Published: September 06, 2008 11:19 pm      

SUSAN EVANS | Cambria fairgoers show smiles, frowns

This isn’t about winning or losing, or who gets a blue ribbon. This is about two very different faces of the Cambria County Fair, much like the two-sided masks that show a smile on the front and a frown when turned around.

I saw them both last week.

The smile was on Thursday evening, when the food and the jovial auctioneer’s chatter warmed up the crowd at the annual 4-H livestock sale. It starts with pigs, ends with dairy cattle and is the culmination of months of work by youngsters who parade the stock they have raised and hope for the best price.

It also is a favorite event of The Husband, who as a young boy growing up on a Cambria Township farm raised a pig each year to sell at the fair.

So we go each year – not to get meat for the freezer, but to buy a hog and donate it back to be resold for the benefit of 4-H.

This year we had the privilege of doing so as a memorial to Zack Alvarez, our neighbor and little buddy who died last year at this time, just a few days before he could take his own hog to the sale.

For rural families, the 4-H livestock sale is a symbol of the good times and the bad, the hard work and the success. And the humor.

Benny Davis, the Ebensburg area’s auctioneer extraordinaire, provides the banter.

“Yup, yup, yup, let’s go folks. Who’ll give $2?

“Come on, Sue, how ’bout this one?

“Chris, what’ll you give me?”

As the noise level rises, so does the price, and the kids prodding their hogs around the ring smile at the bidders.

The usual supporters are there – Portage Power Wash, Cresson Steel, Long Barn, Long Hardwoods, Holland Brothers, to name a few– and the proud parents and grandparents.

Some buyers donate their purchases to be resold for the benefit of the 4-H scholarship fund or a food pantry.

A total of 196 animals were sold this year, and most folks left smiling.

Not so with the frown side of the fair’s face.

That one I saw earlier in the week when a young Ebensburg girl was excluded from a show, not by 4-H, but by fair workers who were rude and arbitrary.

The story is this: After a year of disappointments, she had set a goal of learning to hitch and drive huge Belgian draft horses.

She practiced on The Daughter’s farm all summer, between riding her own horse in various 4-H shows and other competitions.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to do this at the fair?” became her new goal.

Her mother, The Daughter’s best friend, filled out the forms, indicating she would not be stabling the horses at the fair and that she was registering herself and daughter for this event only.

The fair workers took her application, cashed her check and never told her that anything was amiss.

The girl spent the evening before the event grooming the horses, polishing the cart and cleaning the horse trailer.

On the day of the fair, she was let through the gate and the horses were unloaded.

“You’ll have to take these horses and get out,” a fair worker said.

The rules were being broken, he said.

What rules? Why weren’t they told when they applied? Why was their application accepted?

No one could give an answer or cite specific pages in the fair book.

Yes, draft horses could come in only for the horse pull, but the animals could not come in only for the draft hitching, the fair worker said.

Isn’t what’s fair for one fair for all?

Answers ranged from, “These families have been coming here for years and they know the rule,” to the fair superintendent saying, “I have 95 horses to take care of, and I can’t baby-sit everyone.”

The fair book requires exhibitors to stable their animals all week, but this girl was not seeking to be an exhibitor. The book does not explain why draft horses for the pull come in for that event only, but the same could not be done for another draft horse event.

It was the classic argument that something is the way it is because those in authority say so.

With that attitude, so much for drawing new interest in a fair that, by the fair director’s admission, is lagging in participation and attendance.

But just as the 4-H kids show determination in raising their animals for the sale, I hope this girl persists in a quest for fairness.

If the rules actually excluded her, then write those rules clearly in the book. Most importantly, train a staff to be fair, logical and courteous.

The fair is an important tradition – too important for the frowns to overtake the smiles.



Susan Evans is a reporter with The Tribune-Democrat.