There won’t be a State Fair in Shreveport this year. Coronavirus has delayed it until next spring. The event started 114 years ago and was called off just once before.
That was in 1918 when the Spanish flu killed 50 million people. So it takes a pandemic to shut down the fair.
Kids these days with all those television channels, video games and other entertainment might not miss the State Fair, but it was a big deal when we were growing up.
For those few days at the fairgrounds every October, there were more thrills and dazzling sights and sounds than we experienced in our little hometown all year.
We piled into yellow buses for annual trips to the fair with school groups. My family and I would always spend another day there, arriving before it opened and staying until it closed.
School friends entered sheep, goats and such in the livestock competition, and we stopped by those shows to support them. We didn’t raise anything but chickens at our house, and I never saw one that was pretty enough to enter in a contest.
We spent most of our time riding the Ferris wheel and Tilt-a-whirl and at food booths where we were lured by the scent of corn dogs and cotton candy that floated across the fairgrounds.
There were sideshow tents where barkers with tattoos tried to coax us inside to see such sights as fire eaters, sword swallowers, the world’s tallest man and Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled Ford.
But we had saved up our money all year for the fair and didn’t have much allocated for sideshow attractions. We preferred to spend it on rides that never lasted long enough, funnel cakes and games of chance at the midway booths.
Even as we soaked up the glitter and glamour of the fair, we were well aware of all the grifters and flimflammers that offered shoddy prizes for winning carnival games.
We tossed dull darts at balloons, shot oversized basketballs at undersized rims and threw softballs trying to knock down lead milk bottles that tanks couldn’t budge. We won when they let us and showed off our prizes.
But it was a day alone with my dad at the State Fair that left a lasting soft spot in my heart for the event.
I had barely reached my teenage years, and he told me one night that just the two of us were going to the fair the next day. It surprised me since we had already been that year and never went without my mother and brother.
After some rides and corndogs, my dad guided me to a dusty tent on the midway. It had paintings of shapely ladies in tiny swimsuits and big lettering about sex and the mysteries of life. I had noticed it several times.
The barker out front said I had to be 16 to get in. My dad slipped him a few dollars, and I became old enough to enter.
Inside the tent were folding tables that held rows of jars. The contents were unidentifiable to me. There were index cards by each jar with typewritten wording. I was so busy looking for ladies in swimsuits that I didn’t pay much attention to the jars and cards.
I had overheard my mother a couple of times telling my dad that he needed to talk to me about the facts of life. He had broached the subject when we were fishing or frog hunting but never got around to providing any information.
My dad’s great sense of satisfaction as we left the fair made me realize that this had been my official introduction to the facts of life. I smiled as we rode home that night and finally laughed out loud.
Dad asked what was funny, and I told him he had just done the worst job of any parent in history of teaching a kid the facts of life. He seemed taken aback at first but soon broke into laughter.
All the way home, one of us would start laughing, and the other joined in. We shared that private joke for the rest of his life.
It’s sad that there will be no State Fair in 2020. Some young boy might never get to know the facts of life.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES