Hall Shows, an outdoors institution, brings connection in its return
They survived a pandemic. They survived a court fight. They survived product shortages, supply-chain hiccups, disposable-incoming pinching and the out-of-sight, outof-mind dangers of being mothballed for four years.
The Bart Hall Shows, formerly known as Fred Hall Shows under the name of Bart’s father until that trip to a judge, return to the Del Mar Fairgrounds, today through Sunday.
To San Diego’s deep and intertwined outdoors community, this is not simply knocking the dust off an annual event that pushes boats, fishing tackle and trips to the Alaskan wilderness. It’s more personal than that, more meaningful than that.
The shows with a 44-year run locally and Southern California lifespan dating back to 1946 are about a kid whose father brought him to the trout pond before he did the same with his son, then his grandson. It’s about that spur-of-the-moment splurge on a trip that bonded parents and children for a lifetime.
It’s the organizers and select invitees who gather at the secretive cigar tent, the robust handshakes as people from all corners of the
It’s part extended family, part orneriness and all fun.
“One show, we set up tents and rain was running right through the middle,” said Bart Hall, 77. “One guy who had too many toddies sat in a chair pretending to fish in the ‘stream.’ They distracted him while my dad went to the trout pond and hooked a real trout on his line. He thought he was catching a fish.
“He thought he was funny, but my dad was a little bit funnier.”
It’s trial and error that ends, plenty of times, in stories told for generations.
In the very first show, pre-dating San