For Most Of Us, The Simple Pleasures Of A Day At The Fair Come Once Each October. For Some of Our Neighbors, The Fair Stays Alive All Year-Round.
The State Fair of Texas is an old-fashioned event that returns our attention to simpler pleasures. Each October, we learn again that a day riding the roller coaster, examining prize-winning chickens and eating sausage-on-a-stick rivals any big-city entertainment.
East Dallas and Lakewood are not only home for thousands of State Fair devotees, but out neighborhoods also are home to many of the personalities who raise the live-stock, operate the rides and concession stands, and make the Fair come alive.
During the rest of the year, these people may seem a bit eccentric. But at Fair time, they’re stars.
Here are a few of their stories.
Remember the ‘Comet’? How About The Snow Cone Machine? This Family Takes Credit For Both.
The State Fair of Texas remains an event suspended in time. Amidst the elegantly declining Centennial buildings, the Midway attractions, the Belgian waffle stands and the assorted carnival acts at Fair Park, the fair provides entertainment that is at once tasteless, archaic, thrilling and satisfying.
But many of the landmarks are gone, and the sideshow men are growing old and inconsequential. What will replace them?
The Comet, once the largest wooden roller coaster in Texas, had sat idle for three years when the State Fair tore it down in 1989. Although officials had negotiated with European designers to build a modern, triple-loop, steel roller coaster, they haven’t replaced the Comet.
Sam Bert built his roller coaster in 1947 out of salvaged wood, still in short supply at the time because of wartime rationing.
The coaster, designed by Charles Paige of Cincinnati, was 59 feet high, 2,610 feet long and carried 106 people an hour. The Comet was a popular attraction and later, a Fair Park icon. Bert sold it to the fair in 1976.
Changing times, more than age, shut the coaster down; Bert’s sons say during any five-year period, he replaced every piece through routine maintenance. Fair officials cited prohibitive insurance costs when they closed it for good in 1986.
“It was sad,” says Mary Bert, Sam’s widow, of the Comet’s end. “It was just like losing a member of your family.”
Bert died at age 88 in 1984. His sons Sam Jr., 56, and Nick, 55, carry on the family’s concession supply business on Exposition Street, about two blocks away from Fair Park. During the fair, they operate Bert’s Burgers and Fries across from the Cotton Bowl.
Mary, who lives in the White Rock area, once managed the Fair’s Cotton Bowl Cafeteria. Her nine grandchildren help run the family’s food stands.
Even though the Comet is gone, Sam Bert’s other great contribution to the State Fair lives on. After moving to Texas from Illinois in 1919 and finding work as a vendor at area fairs, Bert invented the automatic snow cone machine.
“He started out making nickel snow cones with a little hand shaver,” Mary says.
Bert, an Italian immigrant, patterned his hand-shaved cones after the flavored ices sold in his native country.
“That hand shaver wouldn’t cut the mustard,” Sam Jr. says, “so he started trying to think of something faster. And that’s when he started on the invention.”
A whirling blade in Bert’s machine shaved the ice for him and mad Bert’s Snow Magic cones the hit of the State Fair. The Berts still sell snow cones, although they don’t build the machines anymore. Nick says block ice, which made smoother snow cones than ice cubes, is no longer available. But that’s progress.
When Sam Bert came back from France after World War I, the town of Dime, Ill., didn’t seem like home anymore.
“His dad was a coal miner, and he went in the coal mines one day and said it was not for him,” Mary says. “He ventured out to Texas, I don’t know how, and he started making fairs.”
By the time Mary married Sam in 1931, he was established at the Fair. Bert ran a popular roller rink and built his snow cone machines in a shop over the cafeteria.
“He was always thinking of something to make money. Thinking, thinking, thinking,” Mary says.
Finally, Bert bought the Fair’s antiquated roller coaster and tore it down, intending to build his own.
But wood was in short supply.
“You could not buy lumber,” Mary says. “Then Same heard about some old Army barracks in Gainesville, Texas. He sent a lawyer to Washington to get a permit, and he bought that lumber and hauled it to Dallas to build the roller coaster.”
