Life and Death at the County Fair

Words & Photos by Michael Adno

During annual pilgrimages to my hometown carnival, I never fail to find meaning among the doughnut burgers, feather boas, and iridescent dragons.

Come March, a fleet of semitrucks rumbles west down Fruitville Road before turning south and filling a 50-acre plot of grass punctuated by four buildings and a barn. Once the trucks find their marks, they blossom from steel knots into neon flowers overnight, opening into Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and bumper cars. Compact trailers morph into food vendors and prize games. By dusk, cattle and pigs file into a barn at the heart of the fairgrounds. And on opening night, lines form at the gates as oil pours into fryers. Evangelicals proselytize fairgoers beneath vinyl pop-up tents, asking them whether they’re headed for heaven or hell. Nearby, vendors sell plastic machine guns, Confederate flag beach towels, and dreamcatchers.

The town, rooted along the Gulf of Mexico, only 90 miles north of the western Everglades, was once home to the Ringling Bros. circus. In 1923, Martha and Calvin Payne sold 60 acres to Sarasota County with the hope that a fair would attract tourists. When the fair opened on January 26, 1925, in only its second year, more than 5,000 people came in a single day. Two years later, the fair association transferred all of its assets to Ringling Bros., which then made the sleepy, subtropical place its official winter home.

After John and Mable Ringling built their house along the bay in a stand of slash pine, the town shifted from cowfolk to carnies. Fortune tellers and elephant trainers filled the seasonal trailer parks and pseudo-Mediterranean duplexes near the Gulf. And as the Ringlings assembled their Italianate mansions north of downtown, under the supervision of architects Ralph Twitchell and his protégé Paul Rudolph, their sense of style suffused the place like humidity. They took the spoils of oyster reefs and mangrove strands formed over centuries and recast them as islands before recreating Venetian villages. They planted casuarina trees to drain land, laid down veins of pavement, built a casino, and animated the town. The fair has never lost touch with Southwest Florida’s agricultural roots, but in the past century, it has also become something else entirely.

On his throne, a young prince learns about the joys of frozen lemonade while surveying his fiefdom.

The fairgrounds, where St. Augustine and torpedo grass flush and wilt with the seasons, sit idle most of the year. Vast parking lots stake its edges, rimmed by ixora and crepe myrtles along Fruitville Road, which begins at the historic Myakka River as a dirt two-track and falls toward the Gulf before reaching a Ritz-Carlton. Four buildings sit on the grounds, not counting the low-slung ticket booths or the barn. Three are spare, mid-century modern buildings set in a row. Two are used as exhibition halls and the third as the fair association headquarters. The fourth building is a gargantuan, 15,000-square-foot facility built in 1967 called Robarts Arena. A mural of circus performances with an elephant and a tightrope walker stretches across its façade. When presidential campaigns reach Sarasota, this is where they hold rallies. In 1970 and 1971, the Allman Brothers Band played inside. Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, and Neil Young performed here. But, most of the time, the arena is used for things like wrestling matches, high school graduations, and the periodic gun show.

 In 1947, the fair formed an agreement with the county for its current 54-acre plat. It was straightforward: If the association held an agricultural fair once every two years, the property would remain under their control. If they failed to hold one, the land reverted back to the county. Over the years, the city and county have questioned the agreement, especially under pressure from developers. At one point, they were offered 100 acres and 50 million dollars to relocate further south. The Sarasota Orchestra once eyed the property. Another plan was to move the fairgrounds further east to build a baseball stadium in its place. 

But for Rory Martin, whose grandparents planted one of the first Valencia orange trees in the county and who is now president of both the fair and the Sarasota County Farm Bureau, the annual fair, alongside civic events like graduations and gun shows, seems like more of a cultural asset than any of the proposed plans. 

The word “fair” likely grew out of its Latin counterpart “feria” that means holy days. Throughout the Roman Empire, the festivals composed of games and competition were recognized as public holidays. Later, they added markets and aligned with the Christian calendar. In America, the first agricultural fair took place in 1807, and bore little resemblance to historic fairs. Its main attraction was a sheep shearing demonstration. Today, its legacy is clear in thousands of county and state fairs in America with the same DNA: part education, part entertainment, born of agriculture.

In good years, the fair garners nearly half a million in revenue. It costs about $200,000 to produce each year, says Martin. According to him,  if that much is in the fair association’s checking account, then the fair is happening. The only times the fair didn’t happen was during WWII and in 2021 due to the pandemic.

