Where Change Is Just for Spending

We may colonize Venus, conquer cancer and discover a gene for good luck, but the Ventura County Fair will never change.

That’s the beauty of it. Go to the fair three or four decades from now, and you know what you’ll get. You might pilot your electric hover craft into a 30-story garage, but there will still be plenty of Footsie-Wootsie machines scattered around the fairgrounds to soothe your aching dogs.

Stroll through the Commercial Building and you’ll still find all the essentials: toe rings, salsa makers, long ropes of beef jerky, belt buckles, bolo ties, salt-water taffy, mugs and jugs, pots and pans, license-plate holders that say “Bad Toys . . . for Bad Boys,” and the miracle Quick ‘n’ Brite RV holding-tank cleaner that the barker pitches for “shampooing your hair, washing your dog, and getting the grease off your car.”

In the year 20-something, 4H kids still will show off their prize porkers, which still will be saddled with silly monikers: Prince Ham-let, Ima Hogg, Aldous Hocks-ley. Pigs at fairs seem to beg for jocularity: The Wisconsin State Fair once achieved a brief notoriety with the slogan “Days of Swine and Roses.” I’ll always remember that.

In the Agriculture Building, there will always be conscientious judges like Susan Kleine, who the other day was cracking pullet eggs on paper plates to see how evenly they spread.

“You want your yolk to sit right in the middle,” she said as she solemnly watched the viscous liquid ooze.

On the other side of the great hall, tables were piled with huge lemons, larger-than-life cauliflowers, and zucchinis the size and shape of the clubs that the cavemen used to carry in Alley Oop. That’s the way the Agriculture Building has looked since Kleine started judging exhibits 20 years ago, and that’s the way it will look when yolks and whites are thoughtfully engineered for perfect concentricity.

At the fair, my 15-year-old daughter Kate always gets her face painted, and Kazem Sangabi, the affable Iranian-American face-painter, always remembers her.

He greeted her Wednesday night with the enthusiasm of a teacher greeting a favorite former student. “Yes, yes, yes, how are you?,” he said. “How many years has it been now?”

Twelve, as it turned out.

A girl waiting in line dropped her jaw. “He’s been painting her face since the year I was born,” she marveled.

“I can’t believe I’m still doing this,” Sangabi said as he applied the final elegant blue curlicue to Kate’s cheek.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” but he obviously never attended the Ventura County Fair.

The fair is nothing if not consistent, and there’s plenty of foolishness to go around. When changes occur, they tend to be modest. One year, there are strolling Garfields. The next, there are strolling dolphins. A cynical cat, or a sea mammal that can ace an IQ test: What’s the difference, really?

If the Ventura County Fair were a person, it would not be the one you would proudly introduce as your future spouse. The fair is not cool, not svelte, not modern, and it loves a sloppy good time. The fair would serve corn dogs at home. The fair is the anti-Disney, you might say.

At some glossy, marketed-to-death theme park like Disneyland, there would be no spots for the purveyors of mops. People in our target demographic aren’t interested in mops, Disneyland’s official reasoning would go. Our guests don’t want to go on vacation and come home with a mop.

But mops have been a consistent attraction at the Ventura County Fair for as long as I can remember.

“You can save time, save money, and save the planet,” intoned a woman in her spiel for the Eco-Star MicroFiber mop, which she had just rubbed around a wooden platform to make scuff marks vanish like that. “Now give me one good reason not to buy it.”

You have to be careful around the mop people. If your character is as weak as mine, you will be overcome by a dangerous lust for a new mop. Resist it!

The money you save you can then waste on impossible-to-win games. When Kate was about 8, I snagged her a huge purple dragon by knocking over three cement milk bottles with just one well-placed softball. I felt like a luminous, button-bursting dad out of a Norman Rockwell painting. This time, I nearly missed the bottles altogether and felt a lot more like myself.

“You’re too old for big stuffed animals anyway,” I told Kate.

“Uh, right,” she replied.

As always, the games reminded me of my magical post-college summer running a game--”Nickel to play! Nickel to win!”--at a low-rent amusement park in Massachusetts. Once again I heard the Jimmy Durante-like rasping of the potato-nosed old barker who called himself Good Hearted Bill From Over the Hill. Bill ran the roulette-like “cigarette game,” where the lucky winner waltzed off with a pack--or even a carton--of smokes.

At the end of the summer, Bill offered me a job. Hobbled by a stroke at the age of 76, he needed someone to drive him and his game around a carnival circuit called the Midway of Mirth. When I stammered something about trying to get a newspaper job, he understood.

“Why, with your vo-cab-ill-ary, you could be another Winchell,” Bill pronounced, ever the pitchman.

I always think of that when I go to the fair. Some things never change.

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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.