Who We Were, Who We Are

No matter which performers or new attractions headline the Ventura County Fair each summer, the star of the show is always nostalgia.

It’s not innovation that draws the crowds. It’s the familiar sights and sounds of the midway, the earthy fragrance of the animal barns, the down-home skills on display in the canning and baking competitions.

So we’re happy to see a return to nostalgia in the poster for this year’s fair, unveiled last week at the fair’s annual awards dinner, five months earlier than usual.

The new poster, designed by fair publicist Devlin Raley, features a sepia-toned photograph from the 1912 Ventura County Fair above the 1999 fair’s theme, “Reflections of Yesterday.” The photo, from the archives of the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, shows mule teams pulling wagons loaded with people through Ventura Trotting Park, which stood near what is now the Grandstand Arena at Seaside Park.

Nobody in Ventura County needs to be reminded what a high point of the summer the 12-day run of the fair represents, or how much care goes into creating a poster to capture the specialness of that event. Some of the posters have become collectors’ items, notably the graceful carousel horse of 1985, the vintage bumper car of 1990 and the red 1941 Farmall tractor of the 1996 poster.

Last year’s poster forsook nostalgia for humor, offering a colorful splash of caricatures including tap-dancing avocados, lighthearted lemons, an equine Elvis, a Shakespearean pig, smiling strawberries and a Wagnerian cow. It did its part in drawing big crowds to the fairgrounds but isn’t likely to be listed among the classics.

We welcome this year’s poster as a symbol that the Ventura County Fair continues to remember--and to remind us of--our area’s agricultural roots and our rich heritage. The more Ventura County grows and changes, the more important such reminders become.