Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. This week we’re going to talk about what’s going on in all of the rural areas at this time, which is the county fair.
And I was just thinking about, I wonder how many county fairs still have carnivals. I know growing up our county fair always had a carnival along with all of the 4-H and FFA exhibits. I don’t even know if FFA was an exhibitor in our fair days.
It might have been all just 4-H. But we always had a big carnival and it was always, you know, all the kids went and rode the rides. But I didn’t realize until probably when I was in college, I started to sell ads for the local radio station as my summer internship and they had me sell a couple of counties around where I grew up.
And I had no clue that most county fairs don’t have carnivals. And I think that problem has only been exacerbated by the fact that there’s fewer and far between on the carnivals and they’re really expensive to get in. So it’s really competitive to find a time for them to come in unless you booked them years in advance, apparently.
But so there’s a lot of the smaller carnivals and a lot of the smaller counties, even back, I don’t know, 25 years ago that did not have a carnival. So does your county fair have a carnival? That’s the question that we’re going to put in the poll this week for our podcast poll. Let me know if your fair still has a carnival.
The other trend that we’re seeing around our area is a homegrown carnival. So they go and they buy former, like old equipment from the carnivals that were running and they fix that up in a store that all year and then they get local volunteers to work the carnival. And to me, I wonder how that works.
Again, let me know, send me a message if you know this, like how does it work in your county finding volunteers at that time? It seems to be unless you’ve got a really dedicated group of volunteers, it seems to be volunteers are the hardest commodity giving people people giving their time. That is the most precious commodity because a lot of people are so busy, they don’t want to give up their time. So I wonder if you have a hard time finding people to commit to the shifts and taking on the rides each year.
So the county fair that’s going on this week in our community, it does still have a carnival. It’s one of the bigger ones around, has races on the midway and it has a carnival, but it’s pretty large and it really attracts from around the region now since we are one of the only fairs left with a carnival in the entire region of where we live, which I guess we’re also seeing that trend more to regionalism and we all travel to the one really cool thing or we travel to the one that has the carnival. So there is actually a carnival along with all the FFA and the 4-H exhibits.
Then I wondered too, so again another question that you can answer and send a message to our page about. I wondered too, how many of you used to be in 4-H? That was a discussion between my husband and I when we had kids. He was like, oh 4-H is really great for kids and we need to have them in 4-H and we should do it.
Well it turns out I was the parent who was not in 4-H. I did grow up in a farming community on a dry land farm, but we were not in 4-H. The parents always said it’s a lot of work for the parents and I suppose if you do it correctly and if you do it the way it’s supposed to roll, it should be a lot of work for your kids.
But if your kids are like mine, they’re not self-motivating most of the time. There’s a lot of primping and prodding and prodding and prodding and lists and buying stuff and you know those type of things that come with the fact that they cannot drive, that still have to happen. So 4-H for our kids, they ended up doing 4-H.
But I was the parent that was mainly in charge of it and keeping it motivated in the family and I’m like, how did I get to be the one in charge of this? My husband was in 4-H and he should know the ins and outs, which if you’ve been in 4-H, there’s a lot of paperwork that comes with 4-H. You got to do the record books and you have to, you know, fill out the sheets and you got to get them registered correctly and even like the fare system has a bunch of coding and a lot of different things you have to make sure you’re getting the right class and all the different parts of that.
So it’s a lot of paperwork and I was like, how am I the parent who did not have any 4-H experience, not the one that’s in charge of all of the paperwork and figuring this out? So I guess I should have kept going in 4-H with my kids because I finally got all the system figured out and how to how everything works and the different events and how to do them and, you know, had them all trained up.
But it got to the point where around here, like I said, you’ve never, I’ve said this on podcasts before, you’re never more busy than a 1-A school kid busy in a small town. So 1-A is the smallest classification of schools in Kansas and our, my kids just started to be so busy that we were just half doing 4-H. So I don’t like to do anything halfway.
I like to do everything to the best of our abilities. So a couple of years ago, I started saying we are not doing this correctly and it really bothers me. So we’re not going to do it.
