That was fast

All of sudden, we're not only into the first sports week of the season, we're through it and into the second. Hard to keep up. I won't attempt to explain how we figure what to cover, but we do try to spread coverage around, and it's more likely we'll be at home games than away games. We'll do our best to post results as we find them, but it's a hit and miss affair to try to get scores in a timely fashion.

This week's biggest game of the year is against N.Harrison here at home Friday. Should be a good one.

Outpouring of love

Sadly, this week, world-renowned glass artisan Bart Zimmerman drowned while trying to rescue two fisherman whose boat had capsized in the Ohio River. Bart and his brother had carried on the glass-making tradition of four generations in their glass factory in Corydon. Life in Corydon does not publish news, but when this tragic event occurred, we were working on a frivolous slideshow about the midway at the fair, and somehow it didn't seem appropriate to run a happy picture of people on an amusement ride. So we've taken a short timeout to honor Bart and express our condolences to his family.

On Thursday, a gathering and celebration of his life was held at his church, the First Capital Christian Church. At 1 pm, the announced beginning of the event, the parking lot was nearly full and hundreds of people had already gathered in the main room at the church, queuing up to express their sorrow or share fond memories of Bart. This went on for six hours until the celebration of life service at 7, where more than 700 gathered in his memory.

Truly an amazing outpouring of love.

The fair

In my more rebellious days (read youth), I got tired of taking the pictures the newspaper wanted me to take for them and decided to do something all on my own. So I took two weeks of vacation and photographed the 1972 Harrison County Fair, from setup to teardown. A lot of things haven't changed much. The midway, where you can still spend $10 to win a prize worth $.50, the food stands where you can get any sort of food that's not good for you, the 4-H kids, who bring in their livestock and sleep with them (actually, now they mostly sleep in tents nearby.) The entertainment is a bit different. Porter Wagoner and a then unknown girl singer named Dolly Parton were the big name attractions, but there was a daredevil car show and an animal show and, of course, harness races. The harness races are about all that remains from the entertainment back then, but they don't draw much of a crowd anymore. Amazingly, they still use the old barns on the south side of the track, barns that looked ancient in 1972. So now we have demolition derbys and tractor pulls instead of the Joey Chitwood Auto Show and a karaoke contest instead of Dolly Parton. But times change, and it doesn' seem to have hurt attendance. The place was packed Thursday night, 4800 people in attendance. That's a lot of funnel cakes consumed. Tonight's the wrapup, with the big tractor pull, big tough machines that don't appear to be all that friendly to the environment.

Next year is the 150th consecutive Harrison County Fair, and there are a lot of plans to make it special. We'll probably do some kind of display of my 1972 pictures among other things. An abbreviated slideshow of them is online at Life in Corydon.