It was show time for 11-year-old and his pigs at state fair
Some mothers and sons have baseball. Heather Comegys and her 11-year-old son, Billy, have pigs.
“This is what they do for their bonding time,” Heather’s husband, Willy Comegys, said, leaning over the side of the swine pen Aug. 26 at the Maryland State Fair. “I do baseball and soccer with him, she does pigs. I don’t have anything to do with this.”
That last line wasn’t entirely true, since he said it while scratching the head of a grateful 298-pound, black-and-white pig named Hank after country crooner Hank Williams. Next to Hank, a 295-pound, ballet-slipper pink Yorkshire pig named Patsy, as in Cline, was chilling in a bed of pine shavings, content with a fourthplace finish.
“My favorite was a pig who would roll over to get his belly rubbed,” Willy said. “But [Billy] sold him.”
While Hank and Patsy were state fair material, Waylon Jennings, sadly, was not.
“We sent him to the butcher already,” Billy explained.
Piglets are born. Pigs are named. Swine are shown. Future hams are sold. Such is the cycle of life for hundreds of pigs raised in Maryland each year by 4-H Club members.
Twentysome years ago, Heather was one of those Queen Anne’s County 4-Hers, dedicated to improving her “head, heart, hands, and health,” but more specifically, to showing pigs and goats. In 2002, she was even named the runner-up Maryland Farm Bureau Queen. Eighteen years later, she began the state fair journey with Billy. The pandemic canceled all official 4-H shows for a few years. But this third try has been a charm, and not only because Hank, who is a girl, and Patsy, who is a boy, have thoroughly charmed judges and the Comegys family.
“He does this reverse naming thing,” Heather said, explaining the pigs’ gender-nonconforming names. “He’s been doing it for three years.”
Both pigs were farrowed at Needwood Farm in Centreville. Heather and Billy began eyeing the piglets and submitted bids for Hank (parents’ names: Rumor Has It and Teen Spirit) and Patsy (parents’ names: Denominator and Times Up).
“I was looking for a big framed, good-boned market hog,” Billy said.
Once Hank and Patsy were weaned, they came to live at ChemRoc Farm in Wye Mills, where their main job was to gain weight, but not too much. State fair 4-H guidelines require market hogs to weigh between 225 and 300 pounds. Nearly every day after school, Billy and his friends practiced “walking” the pigs. Halters and leashes are anatomically impossible, so pigs walk free when they are shown; handlers steer the pigs by tapping them on
either side with a whip about 4 feet long.
“Sometimes we just walk them around the farm,” Billy said. “They don’t go anywhere. They know where the food is.”
Pigs, Heather said, “are very smart and very particular animals.”
But getting Hank and Patsy to stroll around a ring with eight other pigs during show season could be another matter. “One time she went in the corner and refused to walk,” Billy said of Hank’s most recalcitrant performance. She still won.
Heading into the state fair, Heather was especially optimistic about the pig’s prospects. “If she walks, she’ll win,” she predicted.
All swine had to arrive at the fair by the morning of Aug. 25 for the official “weighing in.” Christine Johnston, a 4-H educator emeritus for Queen Anne’s County who spent 32 years working for the University of Maryland’s Agricultural Extension, explained that transporting animals to Timonium requires careful calculation and taking risks.
“We’ve had pigs die,” Johnston said. All it takes is one terrible accident on the Bay Bridge and a pig stuck in traffic becomes premature bacon. “Pigs do not like heat,” she said. A few families can afford air-conditioned trailers, but most cannot. The Comegys family didn’t cross the bridge until after 7 p.m. on Aug. 24. It was after 10 p.m. by the time they checked in at the Holiday Inn. Feeding at the swine barn is at 6:30 a.m., at which point all 230 pigs show up for breakfast squealing at top volume. Then it was back across the bridge: Billy had orientation for Centreville Middle School. Thankfully, he and four other kids with show pigs at the fair did too, but it was still no easy trip.
For decades, Maryland’s academic calendar and state fair schedules were aligned to accommodate 4-H families; schools couldn’t start until after Labor Day because they couldn’t start until after the fair. But start dates crept earlier and earlier, until this year when even ag-rich Frederick County opened classrooms during the third week of August.
The Maryland Agricultural Fair Board, the nonprofit that governs the fair, took the drastic step of rescheduling the fair for three consecutive weekends beginning Aug. 25. As a result, Eastern Shore farm families competing in all the livestock events now face up to triple the costs: three trips to Timonium, three tolls across the bridge, three weekends in a hotel.
“It’s hard,” Heather said. She and many other Queen Anne’s parents decided to forgo the “open” livestock events that began Thursday and are open to all Maryland farmers, and compete only at the 4-H show.
Johnston frowned at the mere mention of the schedule change. “There are a lot of mixed feelings,” she said. On the one hand, “it was completely dead” during recent years at the fair on weekdays. On the other, now only the wealthiest families can afford to compete multiple weekends. In previous years, the 4-H and open livestock shows ran for consecutive days; now the 4-H show is crammed into one weekend.
Which is why Heather, Billy and their friends from ChemRoc Farms found themselves prepping Hank for the heavyweight crossbred swine class late the night of Aug. 26, when most sixth grade farm kids should be in bed.
At 10 p.m., Hank was passed out on her side. “We’re letting her rest,” Heather said. At 10:30 p.m., she was sitting up and yawning while Billy and a friend vigorously brushed off pine shavings. Finally, just shortly before 11 p.m., it was time to line up in the “makeup pens,” which is what the ringside waiting pens are called, even though no one puts lipstick on a pig. According to 4-H rules, only water may be used to ensure pigs glisten for the judge. Hank was doused and ready to go. Water splashed on Billy’s khaki pants and his green 4-H tie was slightly askew.
“Six months of work and it all comes down to three minutes in the ring,” Heather said.
Hank entered the ring for the night’s final class, for pigs weighing between 275 and 300 pounds. Kent McLemore, who flew in from Oklahoma to judge the show, scrutinized all nine pigs, but didn’t seem to pay much attention to Hank, who was acting as if she’d prefer to take a nap in a corner rather than walk around. One by one, McLemore gestured to several 4-Hers that their pig was out of the running. Like bobby-soxers tapped on the shoulder at a dance-off, those teens and tweens were bounced out of the ring.
McLemore had been a tough but unpredictable judge all night, swapping the orders of some pigs that had already lost to each other at county fairs. After each class, he picked up a microphone and in a folksy, Oklahoma drawl, critiqued and praised his favorites. In swine-judging jargon, he called the young females gilts and the males barrows. His colorful assessments of pig body types noted, for example, which gilt had “a really nice stout frame when you look at her from behind” (good) and which resembled “an apple going away from you.”
At 11:10 p.m., McLemore took the mic to call his final class, “I don’t usually do this,” the judge said, “since she clearly didn’t want to show tonight, but the winner is that gilt right there.”
McLemore had no notes for Hank. “That is a really, really nice pig,” he said.
Billy was as elated as an 11-year-old up way past his bedtime could be. And Heather was transported back in time.
“I don’t think I ever, in all my years of showing, won a blue ribbon at the state fair,” she said.
Billy and Hank do not have a Fern and Wilbur ending. Winning a blue ribbon meant Hank was eligible for one of 25 swine spots in the Maryland State Fair 4H/FFA Youth Livestock Sale. At auction last Monday night, she sold for $6 per pound, or $1,788. The Mill, a chain of Bel Air-based livestock feed and supply stores, was the winning bidder.
Heather said Billy will use the money to help cover this year’s showing costs and put some away for his college fund.
And the rest of the money will be invested next year, in hopes of buying another “really, really nice pig.”