A salute to the fair, fest, and fireman's carnival

It only happens once a year...unless you live in rural America and don't mind taking a leisurely drive every summer (and fall) weekend.

If it takes me the amount of time to gather my thoughts as I think it will, you will still have a fair (no pun intended) amount of time to make it up to Harrington and catch the Delaware State Fair before this year’s edition vanishes into the mists of history. That’s where my wife and I were yesterday, and as I write this her and her daughter are making a girls day out of going again. If that weren’t enough, tomorrow we’re all driving down to the Somerset County Fair out by Princess Anne, Maryland for one reason and one reason only: my wife LOVES watching our local chapter of Cowboy Mounted Shooting. In that case, I’ll probably be the one walking around and seeing what there is to see since I’ve never been there. And if that’s not enough, Thursday starts the Sharptown Fireman’s Carnival, which occurs most nights the rest of August maybe two miles from my humble abode here on the flatlands of Delaware.

All these events make me think of summers growing up back home in northwest Ohio, where the county fair is king and local themed festivals provide the court. And when I say “king” I mean it: Fulton County, Ohio, where I spent my teenage years, has a population of 42,000 and a county fair that runs around Labor Day weekend. Its seven-day county fair draws roughly the same total attendance as the state fair here in Delaware, which is a state of one million and has a ten-day fair. In writing this, I got curious and found that 87 of the 88 Ohio counties have a fair - for some reason, Licking County, just east of Columbus, does not.

But I grew up at a different fair, which was just as fun for a kid. My grandparents lived in the town of Pemberville, Ohio, which every August had what’s known as the Pemberville Free Fair. (The good news: even though it was a CCP virus casualty in 2020, they had a “virtual fair” that year and have come back strong for another year, their 77th.) This was an event not unlike the Fulton County Fair except there was no grandstand for entertainment in Pemberville as the event was crammed into its local park. It still had the rides, food, midway, and exhibits, though, with a couple vendor tents - one of which had the shiny new Chevy Impala they raffled off at the conclusion of the fair. (As evidence that times change, that local dealership was one that GM kicked to the curb when they became Government Motors and took the bailout a dozen or so years ago.)

I’ve also observed that every town worth its salt where I grew up has its own festival during the summer as a way to promote local tourism and have some fun doing it. And since Toledo was too big and cosmopolitan to have just a little podunk gathering, they had various ethnic festivals celebrating their local communities. My favorite, of course, was the Polish Festival where they closed off a mile of Lagrange Street and the challenge was eating your way through it with all that good Polish cooking. As for the Germans: “did we leave anything out? Beer!” (You had to be there and pick up on the heavy German accent to understand.)

So when I moved down here, I noticed things were different. One thing I was introduced to, however, was the aforementioned Fireman’s Carnival, which is held as a long-running fundraiser for the local volunteer fire companies that have the need and volunteer manpower to run these events. Every department is different, but among the more prominent Fireman’s carnivals in my area are those in Hebron and Sharptown, Maryland, and Chincoteague, Virginia, the latter of which made its name with its annual Pony Swim that occurs concurrently with the fireman’s carnival. They’re some of the glue that holds these little communities together.

I think I talked about this at more length in one of my previous entries, but having these little festivals and fairs has become a celebration of rural living. While fairs will have exhibits and judging for fine arts such as photography - something my family has entered a few times over the years - the bread and butter of a fair comes from the exhibitors who put up their grains, vegetables, baked goods, and livestock to be judged against those of their friends and neighbors. Go to the Delaware State Fair and you’ll find barns full of cattle, hogs, sheep, and goats there to be shown off, and these farm kids do so proudly. At stake for all those things is a few dollars (although livestock can be much more lucrative) but more importantly bragging rights: both my wife and her daughter can argue over whose “best in show” photo was better because they both had one the same year at the Wicomico County Fair a few years back - one being the adult winner and the other a junior winner.

But the people who really deserve the salute are the volunteers who put these events on year after year. Not that they’re going out of their way to look for it, but they deserve recognition for keeping these events we all enjoy going in an era where a lot of kids would rather be looking at a screen. Those kids are the ones who are missing out on life enjoyed in a simpler manner, and that’s a shame. Luckily, it’s not too late for them and their parents to go to a fair or festival this summer.