great. I’m entering more next year,” she said.

She was accompanied by her mother, Carol Klein, of Ventura. “I like how they use the Danish system in judging the lower grades. It’s based on what the child is capable of doing at that age,” she said.

Over on the midway, the Kamikaze and Tilt-a-Whirl were being collapsed. They didn’t look so scary laid out in parts and pieces on the asphalt.

Robert DeLap of Oxnard, a temporary carnie who runs the Dragon Wagon at the fair each year, sat on a bench outside a fun house. He was waiting for his paycheck, due at 1 p.m. His gear was piled beside him.

“It’s a 14-hour shift. Work two hours, get one off. As soon as we get paid by RCS [the carnival], my girlfriend and I will walk over to the bus station.”

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DeLap said he “used to work the L.A. County Fair in Pomona, but not any more. My girl has two kids and we don’t like to take the kids down there.”

The drained Bumper Boat pond was a forlorn sight. The little boats, which usually bob merrily in the huge plastic pool, leaned askew in temporary dry-dock.

The ride’s operator, Mike Felkins, of Coffeyville, Kan., said he and the Bumper Boats will head south to Malibu to work the Labor Day chili cook-off carnival, “then on to Pomona--I guess it’s the biggest fair of all.”

But not any better, according to Seaside Park manager Michael Paluszak.

“We’re just putting together all our statistics, but we know it was a good one. Everything worked. The weather smiled and the crowds smiled. We’re feeling very good down here today.”