Every August, when the Illinois State Fair came to Springfield, we took the kids.
We lived in Springfield in the late 1970s, and the fair belonged to summer the way certain things do — you didn’t plan for it, you just went.
The first thing I remember is the smell. Frying dough, grilled onions, hot dogs, popcorn, livestock, hay, dust, something sweet running underneath all of it. That combination doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s the smell of summer vacation with a little livestock mixed in. The classic Midwestern state fair.
Then the sounds — the clatter of the rides, bells and whistles, barkers working the games, country music drifting in from somewhere, kids squealing, the low hum of a few thousand people wandering from one attraction to the next.
The rides themselves seemed enormous to the kids: Ferris wheels climbing into the sky, spinning machines that looked like more risk than any parent should sign off on, all of it lit up and painted, run by operators who seemed to have been traveling with the equipment since it was built. And those grins they had.
The carnies were part of the landscape too — weathered, a little mysterious, entirely at home in a temporary city that would be gone again in two weeks. They worked the games with the practiced patience of people who’d seen every reaction a customer could have.
We wandered. We looked at the animals and the exhibits. We smelled those smells. We ate things we wouldn’t normally eat — hot dogs on a stick, lemonade, cotton candy, all the necessities.
And then there were the donuts.
Our daughter Tracy loved the Tom Thumb Donut machine. You could stand there and watch it work — dough going in one end, little rings dropping into the fryer, and a few seconds later, hot golden donuts coming out the other side, ready to eat.
They were tiny. Into the hot oil they drop. That was the whole point. There was something irresistible about the size of them — they weren’t donuts in the ordinary sense, they were little donuts, and because they were little, obviously you could eat several.
I can still picture the warm paper bags in Tracy’s hands.
I don’t remember what the rides cost, or which year exactly, or what the weather was like any particular summer afternoon. I don’t remember the animals we saw or the games we played. Or the prizes the kids won and just had to take home.
But I remember the smell of the fair. I remember the noise. I remember walking among the rides with our children. And I remember our daughter, watching those little donuts tumble out of the machine.
Memory doesn’t save what you’d expect. Not the important dates, not the big occasions — just fragments. A smell. A sound. A child’s face. A warm paper bag. A tiny donut.
The fair was just an annual outing then. We lived in Springfield, the fair came to town, we took the kids. We didn’t know we were making memories. That’s probably how it works most of the time — you’re just living an ordinary August afternoon, holding a child’s hand, watching the rides spin, breathing in fried food and livestock and warm summer air.
And almost fifty years later, those pieces of the afternoon are still here. Somewhere back in my mind.
The fair is long gone for us. The children are grown. Tracy’s gone. But somewhere in memory, the rides are still turning, the lemonade is still cold, the air still smells faintly of hay and hot dogs — and our little girl is standing beside the Tom Thumb machine, waiting for the next batch.
