Cinemagraphs by Andrew Nixon / CapRadio
On a recent Tuesday, a mix of current radio hits and throwback music blared out of speakers placed throughout the Cal Expo grounds. In some places, live performances with their volume turned up high interrupted and overlapped that soundtrack — among them the Drumheads, decked out in Americana red, white and blue.
Smoke billowed up from grills, charring turkey legs and hot dogs before they got handed over to hungry fairgoers. Families lugged around wagons with water bottles and ice, while kids ran ahead to line up for rides.
For many, the sights, sounds and smells of the California State Fair are nostalgic, traditional. The game booths lined by plushie prizes, the food vendors vying for fairgoer attention, the carnival rides that go neon at night, the livestock barn where goats, cows and other animals shelter from the heat — they’re all familiar.
But even for the California tradition, that steadiness is tempered by change. The State Fair got its start as a traveling set of exhibitions, moving between California cities until Sacramento was declared its permanent host in 1859. Even then, the fair moved between locations as it expanded.
And the fair’s schedule has shifted, too. Once held during August, the state fair became a July fixture in 2010. Darla Givens, the California State Fair media director, said the decision to move the event was in large part due to schools starting instruction earlier in the year.
“It was a huge impact on the reason why we changed the fair dates,” she said. “And also, for those students who were showing their animals at [their] county fair, it made it more convenient for them to be able to present during the summer at the state fair.”
More changes may be in the fair’s future. Before the pandemic, its attendance had been dwindling, and while there was an overall uptick in its attendance when the fair reopened last year — from just over 601,000 people in 2019 to over 650,000 attendees — an audit of the fair’s finances in 2019 found that Cal Expo has experienced “recurring losses from operations” and “has aging infrastructure that requires significant capital improvements.” The auditors also cited a reduction in staffing and a loss of revenue due to the ongoing pandemic as cause for concern.
Still, the fair goes on: Givens cited new contest opportunities, exhibits focused on children — like The Lost World of Dragons and the Wild Science! set of “immersive adventures” — and performers coming from across the country as some of the draws for attendees this year.
“When folks win awards, and win these first place ribbons, it kind of sparks an interest and appeals to your sense of competition, and to be proud of something that you can do to represent your county,” she said.
She said it’s part of a pivot away from encouraging California counties to mount displays focused on their produce toward growing county competitions.
“Whether it's canning and baking, arts and crafts, or cooking, we've had all 58 counties of the state represented this year,” Givens said. “And it's been a long time since we've had something like that occur.”
The shift in focus is evident in the solitary two county displays: Mono and Mendocino counties, located in the corner of Cal Expo’s A Building.
There are still ways to learn about counties’ agricultural products at the fair — among them are a placard highlighting the different produce-themed festivals across the state’s counties, and a mounted, picket-fenced “garden” in the shape of California with plastic produce, organized by where each item was grown.
Longtime fairgoer Kerri Nigro is nostalgic for the days when the county displays weren’t sparse, though. She and her husband have been Friends of the California State Fair members for 29 years, and Nigro says she enjoyed seeing “what the different counties had to offer.”
But she understands the lift it takes to mount a display for the exhibit: “The southern counties are the counties that are farther away, [and you] have to have somebody here to manage them, to fix them when they break,” Nigro said. “And that's hard to get somebody to do that and not pay them.”
And while the fair rebounded — at least in attendance totals, compared to 2019 — when it reopened to the public last year, Nigro said she’s still seeing a decrease in vendors compared to pre-pandemic.
“A lot of the buildings are half full,” she said. “A whole lot of people that we've seen year after year are not here … so that's kind of sad.”
Vendor Vande Stagg says she’s still enjoyed her fair experience, though, and she’s seen the State Fair through 35 years of its run.
“Thirty five years ago, I had quit my medical job, and I applied for the state fair,” she said. “One cold wintry day in January, the fair manager called me and he said, ‘Well, we already have somebody doing the ear piercing at the state fair.’ I said, ‘But if you could put me in a location far enough that I wouldn't be taking away from him, I would be grateful.’”
“He gave me the best spot in the fair, and that's how I got started,” she said.
Now, Stagg sells jewelry — she comes down from Seattle every year with a growing number of USA-made earrings, brooches and pins to sell at her booth. She said she appreciates the fair administration’s work to “maintain the level of the fair,” despite the two-year break. For her, the changes she’d like to see are tied to maintaining tradition, like encouraging county exhibits and continuing the 4-H contests.
“I carry 4-H earrings here, and when they win — say, for the best pig — they come and they buy their little pig earrings, and they’re so proud,” she said.
She’d also like to see the fair up its involvement with artists and small mom-and-pop businesses. To her, that would help bring up attendance, which she’s seen fluctuate over the years based on the weather.
“If it’s in the 90s, people will come out, but once it caps over 100 [degrees], it puts a damper on things for a while, but they get out here eventually,” she said.
That’s a pattern the Cal Expo audit identified: “Some 60% of Cal Expo’s revenues are derived each July during the 17 days of the Annual California State Fair. With July 2017 and 2018 being the hottest Julys in the history of Sacramento, attendance rebounded in July 2019 with slightly cooler temperatures.”
Last year’s opening weekend press release said “tens of thousands” of people were fairgoers during opening weekend, though it’s unclear how that stacked up to the over 100,000 attendees during the first weekend of the 2019 State Fair.
This year, though, Givens said the organization won’t release final attendance numbers until the last day of the fair. And the 2023 opening weekend press release had no such statistics, though it did note a “record-breaking number” of 34 food vendors.
It’s likely that the triple-digit heatwaves — which also led to horse racing being canceled during the fair’s opening weekend — stunted attendance this year. It’s something the fair has attempted to circumvent by setting up cooling stations and misters around larger areas like the food court.
When asked about the future of the fair, Givens said “it’s a hard question to answer.”
“Of course, you can’t control the weather,” she said. “The one thing I do know is that next year, we’re celebrating 170 years of the California State Fair. We might do some throwback exhibits or what have you. We haven’t started planning for 2024 yet.”
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