In advance of its centennial, the LA County Fair decided to round up its history — and donate it.
Nearly 100 years of photos, film reels, news clippings, annual cookbooks and more from the Fairplex archives are now in the hands of Cal Poly Pomona. The University Library’s Special Collections and Archives is the lucky recipient.
The items deserved a permanent, secure home where they could be accessible to the public, say Fairplex officials, who after all are in the business of putting on an annual exposition, not donning white gloves to slip 1940s brochures into Mylar sleeves. Also, as any of us who’ve been to the fairgrounds in the September heat can attest, a climate-controlled setting it ain’t.
I visited the library archives on Wednesday. The county fair collection fills some 200 white file boxes. And the staff isn’t even through packing up and transporting all the ephemera.
“It’s one of our largest archival collections. It will probably be our largest,” said Katie Richardson, head of Special Collections, who sees the collection growing over time. “The Rose Parade will probably be our runner-up now.”
Richardson and archives coordinator Rob Strauss boxed items themselves and lugged them to Cal Poly, often in Strauss’ minivan. (All hail the minivan.) Temporary labels on the boxes give a sense of the contents.
“Cattle Drive 1996.” “Film Reels.” “1971-1972 negatives.” “Cookbooks.”
An archivist will be hired in February to begin making digital copies of film reels before they deteriorate, organizing the great mass of material and cataloging each item. I’m picturing a tag that reads “representative popsicle stick, ca. 1972.”
In general, expect a mix of the fascinating, the curious and the mundane.
When I saw a box labeled “Monorail,” I asked Richardson to open it up. I knew the fair had a monorail around the grounds from the 1960s to the 1990s and that the first rider was Richard Nixon. The former veep got sauteed in his aerial loop around the fairgrounds, by the way, because the monorail windows didn’t open and nobody had thought to install air conditioning.
Sadly, the monorail box was full of dull reports about mechanical issues. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Maybe a sweat-stained hankie with the initials RN.
But unexpected finds are already turning up. A cardboard box has slender manila envelopes of large-format photo negatives of various sites around California and the West. One is labeled “Capistrano Beach, 1948.” The photos have no evident tie to the LA County Fair, but that’s where the box ended up, mysteriously.
Richardson and Strauss had already pulled a few fun items for me to see. A scrapbook of photos from the 1948 fair. A 1947 planner from the fair’s manager. A blue ribbon first prize for sheep from the 1927 fair.
Brochures for the fairs of 1940, 1953, 1963 and 1969 were side by side. Cheerful motto of the 1963 fair: “The nation’s most exciting and colorful exposition!” For 1969’s groovy cover: “It’s where it’s happening.” In six years the fair went from “exciting” to mellow.
A few items relate to the debut fair of 1922, including a publicity photo of the six founders standing in a field, pointing.
“They were savvy businessmen. They wanted to promote Pomona,” Richardson explained. “Pasadena had the Tournament of Roses parade. San Bernardino had the Orange Show. Riverside had a fair. They were trying to think of what would set Pomona apart.”
Once they learned there was no Los Angeles County fair, they went with that.
“They incorporated in April 1922 and put the fair on in October. They didn’t even break ground until July,” Richardson said. “It was amazing how quickly they pulled it off.”
The collection has film reels from 1960s and ’70s fairs, contents currently unknown. I think those will be a hit. As research progresses, we might learn more about the origins of Thummer, the Porky Pig-like mascot from 1948.
And how about all the musicians who’ve given concerts at the fair during the rock era? Few of those have been documented in a public way.
For my benefit, Strauss held up a brochure for an unexpected 1952 fair performer: Liberace.
Liberace, in Pomona, at the county fair. The mind boggles. Also, I hope his piano’s candelabra was kept far away from any hay bales.
As the collection is catalogued, Richardson sees opportunities for exhibits, lectures, web pages, oral histories from fairgoers, and tie-ins with Cal Poly classes in business, agriculture and culinary arts.
She said students could recreate food from fair cookbooks from decades past, or the prize-winning chocolate cake of Alberta Dunbar of San Diego, featured in a news clipping about her back-to-back victories in 1977 and ’78.
Richardson said of the collection: “It’s going to paint a picture of how the fair evolved.”
Meanwhile, the LA County Fair is due to return May 5-30 as the event shifts away from the broiling late summer to the gentler late spring. The fair, marking its 100th anniversary in 2022, may be part of history, but its evolution continues.
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Darlene Hard won the first women’s intercollegiate national singles title in tennis in 1958 while attending Pomona College in pursuit of a degree in pediatric medicine. “I quickly saw that playing tennis was easier than studying to be a doctor,” Hard once told Times columnist Bill Dwyre. Hard, who died Dec. 2 at age 86 in Northridge, never looked back, winning 21 Grand Slam contents and playing doubles with future stars Billie Jean King and Rod Laver. Sometimes college is where you learn what you don’t want to do in life.
What David Allen wants to do in life is write Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.