If Illinois State Fair promoters need an animal to play Mickey Mouse to the fair’s Disneyland, they couldn’t do better than Bird Brain. Bird Brain is the star of the IQ Zoo, which features smart animals each year at the fair; he makes a living taking parking-meter money off college boys dumb enough to think they can beat something with feathers at ticktacktoe. A barnyard bird who plucks the city slickers–now there’s a symbol for the Illinois agriculture exposition of the 90s.
A 50-cent ticket to the fair could buy a boy a lot of wisdom in 1959. Seeing an old man get hit by a VIP’s golf cart later helped me understand Reaganism, just as the ringtoss games later gave me insight into Pentagon contracts. And it was while standing in the dairy building staring at a cow sculpted from butter–made from cows–that I realized that life has larger symmetries. Indeed, the state fair was a small-town boy’s first foretaste of the crush, the confusion, and the exhilaration of the big city.
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The most dramatic change in farming since the 1850s, of course, has been in the number of people it takes to do it. A farmers’ fair without farmers is a fair without a soul, and by the time I was old enough to attend it unsupervised, the state fair had begun to lose its identity. Illinois’ agriculture department, which ran it, no longer had much clout with the legislature, and a succession of fair managers tried to stage it on the cheap. The buildings were falling apart, sanitation became a local joke, and the perception grew that the fair had become the province of working-class toughs–sons and grandsons of farmers, who made and repaired the machines that had driven their families off the land. The USAC dirt-car races drew thousands more than the trotters did, and the motorcycle races became so popular that they had to be banned for several years because rambunctious bikers scared the locals.
Thompson personified the new state-fair audience of the 80s–younger, urban, educated, bored. To the traditional competitions in fiddlin’ and cow milkin’ the Thompson administration added boccie and softball tournaments and Abe’s Amble, a ten-kilometer run. Beer tents were authorized, as was harness-race betting. This was to be a fair for the 1980s; nobody was going to drive 200 miles from Chicago to watch a taffy pull.
Traditionalists will be pleased to know that, as was often noted about the blond strippers who worked the Happy Hollow, the roots of the fair still show. In the hearts of organizers, it will always be 1900. Ribbons are awarded for the longest ponytails and pigtails, but corn rows are specifically disqualified. Many visiting urbanites must have found the Swinging Grandmothers of Clinton, Illinois, as exotic, as picturesque, and as off-tune as Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, and wondered why the Grandmothers were booked into the Senior Center and not the Ethnic Village along with the gamelan combos.
For travel information on Springfield, see the Visitors’ Guide in this issue.