Well, then my kids would beg. Oh, we have to do it. We love 4-H.
So we stayed in it for a couple more years. And finally this year I was like, no, we’re too tired for 4-H. We got enough going on.
And so I have a kid in high school and a kid in junior high. And if you’ve been silly enough to have kids that are that close together in age, I guess mine are four years apart. So technically one will be out by the time the other one gets to high school, but it gets super busy because you have something every night of the week.
You’ve got junior high sports on opposite days of high school sports. And so we were never making it. And then, then the things that are not on the weekdays for the, you know, for regular practice get pushed to Saturdays and Sundays.
And Sundays are usually the time we tried to get the 4-H meetings in. So we were never at 4-H meetings. And I get that you don’t have to necessarily attend 4-H to be able to take things to the fair.
But again, that’s part of my standards in terms of we do something, we do it to the best of our abilities and not going to any of those meetings really was really bothering me. But while they were in 4-H, we were doing like photography and foods. And it was always the weekend after our town festival that we had to get going on.
We’d get done on Saturday night with all of the things and staying out late most of the nights. And then we would have to get back into it on Saturday or Sunday and start cooking everything. And we had to make sure we’d planned the weekend before, the week before, and make sure we bought all of the things and inevitably run out of something that day.
And all of you that are 4-H parents and 4-H foods parents, you get this completely. So it was getting to be one of those, you had to make sure you were after it and make sure you were actually planning to get it all done. But those were some of our favorite parts of the fair.
We really enjoyed doing all those things. And we never had animals. I know that there’s a lot of people with animals and I’m sure that’s even a different deal but we were actually in a club that had a lot of people that did brought like cattle to the fair.
A lot of show cattle in our area, which is kind of crazy. I grew up just an hour away and we didn’t have, I don’t think we had anybody that showed cattle. And in this 4-H club here, there’s a lot of families that show cattle and they usually show different breeds of cattle.
We actually had a gal intern with us that was big in the Charlotte area. I think it’s Charlotte cattle world. Nope.
I think it’s Hereford cattle. I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re in. Brown cattle.
So I think it’s Hereford. But they are huge in it. They travel all up and down the Midwest.
So in the Dakotas and Minnesota, I think she’s actually from Canada. So we might do some things cross border even. But it’s interesting to hear them talk.
We had their daughter as an intern in our office one summer and she talked about show cattle and what a different world that is. We had cattle growing up, but it was the kind that were out in the pasture and the pen and you fed them, you know, grain or you fed them grass. And you didn’t really do a lot with them until if you took them to the vet or you took them to the cattle sale barn.
But she was talking about having the show cattle world where you take laundry soap and you wash your cattle and you have to do brush your cattle like every day because their coat has to be like the curls a certain way.
And some show cattle people have refrigerators for their cattle so that their coat curls better. I don’t know.
Completely different world. So if I thought 4-H was a different world, show cattle might be even more formal right there. But it’s a lot of work.
I don’t think people realize, you know, how much work the show cattle arena is. But like I said, at our county fair, back on that subject, we do have a lot of people that have show cattle that come and display them and use them for the county fair. So interesting to see all those different breeds of show cattle that, you know, they’re immaculate when they come to the fair, definitely.
They’re beautiful animals and they do a great job being able to show them because they’re so used to that. So county fair season, like I said, how’s your county fair? Are you running it with a community-owned carnival? Do you still have a carnival? And are you in 4-H? And like I said, you should write a book on how to do 4-H or have a 4-H consulting company that just helps people with new parents, how they fill out all those forms and all those different codes for 4-H. But you’d make a living on that.
You would with me at least back in the day. So happy fair season, happy end of summer around here in rural areas. And we hope that you’ve been able to get away either to your on vacation from your different fairs and festivals that you are involved in each summer in your area.
We wouldn’t have it any other way, would we? Keeps us entertained here in these rural areas. So thanks again for listening to Last People. We will talk to you again on the next episode of the podcast and we hope that you have a great week and a great county fair if you haven’t already had yours.
See you soon.