Faces at a fair

I spent a couple of hours at the Larned community building with Mom yesterday, wearing red "volunteer" ribbons, to make sure no one walked off with the champion onions or the best jar of wheat or one of those hand-stitched quilts that got a yellow ribbon for participating.


Let's just say I wasn't worried.


Among those who came to browse the projects on display was Mrs. Haun. She remembers being a young 4-Her...back when Herbert Hoover was president.


"I showed a hog at the fair," she offered sweetly. "I sold it to pay for my wedding dress."

She was 17. It was 1929.

Her children would form the backbone of the Gem Dandys 4-H Club, in the northcentral part of the county. The Gem Dandys club is one of perhaps four left in the county. "We came up with the name," she said of her family.

Fitting, since Mrs. Haun is a gem, and it was dandy to talk to her.

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Then there was the anonymous guy who was wearing a ball cap boasting of Iron City, Mich. It's cold there in the winter, he said. So cold that you could go sledding and if your sinuses were running it would freeze as you slid down the hill.

"By the time you got to the bottom, you'd look like a walrus," he offered.

Um, thanks for that visual image, sir.

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Stephen Schartz, who was one year behind my twin brother and me in school over at Pawnee Heights, came through the building with his wife, Kaye. He stopped to say "hi" and tease me about my red "volunteer" ribbon. And then he opined to Mom and me that this was the best time to buy chicks, so you wouldn't need a heat lamp to keep 'em warm in the first few weeks of their life. Oh, and it would be comfortable temperatures in the fall...when it comes time to kill 'em, clean 'em and put 'em in the freezer. He's even figured out a way to strip the feathers quickly and hands-free.

Good luck with that, Stephen.

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Then there was the Josefiak girl who is getting ready for her wedding. She just graduated from vet school at K-State and will be marrying another vet, a schoolmate who has already moved to northcentral Nebraska to help expand an existing vet practice.

Her grandmother said she talked repeatedly about never, ever, moving farther north because she hates winter...and ends up falling in love with a vet who will be living and working a stone's throw from South Dakota. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor?

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And finally, there was a former classmate of my oldest brother, Don, who was the essence of patience as his wife studied quilts and crochet and cookies. He asked my Mom if I was one of her grandsons.

That made me smile.

Off to the fair we go

I'm in Larned for a few days to visit Mom and the family farm and take in the Pawnee County 4-H Fair for the first time in several years.

We'll be giving out the first savings bonds in Dad's honor to winners in horse and swine projects, the fruits of money donated in Dad's memory after he died in 2006. It'll be bittersweet, to be sure...and I was tossing and turning last night wrestling with emotions that came to the surface as I reflected on what we would be doing at the fair.

Dad was a 4-H club and county leader for more than 30 years, so it was only natural that people would remember him by donating to the 4-H foundation. He nurtured generations of kids through the organization, which focused on developing leadership and civics skills in young people by offering a wide range of projects for them. Once focused almost exclusively on farming tasks, 4-H's project list reflects a much stronger urban flavor now.

In case you're wondering, the 4 Hs are 'head, heart, hands and health.' I can't remember the 4-H motto off the top of my head at the moment, but I'm sure it will come to me eventually.

The fair is held in a different part of town now; when I was growing up, it was held in and next to Moffett Stadium, not far from downtown or the municipal swimming pool. Moffett Stadium seemed to date back to the Depression, built as it was out of concrete, with wooden planks for much of its seating.

Now the fair is held at nice new facilities on the edge of town, just north of the armory. I'm not saying the change is bad --- but it sure is different. The old location reverberated with history: not just generations of young people striving for ribbons and trophies and the attention of their peers, but countless major events in Larned's past.

The new digs may well feel like that some day. But they don't yet.