A Fair to Remember

Parade on Main St Halfway, OR - 2011

Baker County Fair in Halfway, Oregon - 2011

Queen and Princess - 2011

Back to the 50s

Halfway didn’t have a lot of town celebrations, but the Baker County Fair and Rodeo was the biggest event of the year and the whole Valley, outside towns around and Baker County participated in this festivity.  This always happened on Labor Day weekend when Monday was a holiday.  It was the end of the summer, the harvesting was done, the canning completed, jams and fruits were preserved, the apples were picked and the gladiolas and zinnias were in bloom.  Flags were hung along the main street of town and store windows were scrubbed with a new display placed behind the panes.  4-H club members were diligently training their animals to show at the fair and getting other entries ready for the big exhibit.  We all tried to take something to enter at the fair in hopes of winning a ribbon and a few dollars.  I remember winning a ribbon for my chocolate ice box cookies and Bonnie won for an apron she had made.

 

The rodeo at the fairgrounds was the top entertainment, it was on for three days and everyone attended from the surrounding area.  It was a good rodeo and cowboys from Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Canada came to ride a bucking bronco or rope a steer or ride a mad raging bull.  The purse (the prize money for each event) wasn’t shabby so many young cowboys came to try their luck on winning the big cash prizes.  Riding bucking broncos and mad bulls is a young man’s sport, it’s dangerous and there are a lot of mishaps.  Older cowboys do the roping and herding and easier maneuvers on a horse.

There was a parade on Saturday down the main street of town.  When I was 5 my mother and grandmother made an old 

Judy age 5

fashioned dress and hat for me and I walked in the parade.  After the parade the town gathered for the much anticipated beef barbecue where the beef was buried underground with embers for hours and then dug up and unwrapped and served with roasted potatoes and corn on the cob and all of the trimmings.  It was a feast.  We didn’t have the kind of backyard barbecues one has today, this was a pioneer type barbecue where the men dug a pit for the beef to lay on hot coals and slowly roast.  There was no dirt on the meat, it was wrapped very carefully. 

Our town had a dance hall, it seems strange now to think that a small western town would have a building for dances (I think it was called the Fair Hall) but it did. The rodeo dances, with a live western band, were the main focus for most teenage girls who hoped to meet a cute cowboy.  The dances were on Saturday and Sunday nights.  Some girls dressed western with boots, jeans and hats but others wore summer sundresses with spaghetti straps. 

 

Mama sewed Bonnie and I cotton sundresses that we thought were the latest fashion.  It was thrilling to know that so many new people were in town, young cowboys from other towns and states, it was an exciting time and I longed for a cowboy to ask me to dance.

 I hoped I wouldn’t have to stand along the wall with the old town ladies who planted themselves in chairs to watch the night’s merriment.  This was a time when girls waited to be invited; it would have been way too forward to ask a guy to dance.  

Some girls danced with each other, it was totally acceptable.

The Stringbusters from Boise, Idaho was the western dance band; there were posters tacked up around town.  Actually, they were listed as The Stringbusters and Dolores.  They had been on TV and were on the Country Western Billboard charts so to us they were famous.  The main singer was Dolores, (the only woman in the band) she had a great voice and I loved her renditions of the popular country western songs. This was the era when Willie Nelson was a young song writer, Hank Williams was topping the charts with, “Your Cheatin Heart” and Colonel Tom Parker began managing Elvis.  Johnny Cash was singing “I Walk the Line” and Chuck Berry was hailing rock n roll with “Maybellene.”

Gwen Verdon

One year it was advertised ahead that a real Hollywood movie star was going to attend the fair and there was a lot of chatter in town about this.  She would be introduced at the dance.  I was hoping it would be Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe or maybe Sandra Dee, but it turned out to be a movie star that I hadn’t even heard of.  She was introduced at the dance and she had red hair and looked very pretty and very slim.  I think she was Gwen Verdon but at the time I didn’t know anything about her.  

 

The Indians (Native Americans) from surrounding reservations would bring their horses to the rodeo for the horse races.  The horse races were gripping, loud, fast and dangerous; one of the most thrilling events of the fair.  The prize money was good and the Indians intended on taking it all home and they usually did.  They put small Indian boys on their horses and they rode bareback (meaning no saddle) with no helmet, the horses were fast and the boys were light weight and they didn’t fall off.

Looking back now, I realize how very dangerous it was for those children.  I’m sure it would be against the law today.  I was captivated by the young Indian boys who rode like lightning with their shiny black hair flying in the wind and their faces down near the neck of their horse; their lips whispering into laid back ears a lingo only they and their steed understood.    

Mama was a winner

Mama winning clothes dryer c 1955

My mother was a person who was always hopeful, whether we were hunting for mushrooms, trying a new recipe or browsing at a garage sale, she always thought something good was just around the corner.  She was fun and funny with a charming laugh and a great sense of humor.  Always loving and somewhat religious, she was raised going to a fundamentalist church, and she tried to follow those convictions.   

She read novels, I remember her telling me that when “Gone With the Wind” was first published, she loved that book so much that she stayed up reading it all night long to finish it.  In the 1940s and 50s I remember her in the kitchen with her radio on while doing dishes and preparing the next meal, listening to Helen Trent, a soap opera back in radio days.  Soap operas were named that because they were ongoing episodic stories that were sponsored by large soap manufacturers; I suppose opera referred to the drama of it all.

Mama always longed to be a writer.  She worked on stories and sent them off to various publications.  She loved to enter contests and write jingles and little “25 words or less” phrases about products and she would send them off with big hopes that she might win the grand prize.  Most of the time mama received a ‘thank you for entering’ letter in the mail and maybe a coupon for soap or some product.  Sometimes she would win a minor prize that we couldn’t wait to open and look at but it was always small and kind of cheap and not anything we would really use but this didn’t halt mama’s enthusiasm for writing.  She would send recipe entries to The Pillsbury Bake Off contest when the winning recipes were still all made from scratch and it wasn’t required to use the Pillsbury mixes or store bought pie dough or Jiff peanut butter in your entry.  Mama collected the Pillsbury books of the prize winning recipes each year and would try out some of the winning entries on us.

One year mama entered a contest that the grand prize was an electric clothes dryer.  We always hung our wet clothes out on a clothesline or by the stove in the winter.  Mama WON that contest for the dryer.  Our family was so happy and excited.  She had to go to Boise, Idaho to pick up the prize.  We were all very proud of mama.  Daddy and mama drove the pickup to Boise to get the dryer and stayed overnight with my great uncle Lynn Rumley and his family.  

Daddy and mama came back with stories of their trip.  Mama told about a place they went to eat where the food (each individual serving) was behind little glass doors.  She described how there was everything you could think of to eat and you could open the

little doors and take out whatever you wanted and put on your tray.  There were sandwiches and roast beef entrés and salads and mashed potatoes and fruit cups and soups.  Once you had all of the servings that you wanted to eat on your tray, you paid a cashier.  It sounded like a marvel of an invention to me, it was called an Automat.    Bonnie and I begged to hear that story over and over and asked questions about the food she saw behind the glass.  Was there pie and cake?  Were things warm or cold?  We wondered about the empty places once people had taken food out and mama said there were cooks in the back making the food and putting the next serving in the little space so it never appeared empty behind the little doors.  Bonnie and I wondered if we would ever get to eat at a place so grand.  Of course the best story of all was mama winning the dryer and seeing it brand new in the pickup when they came home.