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.