Paul Grissom took care of the Comet for years, living with his wife in a house beneath the roller coaster. He set five sheep loose to keep the grass mowed.
Grissom, whom Nick says was the best roller coaster man alive, died in 1975. Sam sold the Comet a year later. His other rides, the Flash, the Wild Mouse, and a “baby” roller coaster, are all gone, too.
“When the Fair bought the Comet, they got rid of all the sheep,” Nick says. “They soon learned they couldn’t keep it up so they bought more sheep.”
But the wooden roller coaster seemed like an antique compared to the fast, new steel models, and Fair officials eventually decided the Comet had to go.
Now, designers are returning to wood roller coasters.
“Wooden roller coasters were better than steel,” Sam says. “They were braced from the inside and they had more give.”
“Steel was a very hard ride,” Mary says.
But while the thrill of invention may be past for the Bert Family, the Fair itself is always an event.
“Some people go to ride the rides and play the games,” Nick says. “We like to watch the people. It’s the people who make the Fair.”
This Family Sticks to Business With Their Sausage Concession.
Carolyn Newport reaches though the locked gate outside the Midway at Fair Park and tosses a handful of over sized dog biscuits onto the concrete. They fall just beneath the huge Ferris wheel known as the Texas Star.
A few moments later, a pair of dogs creep out from under the platform beneath the Ferris wheel. The female is a German Shepherd and the male some undefinable breed, black and white with pointy ears.
The dogs collect the biscuits and return to the safe place where they have lived and raised their puppies for the last three years.
Newport intends to sneak in later to get the puppies, which she’ll place in happy, human homes. She acquired one of her own dogs from a transient fair worker and picked up another near the railroad tracks. She is known in her neighborhood as the clearinghouse for stray animals.
But like Newport’s sausage-on-a-stick business, the dogs under the Texas Star are part of the State Fair family. Newport’s business has been a Fair institution since her mother founded Newport Concessions in 1950.
During the Fair, Newport likes to arrive early in the morning, while the fairgrounds are quiet, and prepare for her favorite time of the year.
“Even though I’m 56 years old, the day the Fair starts I feel 16 again,” she says.
That’s when she and husband Bill begin selling sausage-on-a-stick and nut bars – ice cream dipped in peanuts – 18 hours a day.
Their 100 employees are “people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from all the way to an airline pilot who wants to buy a set of Ping golf clubs.
“I worked for an insurance company for 27 years, and one year my boss ran a concession stand with his kids, as a family activity,” she says.
The State Fair has been a big part of Newport’s life since her high-school years, when her mother moved the family into a house on Pennsylvania Avenue, right across from the Bert family’s old, wooden Comet roller coaster.
“During the Fair, I didn’t want to go to school. We would sit on the front porch and watch the yellow school buses pull up to the fairgrounds with hundreds of kids from all over Texas.”
Now, the Newports run a pawn shop and and engraving shop in Cedar Hill, Texas, and spend about seven months a year working on their State Fair concession.
But Newport also makes time for the State Fair community. She serves as vice chair of the 63-member Food Concessionaires group that each year since 1982 has purchased the Reserve Grand Champion Steer at the Youth Livestock Auction, held the first week of the Fair.
The money benefits the Livestock Scholarship Fund, which contributes to the education of some of the 900 boys and girls who annually show animals at the State Fair.
Last year, the concessionaires paid $10,000 for the runner-up steer and donated the beef to the Edna Gladney Home for unwed mothers. Overall, the auction raises $100,000 annually.
“My husband and I firmly believe that whatever you take from, you also put back. It’s like seeds growing,” Newport says.
“We’re saying ‘thank you’ to the community.”
As an animal lover, Newport must reconcile dispatching a prize-winning steer to a sudden end before a final appearance in the dining room at a home for unwed mothers.
She points to a photo of one recent Reserve Grand Champion, posing with the kids who raised it and various State Fair officials.
“This morning we have that photo taken, we know the steer is going to be made into hamburger and steak the next week.
“That’s really tough. In the years we’ve been buying the animals, only one kid has cried. But when that kid cried a couple of years ago, I just couldn’t take it.
“If I started raising an animal, after I got to know it, there’s no way,” she says. “But the kids are very professional. Most don’t cry.