Through the first gate, a seal show greeted fairgoers this year, replacing the alligator wrestler who was here before. Just past them, cowboy actors in chaps milled around a cul-de-sac. One cowboy looked identical to Sam Elliott, and due to his occasional appearances at a bar I like, I promise he’s aware of the likeness. Two lanes directed people past food trucks selling cotton candy, fried candies, corn dogs in varying and sometimes troubling sizes, and a few vendors selling plastic samurai swords, vaguely Indigenous flutes, and souvenirs. There were sections devoted to rides for children, rides for toddlers, and rides for adults intent on behaving like toddlers. There was a strip composed mostly of games, flanked by the stuffed plushy prizes that beckoned like fuzzy, inanimate temptresses. 

Rides and food make up the lion’s share of the fair, and I would guess draw the most people. But the fair’s central nervous system, at least historically, is inside a simple, open-air steel barn.

This year, that’s where I met Lydia Egolf, age 10. A fair veteran, she is familiar with the venue’s characteristic perfume of manure and pine shavings. As she stood in the threshold between the bovine and swine wings of the barn, she told me she was focused on trying to keep her heifer happy; helping friends when she had time. Despite her nerves about the upcoming livestock show, she was just trying to have fun. Her sister, only a couple years younger, was showing a guinea pig in a nearby tent filled with birds, rabbits, and other small critters.

Later that evening, Lydia led her heifer through a gate into a small arena flanked by bleachers. Cowboys watched as each class of cattle entered the ring. At the center, a judge carefully took stock of the kids and their animals. Wearing black pants, a white button-down shirt, and a numbered bib that looked like lederhosen suspenders, she focused her eyes on the judge and tried to keep her cow’s head up by clasping its lead. Later that night, once all the classes had finished walking through, the judges announced Lydia had won first place in showmanship for her class. Her eyes burst with tears as she stood between her parents.

The prize belt buckle she’d won bore a name that is particularly meaningful to her family, as it was that of her father’s mentor, the same man who had trained Lydia, who had died only a few months earlier. The next morning, Lydia returned to the barn, fed her cow, bathed her, and brushed out her hair. She told me of her anxiety and how it had all dissolved as she locked eyes with the judge. Around her waist, she wore the belt buckle, a cast piece of metal that spoke to a vanishing way of life in South Florida.

The kids’ work starts a year before the show, when their animals, whether a steer, heifer, or pig, arrive at their barns. They learn how to feed and care for their animals and how to tour them around the pen. Ringmaster and 40-year member of the fair association’s board, Bill McClain, tells me that steers gain about 2 pounds each day. By the time the first weigh-in happens in December, the kids have built a rapport with their animals, and by March, they’re not just finishing their steers for market, but practicing how to walk a 1,000-pound steer gracefully into an arena of 100 people. Despite the competitive atmosphere, all the contestants help each other. As Lydia’s dad told me, “The fair is important. It’s about the kids.” It felt like a sort of ceremony.

But as much as the county fair is for and about kids, I believe it’s for everyone. You look around and see teenagers holding hands, wanting to hold hands, embarrassed to hold hands. You see parents and grandparents doing the same. I see friends bickering, families cursing the incoming traffic, a red drip of lights sliding down Beneva and Fruitville roads. I see the taciturn and the queer. I see white sunglasses and luxury labels. I see straw Stetsons and hats worn just for show. High heels and steel toe boots. I see North County and Myakka, Park East and Proctor, different parts of town that belong as much to different parts of the world as they do to America. It’s beautiful, because these parts of town and parts of life and parts of America don’t often touch. The South, for all its diversity, is still a segregated place. But here these disparate groups do touch. Between the beaches and the backcountry, with its dusty, languid sunsets and its dizzying wealth of rare flowers and curious animals, few places are so overwrought with beauty. The organizers say it’s about agriculture, and that’s true. The ag committee says it’s about the kids, and that’s true. But I think they’re underselling “it.” There’s more to the county fair.

A family talks as they wait in line for a mechanical ride.

