I just have a few remarks about the Iowa State Fair Cribbage Tournament which took place today. I don’t have the results and it could be a week before anything is announced about the winner. Here are the rules:
Note the $1 entry fee and you have to bring your own cribbage board, cards, and pen. In the past there have been as many as 200 entrants (that was in 2015). We’ve never entered.
I also wanted to let you know that Sena has started a new cribbage tradition. Whenever she wants to play cribbage, she just puts the deck of cards in our automatic shuffler and makes a racket.
The Iowa State Fair will again have the Cribbage Tournament this year! It’s on August 18 (the last day of the fair) from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m at the Oman Family Youth Inn. Registration begins at 10:00 a.m.
I got a big kick out the Rubber Chicken Show at the Iowa State Fair, broadcast by Iowa PBS. I don’t need another reason to post it other than to make you laugh.
The other day Iowa PBS remembered former Iowa PBS Market to Market host Chet Randolph with a flashback to his 1978 Reflections on the Iowa State Fair. His point about the Iowa farmers and the role of agriculture in this state is well taken. We enjoy the Fair because of Iowa farmers, who may enjoy it in a different way than most fairgoers.
According to Bob Quinn’s story in 2002 upon Randolph’s death, the icon of Iowa agriculture set a great example of how to respect the opinions of others while defending your own and be ready to accept “a better answer.”
Chet started out in Mason City, Iowa as a farm news broadcaster and in his early days, he made part of his show an offer to do chores for farm families who otherwise would never have had the time to take a vacation. He spent about 16 years (1975-1990) hosting Market to Market back when it was first called Farm Digest in 1974.
Picture credit of Chet Randolph “choreboy” Gene Champ.
We’ve never actually been to the Iowa State Fair, but we really like listening to the Iowa Public Broadcasting TV shows about it.
The first show covered a lot of activities. Food at the Fair is always intriguing. We know there are a lot of foods on a stick, but we didn’t know you could get a rattlesnake corn dog—with venom sauce! It’s pretty good according to the food guy, Travis Graven. You probably won’t find it in your local grocery store.
The big animals are impressive. I always wonder why the handlers sort of guide some of the animals (like that huge boar) using those little boards.
The lemonade stand was a little thought provoking. Dad’s Old-Fashioned Lemonade stand sellers aren’t out there to make money. They do it for the nostalgia. I’m sure they do it for the tradition as well.
That’s a nod to keeping tradition alive. One of those is the 4-H program. According to the Iowa State University 4-H Youth Development web page, the 4 H’s stand for:
Head for thinking, planning, and reasoning
Heart for being kind, true, and sympathetic
Hands for being useful, helpful, and skillful
Health for taking care of yourself and your community
The Iowa State Fair is a longstanding tradition. It started way back in 1854. It was on hold in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and that was the first time since World War II it was cancelled and only the sixth time in the Fair’s 166-year history.
A tradition is defined as the transmission of a culture’s customs, beliefs, knowledge, skills and more from generation to generation. In order to do that somebody has to do the passing down of all of that. And somebody has to pick it up.
You can store some of it in electronic archives, but a critically important part of it relies on institutional knowledge in the hearts and minds of the culture’s older people. It’s a two-way street; the young listen, accept some, and improve more if we’re lucky. It’s more than facts and figures—it’s the wisdom we want to preserve.
And we want to keep the rattlesnake corn dogs, with venom sauce.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 