Edmonton Journal

‘IT IS ABOUT SUMMER’

GIANT RABBITS, CORN DOGS, LADIES ON HORSES AND THE ENDURING APPEAL OF FAIRGROUND KITSCH

- Joe o’Connor

Friday, Aug. 17 was supposed to be Simon the giant rabbit’s big day at the Iowa State Fair, at least that was the great hope, some months back, when Bryan Bergdale, a new employee at the Peoples Company in Clive, Iowa, followed through on his boss’s wacky request to source and purchase a giant rabbit capable of winning an iconic state fair’s iconic giant rabbit contest.

Bergdale paid $2,500 for Simon, a metre-long black Continenta­l from the United Kingdom, and Simon became famous shortly thereafter, not for winning any big bunny contests but for dying in a Chicago airport on April 20 while in the care of United Airlines employees.

“We really didn’t know what to do after Simon,” Bergdale, a land broker, said from his Iowa office this week. “My boss said, ‘Well, it is dead — do you want to get another one?’

“So I looked around the Midwest, but I couldn’t find anything because a lot of people, I guess, who are into rabbits don’t want to sell them when they get really big.”

Giant rabbits, enormous pigs, massive bulls, ferris wheels, thrill rides, country bands, pie-eating contests, hypnotists, cow milking — a butter cow sculpture — and more are all part of the Iowa fairground milieu during the 11-day annual event that attracts in excess of a million visitors.

The fair is now into its eighth day and attendance has been robust. It is a good news story for fair operators, and one that obscures the dramatic tension that, historical­ly, plagued one of farm country’s great spectacles. Fairs, indeed, in Iowa and Canada, were not conceived to be wholesome fun, in the days of yore, but sprawling classrooms for predominan­tly agrarian cultures.

“Agricultur­al fairs were aimed at educating farmers,” says Chris Rasmussen, a native Iowan, historian and author of Carnival in the Countrysid­e, The History of the Iowa State Fair. “This was back before most people went to university, and so they were intended to educate farmers to be better farmers. What they discovered was that if the fair didn’t have entertainm­ent then nobody wanted to go. So there was always this tension at the fair, between those who felt it should be a scientific education — and those who wanted it to be a vacation, to give people who worked so hard a break.”

Iowans debated whether horse racing was an entertainm­ent or an offshoot of farming in the early years of a fair that debuted in 1854. They were scandalize­d (and titillated) by “female equestrian­ism,” an event that featured women riding astride a horse through an obstacle course. Miss Belle Turner of Keokuk, “with elegant form, fine face and soft blue eyes” was judged the winner, according to historical accounts.

This push and pull between science and spectacle was weighing heavily on David Coombes in 1967. Coombes is the longtime manager of the Hants County Exhibition in Windsor, N.S. — North America’s longest running fair. It has been around for 252 years and was running on fumes in the sixties when a desperate Coombes imported a troupe of ostriches (and their handler) from California. Fair patrons were invited to race them in the arena.

“My attendance almost doubled that first year and

THAT’S WHAT THEY COME FOR, TO BE ENTERTAINE­D.

went up another 25 per cent the next year and another 15 per cent the year after that,” Coombes says from Falmouth, N.S. “I maintain that if I hadn’t brought in those ostriches it would have been the end of the fair. You can take surveys, and people will say they don’t come to the fair for the midway games — but that’s what they come for, to be entertaine­d.”

Coombes recruited a giant mechanical dinosaur from Toronto to pull people in to last year’s fair, while this September’s marquee attraction in Hants County will be a group of aerialists from Montreal.

“I don’t think the aerialists will be quite as sensationa­l as the dinosaur, but it will still be pretty good,” says the longtime fair hand, adding that the exhibition draws about 30,000 people.

Fairs, it seems, endure, as so many other things (family farms, milkshake bars, pay phones, newspapers, affordable big-city housing, Main Street U.S.A.) fade away, leaving behind a yearning for something familiar, for simpler times.

“There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when people were talking about the fair as not being able to survive,” Chris Rasmussen says. “I think it is nostalgia that keeps people going back to the fair.”

Rasmussen keeps going back to Iowa for the corn dogs and to look at the chickens. Bryan Bergdale, meanwhile, had it in mind to pop by the largest rabbit competitio­n Friday at 6 p.m., to see what Simon’s competitio­n might have been.

“Simon was my first time owning a giant rabbit,” he says. “But the fair, for me, is about seeing the largest bull. It is about summer, and seeing people. It is a tradition, and they serve all sorts of weird food — including fried butter on a stick — anything that you can think of that could give you a heart attack.”

 ?? SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES ?? Fairgoers hit the corn dog stand at the Iowa State Fair this week in Des Moines. The event is expected to draw one million people. Fairs seem to appeal to the yearning for something familiar, for simpler times.
SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES Fairgoers hit the corn dog stand at the Iowa State Fair this week in Des Moines. The event is expected to draw one million people. Fairs seem to appeal to the yearning for something familiar, for simpler times.
 ??  ?? The giant rabbit competitio­n is a big deal at the popular Iowa State Fair each year.
The giant rabbit competitio­n is a big deal at the popular Iowa State Fair each year.

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