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.