By Ben Godina
Temporary Secretary
I spent several hours last week covering the Reno County Fair. Walking between the few buildings the 4-H kids used got me in a certain disgustingly-unhealthy-food-and-way-too-many-people mood.
As a kid growing up in Hutch, I always made my family walk the seven blocks from where we live to the nearest fair entrance multiple times during those magical and miserable two weeks in September. To me, it was the only interesting and stimulating thing Hutchinson ever had going on. Since then, I’ve learned there is much more fun to be had in Hutch, but that feeling the state fair gave still hasn’t shaken off.
As a freshman at Wichita State, meeting people who had never been was awesome, because I got to force them into my dearly departed Jeep Liberty and take them to my hometown and show them what we were most well known for.
My best friend, Kyle Hartman, is from Lakin, Kansas, and my girlfriend, Ashlyn Zimmerman, is from Sedan, Kansas, so neither of them had ever made the two or three and a half hour drive up to Hutch for the fair. Getting to take them to all the classic food spots, dip sampling stations and freebie booths reminded me of my family doing the same for me growing up. And now they continue to want to return every year to see what the butter sculpture will be this time or have some amazingly detrimental food. Ashlyn still talks about the street corn year round.
The fair has also become more enjoyable when living in Wichita. Not having to deal with the constant traffic and mixture of smells of farm animals and fried food has tricked my brain into forgetting the annoyance the estimated 300,000 new people bring in every year. But nonetheless, the fair was always a time of excitement and one of the only times my friends and I were set loose to do whatever we wanted. I have many fond memories of wasting money on games or rides or meandering around the same buildings year after year with many different friends.
I even saw my first concert ever at the fair. I believe the tickets were a Christmas present from my parents and entitled me and my brother to see the flash-in-a-pan, one-hit-wonder band Hot Chelle Rae and the Nickelodeon boy band Big Time Rush. As a kid, I thought it was so cool that what I perceived as these big-time celebrities who had their own TV show were interested in our town and our fair. Ashlyn and I play a game where, whenever a song we’ve heard performed at a concert is played, we turn to one another and say “I’ve heard this song live,” and I will always be satisfied that I have the bragging rights to every Big Time Rush song. I even carry a sticker around on one of my Magic: the Gathering boxes that says “Once a Rusher, always a Rusher.”
So dang, it as much as I don’t want to be, I’m still excited for the state fair. I can’t wait to eat Knights of Columbus pizza, get free dip mix samples from the Meadowlark building, ogle at the massively oversized pumpkins and meet the newly born babies in the birthing center.