NC State Fair ends on high note

The annual North Carolina State Fair, which started Oct. 15, attracted many attendees to the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh. The event, featuring amusement park rides and fried Southern cuisine, ended Sunday night.
The annual North Carolina State Fair, which started Oct. 15, attracted many attendees to the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh. The event, featuring amusement park rides and fried Southern cuisine, ended Sunday night.

Toddlers in wagon-beds with powdered sugar on their lips, boyfriends with stuffed pink tigers won for their dates, snow cones, cotton candy, rubber-duck-yellow corn-on-the-cob, pig races, wallabies, machines zipping, rotating, lighting-up as riders shriek with terror and delight.

The place is so crowded that parents have to hoist their children on their shoulders so they can take it all in.

It is the scene at the annual North Carolina State Fair on its final night Sunday. More than 800,000 visitors attended the Raleigh fairgrounds during its 10-day run, starting Oct. 15.

At “Cowgirl Heaven,” a popular family attraction, six ponies, their bridles linked to steel poles, walked in circles with children on their backs. Sarah Barnes, a blond five-year-old with pink socks and a rainbow headband, waited her turn, her hand in her mother’s.

“She’s been here every year of her life, since she was in my tummy,” said Karen Stevens, Sarah’s mother. “She looks forward to it every year.”

Sarah, too shy to speak aloud, puts her head on her mother’s shoulder and whispers that she likes the ponies because they are cute, and she hopes to ride the brown and white one.

Nathan Hudson, 17, of Benson, and David Baum, 16, of Smittsville, make their way through the crowd brandishing inflatable swords. After earning a prize for guessing their own weight correctly, the boys chose the swords from a dazzling array of technicolor stuffed animals because they “looked cool,” Hudson said.

“We’ll probably beat each other with them at school tomorrow,” he added with a laugh.

Kids of all ages have their fun at the fair. Veteran rodeo clowns Logan Teachey and Rick Richardson—or “Me Too” and “Paka,” as they are known by the children—hawk hot dogs on the loudspeaker at Amran Shiners Restaurant.

Richardson said the fair never feels quite right when he is without his curly mop and oversized shoes. But his employer insisted that he work in his street clothes because it takes him an hour to undergo the transformation. So Paka will have to go by plain old Rick for now.

“Besides, I’m sure the FDA would say, ‘You can’t have them clowns back there in the kitchen,’” he reasoned.

Returning to work, he switched his microphone back on, and his voice echoed throughout the fairground.

“Here they come, step right up! Barbecued chicken. Fried fish, fried fish. $5, $5. Footlongs, footlongs!”

Further down the winding dirt path, four pigs prepared to race by circling their cramped pen and squeezing their snouts through the wiring to get a better view of the outside world. Their caretaker, Dennis Cook, watched on outside the trailer-turned-barn. Soon, Cook will have to send them to another farm to “finish them off,” he said.

“I have some animals that I retire—I keep them because they were my buddies,” he said. “But pigs grow too quick.”

When the trailers leave the lot and the North Carolina State Fair settles to dust, Cook will be on to another festival in another state.

Cook and his family work 50 fairs a year, starting in Florida in February and circling the country to finish in Alabama. He has lived this life for 27 years. But at 58, he is “just a baby,” he noted. He has years of bright lights, fried food and whirring rides ahead of him.

“I hope I go ’til I fall over, ’cause I love what I do,” he said. “I love my animals. And putting smiles on people’s faces—that’s a special thing.”

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