43
Fair memories in the making
By Elise Franco
Canfield
“Making Memories,” the theme of the 164th Canfield Fair, embodies just what the fair means to so many people.
The fast-approaching event, which kicks off Wednesday, has members of the Canfield Fair Board reminiscing about years past.
Andy Frost Jr., Austintown fire chief and fair board member, said it was in the late 1950s that the Canfield Fair took on an importance for him that he’ll always cherish.
Frost said he and his late wife, Nancy, attended the fair together each year since they were 17. He said they set up a photo button booth on the grounds, which ran for 25 years — until she died in 2002.
“We’d get there at 7 a.m., and go home at 1 a.m. every day,” he said. “It had so many good memories. It was just like a big family thing, and a lot of good family memories came from that.”
Frost isn’t the only board member with fond fair memories.
Kathy Bennett, who has been on the board since 1992, said when she was a teenager, friends and family drove their farm equipment and led livestock in a parade around the grandstand.
“I had friends ... all professing a great love for my father’s Jersey herd,” she said.
Bennett recalls a joke some family members played on a grandstand security guard.
“On the far side of the track, a big uniformed security man was on duty,” she said.
“We learned he was afraid of cows, so we led our cows as near as we could.
“[This caused] the officer to climb over the fence, and we never saw him again.”
Frost said he’s been attending the fair since he was a child.
“When I went out there as a kid, for as long as I can remember, we used to go back to the car and sit behind the car and have lemonade and lunch,” he said. “I remember doing that with my kids, too.”
Howard Moff, board member, remembers doing the same.
Moff said among his best childhood fair memories are “picnic lunches out of the trunk of the car and staying overnight in the barn loft where the dairy animals were housed.”
He said he also used to schedule his leave from the military around fair time.
Frost said though the fair has grown over the past 50 or 60 years, for him it’s stayed very much the same.
“It’s been so much a part of my life,” he said. “If people come through those gates they’ll see the same things I saw in the ’50s.”
Frost said he thinks it’s the fair’s continuity that makes it so long-lasting and important to the Mahoning Valley.
“The faces may change, and the rides change, but there’s still the hot sausage sandwiches and the animals and the shows,” he said. “It’s good, wholesome fun, and I think people still want that.”