<I>The Eagle/Tina Cook</I><BR>Tyler Stoneman enjoyed the YoYo. It was one of the favorite rides at the 2006 Grant County Fair.

My first fair as the fair manager is over. Getting ready for the fair requires a whole year of planning, attention to large and small details, lots of help from others, many last-minute adjustments and a lot of hard work (physically and mentally). And then, before you know it, the Fair is over much too quickly. Which doesn’t seem right for all the time and effort required to put it all on.

Overall, I thought the fair went reasonably well for my first year managing it. I can’t totally take the credit.

I had Vickie Mullin, my administrative assistant, who knows everyone in the world (at least in Grant County) and was able to skillfully manage our volunteers and vendors plus payout premiums. Lee Mullin, Vickie’s husband, was always close at hand ready to respond to our latest crisis.

Fair Board members Larry Pierce and Doug Kruse helped to handle all the heavy things involving building, lifting and moving, provided flatbeds and generators as needed, and stayed late and came early.

Fair Board member Charlene Morris helped keep our rodeo committee running smoothly, arranged volunteers for our rodeo hospitality tent and at the same time managed the schedule of our queen MaryJo Larssen and the two queen contestants, plus their tryout schedule.

Our Grand Marshal, Margaret Lemons, and her family needed neither supervision nor guidance. Plus, during Margaret’s tenure, her family taught us a few things about floats and organization.

Fair Board member Carolyn Mullin and husband, Steve, oversaw the livestock barn and helped with concerns that arose, plus pitchhit for us a few times on the gates and elsewhere as needed.

Fair Board member Austene Hendrix manned our information desk in the pavilion most afternoons and kept detailed notes on items we needed to correct or address.

Fair Board member Fred John Livingston and Sharon Livingston took on a huge undertaking for the Stockgrowers and the Fair – managing the two beer booths.

Fair Board member Mark Webb was instrumental in getting the 3rd Street parking area mowed and ready for parking. He and his wife, Sherry, were available each day to help.

Mike Bowe, our building and grounds person, spent every morning until late evening empting the garbage cans and keeping the grounds picked up.

Kathy Smith and Dena Bush from the county treasurer’s office made sure we had the money for the gates, prizes and premiums on time and were able to adjust quickly as necessary to changing situations.

The superintendents and the committee and contest chairs all handled their areas superbly and required little oversight, which took a lot of pressure off of my shoulders.

My Mom, Patty Hyde, helped whenever we called, and my husband, Larry, who is always my best support, listened to all those little problems that had grown in my mind and jumped in to fix whatever and whenever I called.

That is how I handled my first year as fair manager – I called upon and used the fairboard, fairgrounds staff, volunteers (way too many to mention personally in this article) and family to help. Everyone pitched in to ensure that the fair ran smoothly for everyone’s enjoyment.

Thank you to our sponsors who provided the financial support we needed to have a successful fair and rodeo, to our volunteers who provided the manpower we required, and to the fair board and the community for working with me to ensure we had a great Grant County Fair and Rodeo. I am looking forward to helping plan the next one.

The Fair Board will be meeting at 7 p.m. Sept. 18 in Keerins Hall to discuss the fair, how it went and what could be improved. If you have any input you would like to share with us, please come.

Study says fairs help economyAn Oregon State University study has found that county fairs and year-round fairground events contribute to local and statewide economies.

Bruce Sorte, an OSU Extension economist in the College of Agricultural Sciences in Corvallis, analyzed the flow of goods and services created by county fairs in Douglas, Hood River, Tillamook and Grant counties. He examined visitors’ spending as well as direct expenditures of the fair and other fairground activities and found that county fairs’ contributed five times their budgets to the local economy. In some counties, public funds used by fair organizers returned dollars to the local economy at a 10-to-1 rate.

Among his calculations of expenditures, Sorte included a characteristic transaction of county fairs, namely the purchases by local people of local goods and services during the fairs and year-round events. These purchases retain dollars in the local economy and replace purchases of imported goods that would leak dollars out of the county.

In addition to generating dollars for counties and providing a forum for local buying and selling, county fairs highlight the natural-resource base of local economies, Sorte found.

The forthcoming study, “Oregon County Fairs: An Economic Impact Analysis,” was funded by the Oregon Fairs Association and will be available this month on the OSU Rural Studies Program Web site: (ruralstudies.oregonstate.edu).

? Stephanie Walters is the manager of the Grant County Fairgrounds. Her column about what’s happening at the fairgrounds will appear the first Wednesday of the month.-