“They’re really proud because they spend a lot of money and time to raise the animals.”
Calling Him The ‘Chicken Man’ Seems Simplistic. But It’s The Truth.
“I’ve like chickens ever since I can remember,” neighborhood resident Lonnie McAfee says. “When I was a boy and we would go to visit my grandmother, everybody else would be out riding the horses, except me. I’d be with the chickens.
“Chickens are just like people. Every one of them is different. Some are extra gentle, some want to meet the judge at the door and start fighting. Those chickens, with its velvety, greenish-black feathers, bright, red comb and earlobes like white mints, “it was love at first sight. I knew I had to have some,” he says.
McAfee has achieved great things in the world of show chickens. He is president of the Black Rosecomb Bantam Federation and winner of the American Poultry Association Master Exhibitor Award and the Bantam Association’s Master Breeder Award.
He is also superintendent of the poultry show, held during the second week of the State Fair.
The poultry show, which added bantam ducks to the standard and bantam chicken categories this year, is making a comeback after losing many of its exhibitors to regional shows.
McAfee, who works as a machinist, expects about 40 exhibitors to show 350 birds this year. That’s just a third of the 1,000 birds that McAfee found when he began showing his birds at the fair in 1977.
“The number is not as high as it once was, but from a Texan’s standpoint, this is the ultimate of state fairs,” McAfee says.
His backyard is stacked with chicken coops, each holding one or more Black Rosecombs. McAfee reaches in here and there to pull out chickens in order to display their finer points. The Rosecombs are smaller and seem far more docile than the foul-tempered hens found in many barnyards.
Show chickens must impress judges with their appearance and spirit. Judges award 28 points alone on a Black Rosecomb’s head. To prepare a chicken for competition, McAfee washes its feet and head with a toothbrush and swabs Vitalis on the gristly, red comb.
During the State Fair, he will show birds hatched in February. For a female, show time is “just when she lays that first egg, about six months. After awhile, egg-laying takes the color out of the face,” McAfee says.
His most important task is to preserve the genes of the best birds. Thus, even in the Bible Belt, it’s considered good form to mate parents with their offspring.
“When you get a real good chicken, you want all his good genes. Mate the female back to her son, and you’ve got good genes both ways,” McAfee says.
“With two unrelated birds, it might take four to five years to get good show birds.”
At birth, he tags the chicks with colored pieces of Mrs. Baird’s bread wrappers and places them in incubators. At two weeks, he wraps numbered tags around the birds’ feet and begins to look for winning qualities.
McAfee sells birds that don’t make the grade at the First Monday sale in Canton, Texas. Older birds and other, promising chickens that spoil their looks in barnyard squabbles still may be useful as breeders.
He separates the better birds as soon as he can minimize casualties, but sometimes he’s too late. Holding a young male, McAfee says: “I’m not gonna send him to Canton just because he’s got a nick in his feathers.
“It’s hard to get everything all in one chicken.”
But that’s part of the fun, McAfee says.
“Competition adds to it, to try to raise a better chicken than the next man,” he says. “Of course, the rule book (called the Book of Standards) is open to interpretation like the Bible, but the judges can usually pick out the best bird.
“The most-asked question at the chicken show is: “What’s a pullet?” McAfee says without prompting. The answer: A pullet is a female less than a year old. A male less than one year old is called a cockerel.
Chicken showing is a long tradition at state fairs. The American Poultry Association, founded in 1873, is the oldest livestock organization in the U.S. McAfee keeps up with his hobby by reading the Poultry Press, a tabloid with a circulation of 10,000.
State Fair visitors will see many colorful breeds of well-groomed chickens. Buff Cochins resemble powder puffs. The Polish breed appear to be wearing Superfly wigs. The fuzzy Silkies actually resemble rabbits.
One Black Rosecomb looks like another to the untrained eye. McAfee views his chickens a little differently.
“Some stand out like star football players. You don’t have to ask anybody who Roger Staubach was. He wore Number 12.
“Watching them hatch, seeing them come to life and raising them all the way up to show time lets you see nature at work,” McAfee says.
“It’s part of the beauty of raising chickens.”
