Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. This is a blog that was supposed to occur about 4 weeks ago. It was to proclaim my recovery from attendance at the Indiana State Fair. It was to be a pull the pin on the grenade and let er rip kind of blog. I had outrage. I had indignation. I was aggrieved, exasperated and piqued. It was going to be a doozy. However, it was eclipsed by the astrophysical equivalent of shadow puppets.
So here I am a nearly a month after the fact, sitting down to write about the state fair and I must admit that I have lost some of my steam.
I had not attended the great Indiana State Fair in several years. During my formative, it had provided an annual milestone for the Sharritt's. No matter, how much work needed to be done on the farm, dad would load up the family and we would head for the fair. We were poor back then. So this would have been the budget for our day at the fair.
Car parking $5.00
Admission $5.00 “You kids will be okay in the trunk now shut up and stop kicking the lid.”
Tractor tram ride $$2.50: ride from the machinery field to the hog barn.
Lunch $10.00 Toasted cheese sandwich and shake.
Saltwater taffy $2.00.
Grand total $24.50; Leaving $0.50 in our entertainment budget for August and September.
Yes, the Indiana State Fair was a celebration of Hoosier Agriculture. We would roam the equipment field and the antique machinery field. We would watch the thresher machine demonstration with dad regaling us with stories of his time with a threshing crew. It was quick juxtaposition the year when we wandered from the threshing demonstration to a combine that had a cab large enough to hold the entire family. I do not know which company used the small house model for combine cabs, but it never caught on. The extraverted farmer niche just wasn’t big enough to sustain their model.
We would wonder over to the Bobcat booth where we would marvel at the 5 foot deep hole that they could dig in a couple of hours, and rue the moment when we realized that the door to the cow stall that had to be forked out by hand was too small to allow the passage of this wonderful piece of labor saving technology. Oh how we would dream about how fast the foot and a half of cow poop could be hauled if that door were six inches wider when cleaning those stalls every spring and fall. With each fork full of aromatic bedding, we would curse our ancestors for not being visionaries when building that cow stall and we would covet a Bobcat every summer at the fair.
Yes, we would marvel at the size of the world’s largest boar, but only after a mid afternoon lunch at the Dairy barn; toasted cheese and strawberry shake. There might be some sniggering between the cousins as we vainly tried to cover up our perceived inadequacies when in the presence of such an example of scrotal superiority as we left the swine barn. We would marvel at the Clydesdales and groan with boredom as we made our way through the dairy barn. After milking 65 cows twice a day for years, the dairy barn held no interest. We had literally seen it all when it came to dairy cows.
I know that you are thinking “Roger this is nostalgia not outrage.” You are correct. But if you are a long time reader of “You Said What, Roger?”, you would remember that I have had a hate hate relationship with 4-H, and Lord knows the State Fair is the Super Bowl of 4-H. However, I must admit that 4-H baggage isn’t what I wanted to rant about. I had an enjoyable time at the fair that afternoon and evening in early August.
It was a different experience for me. After years of boycotting the Indiana State Fair celebrating hot tubs and whirlpools we returned this year. Bev and I have once again listened to the call of the end of the driveway. Read my blog from September 12 of last year if you need some context. This kiddo who is living with us came ready made with 4 friends. They had never been to the fair. So we loaded into the car and went to the fair.
These are city kids. Their fair experience had to be much different than my old fair experience. In ten years of attending the fair, I never once made it to the midway. Remember the fair budget from above; not much wiggle room. Things are different now. We pay the 15 year old boys money for working in the garden and getting things ready for our son’s wedding earlier in the year. They hit the midway with the disposable income that only working teens living at home have. That money was not going to burn a hole in their pocket.
At this point, you might expect some ranting and raving. However, I quickly slipped into catatonia. As the lovely Miss Beverly pointed out, “we live such contemplative lives that all of this noise and blinking lights is just too much for us.” Too much it was. I quickly found a bench and sat down with Bev. We told the urchins that they had to check in with us every 15 minutes, and we just sat there slowly rocking back and forth hoping that it would all end soon. If I ever become a state legislator, I am going to force the following change on the Indiana State Fair. They have to have more benches to sit down on and so contemplative can wait while the end of the world approaches.
But I am not even going to rant about that. Although, I could rant a little bit about sitting 150 ft from a game when the operator needed a thesaurus. For two hours, we listened to her say “every winner gets their choice.” She never once wandered off script to “any prize you want”, or “take any prize” or “the choice is yours.” I don’t know what stopped her from saying “shoot me now, I can’t take it any more!”
I was okay with that. The kids had fun. It was a new experience for them. They showed the proper amount of awe for 15 year old boys while looking at the world’s largest boar. I only chortled a little when they said that they didn’t want to take their strawberry shake and toasted cheese sandwich with us while we walked through the dairy barn because “they didn’t like the smell.” I wish that I still had a picture of my father in poop stained t-shirts that weren’t completely covered by a full length rubber apron that we wore while milking cows. Oh well, I guess that it isn’t all bad that the youth of America don’t know how their food is produced.
SO ROGER WHAT WERE YOU GOING TO RANT ABOUT? Take it easy. I was going to rant about an Indianapolis Star article the following day by a Ruth Servens. She was doing an in depth analysis of State Fair Finances. She found that the State Fair doesn’t get as much money from mid-way rides as surrounding state fairs do. It appears that the fair board leaves $ on the table in order to receive a guaranteed income year after year. Bad for us when attendance is up 19% like this year but good for us when it is down 16% like last year. And in the middle of the article was this little gem about the $2.4 million annual subsidy the state fair receives annually; “at roughly $2.4 million a year, it's a tiny portion of Indiana's $31 billion two-year budget, but it's money that can't be spent on other underfunded services.”
Yeah, underfunded services like the $713,000,000 stadium for the colts to pay in, or the $44,000,000 that the pacers have received over the past 4 years. Give me a break.
Indiana Agriculture generates $44 billion in revenue in direct agricultural sales and ancillary economic activity a year. $2.5 million is too much to spend in celebrating that. The agricultural impact to local services if felt even greater in Indiana. As property taxpayers, I know that my farm pay 10 times more in taxes than my neighbor does. Yet, both households only put one family through the local schools. We both go to the same library and fund one municipal pool. We both help pay for one county court. Yes, farmers are getting too much of a good thing.
You and Ms. Servens may believe that the state taxpayer has no business celebrating the accomplishments of a free market enterprise. She may be correct and if she is then let the colts build their own underfunded barn to pay in. Or let the pacers find someplace else to make up for their $4 million annual short fall.
But I bet that Ms. Servens employer disagrees with that plan. The howl that would go up from the pages of the Star would drown out that carnival barker if a legislator had the temerity to suggest that the colts and pacers pay their own way. There would be 25 references to “Naptown” in describing the downtown environment if those two teams went away. Plus, and correct me if I am wrong but the state has roughly half a billion in its rainy day fund and last year ran about a $50 million surplus. So by definition in a representative democracy, nothing was underfunded.
It just gripes me to no end when uninformed people go about casting stones insisting that world line up the way that they believe it should. It especially galls me when they blithely try to determine whose ox should be gored and whose should be spared.
Take care.
Roger
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