“It takes a lot of people to make it all come together,” Porter County Fair Director Dave Bagnall said while driving a golf cart around the fairgrounds Tuesday, greeting some of the people setting up equipment for Thursday’s opening day.
The fair has well over 100 volunteers to make it all happen.
Bagnall arranges the entertainment for the fair as well as overseeing everything. That can get tricky.
Thursday night’s grandstand entertainment is Sawyer Brown, offering the first of five concerts. Fireworks follow the concert.
Other fair concerts include country staple Old Dominion on Sunday and rap artist Nelly on Monday. For more information on grandstand entertainment, go to www.portercountyfair.com/grandstand.
Subsequent grandstand shows include a rodeo, truck, and tractor pull, demolition derby, and school bus derby.
New this year is a porta-potty race included as part of the rodeo. “I haven’t seen it around here,” Bagnall said.
The Porta Potty has a rider sitting, well, you know where inside. Don’t worry; the Porta Potty is like new. A cowboy lassos the portable toilet and drags it down the track, with the rider getting out and touching the fence to determine who wins.
“We always are trying to improve things and make them better and not make them the same old, same old,” Bagnall said.
The grandstand offers 9,858 seats, including the pit area, he said. “We had every single one of those sold with Jelly Roll” last year, Bagnall said. The Miranda Lambert concert, among others, sold out as well.
Fairgoers who want to see the grandstand shows have to walk the length of the fairground to get to the grandstand, taking them past the 4-H exhibits offered by around 1,000 young people. “That’s why we do it. That’s why we have the concerts,” he said.
“With the concerts, you get 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 people coming, and they all have to walk by the barns to get to that concert, by design.”
This year’s fair queen, Gwen Weaver, of Hebron, is one of those 4-H’ers. She was crowned on Saturday.
“As a child, I grew up in the fair, in 4-H, and I want to be an ambassador for the community and the acts of service that the fair represents,” she said.
Weaver, who has a chance to compete in the Indiana State Fair queen contest, will be busy with her court attending fair events.
“Honestly, our biggest job is to create a warm welcome for the fairgoers,” Weaver said. “We get to really promote the different aspects of the fair, the rides, the food – of course, I’m excited to promote that.”
Her favorite fair food is candy apples. She’ll participate in a candy apple eating contest. Her secret? “You kind of have to bang it on the ground, crack it, and then you eat it.”
Other winners include Miss Photogenic, Jillian Young; Miss Congeniality, Brooke Trinidad; 2nd Runner-Up, Tya Combs; 1st Runner-Up: Evyenia Butterfield.
Last year was the first successful year of electronic gate admission. “Everybody that comes in gets an electronic admission,” Bagnall said.
That helps the fair better track the number of visitors – 130,000 to 150,000 over the 10 days of the fair – and where they’re coming from, down to the ZIP code. About 85% of concert attendees are from Northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.
Carnival workers were busy Tuesday setting up rides, ticket booths and games. Rick Wyatt, general manager for North American Midway Entertainment, has been doing this for 54 years.
“Yesterday was tough. We had six inches of rain,” Wyatt said. Everything had to be rinsed off and cleaned.
The carnival’s previous stop was in Glendale Heights. Wyatt said he hadn’t slept in 40 hours.
Bagnall praised the carnival workers. “They’re all amazing. They work hard,” he said.”
The fairgrounds have seen recent improvements, including a new black vinyl fence, replacing the chain link fence erected 39 years ago, and a new electrical grid.
The campground now has 750 tons of crushed concrete to handle muddy conditions.
“We spent about $1 million in the last two years doing upgrades,” Bagnall said. Money from the American Rescue Plan Act helped pay for that work.
Other than the Expo Center and Expo East, the buildings and grounds are maintained by the Porter County Agricultural Society, which operates the fair. The ag society gets its primary revenue from ticket sales.
“When you come to the fair, you want the experience to be as pleasurable as possible,” Bagnall said. “We like to be clean, safe, and well presented at the Porter County Fair.”
For more on the fair, go to www.portercountyfair.com/.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
