Iowa State Fair A To Z

"It's time for the Iowa State Fair! Every year, the people of Iowa gather to enjoy some of their favorite fair activities. Learn about them from A to Z!"

A pictorial and written history of one of the country's best agricultural fairs, the Iowa State Fair. Started in 1854, the Iowa State Fair continues to showcase Iowa agriculture and draw crowds from across the country. This book shows the old and new, competitions of yesterday and today, exhibits, entertainment and the buildings of the Iowa State Fair. To order a book, please call 1-800-750-6997 (in Iowa) or 1-800-453-3960 (Outside Iowa) and ask for McMillen Publishing. To fax an order, dial 1-515-232-8820, To mail order, send to: McMillen Publishing, 413 Northwestern, Ames, IA, 50010, to order online: [email protected]. or [email protected].

Iowa¿s Tradition: An ABC Photo Album of the Iowa State Fair has over 100 color photos of things you can see and do at the Iowa State Fair. Following an ABC format, there are at least two photos for every letter along with a description of who or what is pictured and where it can be found on the fairgrounds. Fair visitors from several states are shown enjoying activities including the cow chip throwing contest, ugly cake contest, arm wrestling championship, belly dancing, Dancin¿ Grannies and the Ye Old Mill. For more than 150 years, millions of visitors have made life-long memories enjoying the Iowa State Fair. Whether you dream of childhood memories, faithfully attend every year, or have always wanted to go to the Iowa State Fair, this book is for you.

Once a year, a tent city springs up overnight around the exhibition halls in Des Moines as farmers and their families pour in from across Iowa to attend the State Fair. After months of hard and often lonely work, farm families are given the chance to step out of their rural routines — picnic and gossip, sing and dance, take a chance at the hoopla stands, and strut their stuff in stiff competition for ribbons and prizes. When the close-knit Frake family set out from Brunswick, Iowa, Abel's hog, Blue Boy rode proudly in the back of the truck — manicured, curried and rubbed to enameled perfection — ready to compete and win the sweepstakes, the highest honor which any hog could attain. Melissa, Abel's wife, had her hopes set on beating the competition with the prize-winning quality of her pickles. Their teenage children, Wayne and Margy, found themselves faced with a pickle of another kind. Although committed to sweethearts in their hometown, brother and sister are each seized by a new love that sweeps them along, secretly and illicitly, somewhere between the sweet taste of cotton candy and the breathtaking plunge of a roller coaster ride. State fairs were a subject that Phil Stong knew well. For several years his grandfather had been superintendent of the swine division at the Iowa State Fair and, as a reporter for the Des Moines Register, Stong was assigned to cover the evening stock shows at the fair. Iowa held its first state fair in 1854, and for some time fairs were held at various locations around the state before permanently settling in Des Moines. State Fair is very much an Iowa book, filled with incidents and details from the author's own life. Although State Fair suggests a deep satisfaction and fondness for rural life, it shocked some readers in 1932 and was banned in the city library of Keosauqua, Iowa (Stong's hometown) for twenty-five years after it was published. However, judging from the success of the book and the enthusiasm shown for the movies that followed, most readers were captivated by the Frakes' down-home talk and whimsical humor and commended the author's portrayal of rural America.

In 2013, Kurt Ullrich set out to chronicle the magic of the Iowa State Fair in words and photographs. Join him as August days and nights blow warm and easy over the fairgrounds, brushing lightly against fellow travelers on this earth, both human and not. He captures precious moments of extreme joy and unbridled delight in these beautiful black-and-white images, celebrating the brash rural energy of the fair, from Big Wheel races to people-watching goats, fair queen contestants to arm wrestlers, Percherons to ponies. Prize pigs, prize sheep, prize apples, and the famous butter cow all have their moment in the limelight. Iowa's very best ear of corn and old friends reminiscing outside their RVs draw the photographer's fond eye, as do brightly lit beer stands and the brilliant arc of the Ferris wheel against the night sky.

More than 190 vintage postcards provide glimpses of the historic fair from the 1890s through the mid-1950s. The quintessential event has an attendance topping 1 million each year.