Well-removed from Big Tex and the Midway, past the Cotton Bowl, sits the Creative Arts Building at Fair Park. While it’s not the State Fair of Texas’ sexiest attraction, the sweeping structure is a hub for a relatively unknown subculture: the competitors.
Competitions at the State Fair are aplenty. Among the arts and crafts contests: painting, sketching, needlepoint and Lego architecture. Food-contest categories feature baking with KARO syrup, chili, chocolate, relish, jam, SPAM creations, bread baking and cooking with cheese, to name a few. Collections contest categories run the gamut from apothecary items and thimbles to sports memorabilia and pipes. There are fashion-design contests and diorama competitions. The list goes on and on. We tracked down several neighborhood residents who, through experience, understand the spirit of State Fair rivalry.
Photos by Danny Fulgnecio and Can Türkyilmaz.
Bob Reagan
Bob Reagan’s New Year’s Day tradition with wife, Martha, is to watch the sun rise near the Spillway at White Rock Lake. They’ve been doing it for about 15 years, and afterward they have breakfast at John’s Café.
That serene New Year’s sunrise over White Rock is depicted in Reagan’s photo contest entry at the fair this year. Last year, he “won” a green participation ribbon for his photo of the February 2011 ice storm, and he hopes to score a more exclusive color this year.
“I saved my pennies to buy a Leet reflex camera, single lens,” while still in college, he says. “And it’s always been a hobby.”
While walking the Creative Arts Building a few years ago, he says, he realized that his pictures were good enough to compete.
So he entered the following year.
Nineteen-fifty-two, the year Big Tex debuted, was the first year Reagan attended the fair, or so his mother tells him. He grew up in the Love Field neighborhood known as Love Dale Addition and attended Jesuit High School. He was a Dallas police officer in the 1970s and went through the police academy at Fair Park, when it was there. He remembers riding the monorail and the old Swiss Sky Ride at the state fair.
He missed a few years of the fair while in law school in Houston, but that’s where he met his wife. They went together when they were dating.
“She can’t wait to go to the fair every year,” he says.
Photos by Danny Fulgnecio and Can Türkyilmaz.
Jeff Mason
Jeff Mason enters picante sauce and barbecue sauce in the fair’s creative arts competition every year.
But that’s no way to win a ribbon.
No. The easier path is to find a niche. Banana butter turned out to be that niche for Mason. And he is the reigning blue-ribbon holder, two years in a row.
But Mason, who is also a “real-beard Santa,” is not impressed. Even though he strategizes, identifying which categories garner the fewest entries and then enters those categories, he really wants a big one.
“I make about 40 quarts of salsa every year,” he says.
Friends request it for birthdays and Christmas. He says his nephews went ape over the stuff one Christmas, which gave him the boost to enter the fair for the first time.
“This year, I did a smoked version of the salsa,” he says. “It’s a two-day adventure when I’m making salsa.”
He also cans whole squash, okra, whole yellow tomatoes and pineapple. All of those are judged solely on appearance. The judges never taste them.
Mason won five blue ribbons last year.
Photos by Danny Fulgnecio and Can Türkyilmaz.
Phyllis Rodriguez
Phyllis Rodriguez’s daughter pushed her to make her famous strawberry jam while she was recovering from an illness about eight years ago.
The batch tasted so good that she decided to enter it at the fair, and Rodriguez won a first place blue ribbon.
That was Rodriguez’s first entry into the fair.
“All it takes is one ribbon, and it hooks you,” she says.
Now she enters cookbooks and salt-and-pepper shakers in the collections competition. A blender cookbook from 1932 is among this year’s entries. Her cookbooks usually win ribbons.
She also entered salt and pepper shakers in the likeness of babies in diapers.
“My son had a baby this summer, and my daughter had a baby last year,” she says.
Photos by Danny Fulgnecio and Can Türkyilmaz.
Kathy Rohrer
Kathy Rohrer thinks about the fair all year. Once it’s over, she’s planning for next year. She practices her recipes and tries things out on her friends.
She has entered jams, jellies and canned vegetables in the creative arts contest every year for the past 15 years.
Every year, that is, except this one.
Rohrer visited a friend in Seattle the week before the deadline to submit fair entries. On the Saturday she was to fly back to Dallas, an August thunderstorm here caused her flight to be canceled.
“No flights were available on Sunday because everybody goes home on Sunday, and that was the final day to bring things in,” Rohrer says. “I had it all ready, and when I called them, they had closed the books.”
So her fruit cocktail, cucumber relish and peach barbecue sauce will go unjudged this year.
The Hutchinson, Kansas, native grew up going to the Kansas State Fair, where her mom used to enter the knitting competition. She started entering the State Fair of Texas after her Aunt Neva, who was in her 80s, died, leaving Rohrer her plastic bag full of canning recipes.
“I started screwing around with her recipes, and I figured I would find some mojo,” Rohrer says.
She’s kind of superstitious about the whole thing. If a pal gives her homegrown cucumbers, she assumes they will make her lucky, for example. And maybe it’s true. Rohrer has won ribbons every year she has entered.
That could also be because she’s exacting. One year, she won a blue ribbon for canned green beans, which are judged solely on how they look in the jar.
“I spent hours measuring each bean and putting them in the jar just so,” she says. “I thought ‘if anyone saw me doing this, they would think I am crazy.’ It was so much trouble, but I won.”
Photos by Danny Fulgnecio and Can Türkyilmaz.
Barbara Michaels
Barbara Michaels is a founder of the Forest Hills Garden Club, and her garden is an inspiration for her fair entries.
This year, she made a loquat-peach jam infused with basil, a pear jam infused with sage and an orange marmalade.
A few years ago, she read a book called Blue Ribbon Preserves, and that gave her a lot of ideas. But she tweaks the recipes with herbs from her garden.
Michaels also is a member of the Lakewood Knit-Wits, who are known for “yarn bombing” the Lakewood Branch Library. She first entered the fair with a christening gown she made for her granddaughter in 1996, and that won third prize. This year, she’s entering a knitted scarf and shawl, along with the jellies.
Last year, she entered four things in the fair and won four ribbons — first, second, third and runner up.
“It’s become my own little competition for myself,” she says. “I’m competing with myself to see what can I think of next year to do.”
Photos by Danny Fulgnecio and Can Türkyilmaz.
Vinson Family
Patti and Jonathan Vinson have been married 13 years, and it was at the State Fair of Texas she told him she was pregnant with their first child.
“We were in the food court area, near the Cotton Bowl, and I remember seeing the booth for Jack’s French Fries and Fletcher’s Corny Dogs,” she says.
On a lark, they took photos “in one of those goofy photo booths” that day. And the next year, they took another photo with their baby daughter, Claire. Now it’s a family tradition.
“It’s a fascinating record of how we’ve all changed,” Vinson says.
The family started entering the creative arts competitions five years ago. Patti entered two photos, and while she was at it, she submitted artwork from Claire, who was 7 at the time. Claire’s was a self-portrait, and she won the purple ribbon for best in show.
“She has considered herself an artist since that day,” she says of Claire, who is now 11.
Claire’s brother, 8-year-old Will, also submits artwork. Will’s first word, uttered while pointing at a refrigerator magnet depicting Big Tex, was “howdy,” Patti says.
The fair is a favorite family activity for the Vinsons, and it’s a big deal to them every year. But last year “was the most thrilling,” Patti says, because they were asked to be judges for the chili cook-off. Fair judges are given season passes and parking passes.
“We didn’t do it for that. We didn’t even know we would get all these perks,” Patti says. “We were just so happy to be part of the State Fair. It’s so interesting, and there’s such a great crowd of people.”