Two friends come with me to the fair each year. We grew up together in an apartment complex just across the street, where the kids with minimal parental supervision skateboarded and rollerbladed. We built our own ramps and rails, hiding them in a nearby stand of pine trees. Sometimes, the rails vanished due, we assumed, to the passive aggressive behavior of management. But later, we discovered that kids in a nearby neighborhood had stolen the rails and were building a pirate skatepark in an abandoned warehouse. Once, police raided the facility and rounded up a bunch of sweaty stoners. My best friend’s little sister eventually married one of the thieves, who had by then become one of our closest friends. That couple is always my first call when the fair opens.

Two years ago, we decided to take a period photo. The married couple looked impossibly sexy in chaps, an ascot, and lingerie while I looked like a bearded lady dressed in feathers, my aforementioned foray into drag. This year, Kalin and Manny’s infant son Miro came with us to the fair, where he was subjected to goats, met Gilligan the monkey, and was introduced to his parents’ unsettling corn dog habit.

A few nights later, a cold front’s north wind met me and my friend Thomas at Gate No. 4, where we blew past the dancing sea lions and headed straight for the steers. My native Floridian companion lit up when we saw the 1,000-pound creatures chewing hay and swinging their fuzzy tails. We drew centripetal circles through the barn, scratching a snoot here and there, whispering sweet words to the snorting piggies. And by the time we were spit out on the backside in a sea of sodium bulbs, he told me, This made my day better.

I had met Thomas a few years earlier while surfing. We became fast friends, and during Hurricane Ian, I sheltered in his home. When you weather a Category 5 storm playing mahjong and managing an incontinent dog with someone, you bond. Last year, Thomas was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer that had metastasized and spread before showing any signs. Suddenly, time wasn’t just finite but visceral. Eliminating the cancer entirely wasn’t an option, so fighting the disease became an awful mystery of how to prolong life. I figured the fair was one way to do that.

After visiting the barn, we ogled the bantam roosters, especially the itsy bitsy bantams. We ate tacos in the dust bowl stirred up by the steady north wind. We wandered aimlessly, as one does at the fair, into an agriculture exhibit where a 10-foot-tall Ferris wheel spun with produce boxes. I lurked nearby during a 20-minute seminar on composting. Finally, the seminar ended, and we passed through the county school art exhibit before heading to the games.

We began with tossing rings onto ancient Coca-Cola bottles, maybe the tamest of fair amusements. Somehow, Thomas charmed the carnie running the game into giving him a blue, sparkly cowboy hat monogrammed with stars — despite no measurable success. We crossed the midway where a carnie with a South African accent talked us into playing a squirt-gun race in which dalmatians drive firetrucks forward based on the accuracy of your aim. A family cheered us on as Thomas reached the finish line first. Bastard, I thought. But considering his terminal illness, I thought, Well, he needs this. As a consolation, he let me choose the orange alligator as his prize. 

We slipped into the stream of adult rides, the ones with names like Zero Gravity and Zipper. One merry-go-round, called Musik Express, bumped Bad Bunny all week, and the line of teenagers was pretty much an omnipresent reggaeton club. I know this because, as Thomas played the nearby quarter games until his hands turned sterling, I watched the high schoolers giggle and taunt each other.

Next up was cork shooting. Aware of my opponent’s experience with skeet shooting, I felt, perhaps unjustifiably, overconfident. I mean, he was wearing a sparkly blue cowboy hat over a beanie. Very quickly, he was in the lead, but we tied in the back leg. I blamed the witch who runs this warren of plush toys for goading us into a tiebreaker, which Thomas won. He chose a puppy in an iridescent dragon costume.

Funnel cake followed, because what’s more life-affirming than fried dough covered in powdered sugar? As we floated past the fishbowl game, a couple of sirens, with lilting accents that reminded me of my father’s home, persuaded us to play. Soon, Stephan and Chad, said sirens, were choreographing our moves as we tossed pingpong balls at the nonplussed goldfish accustomed to the melee. Chad took my camera and photographed our efforts, directing us like we were in a Juergen Teller campaign for Bottega Veneta.

A photographic typology of the Ferris wheel at the county fair.

This year, a lot of the carnies were temporary workers, brought to America under the H-2B program that’s less well known than the similar H-2A visas for agricultural workers. Some South Africans have done this for years, arriving in November and staying for up to 10 months. Claire, the manager for the ride operators, even has children born in the States. Chad, a writer from Cape Flats, leaves his family each year and tours largely through the southern U.S. Masi, a classical musician from Hout Bay, runs the balloon dart game. Robbie, another South African, tells me there’s nothing back home to compare the fair to. “It’s like Christmas,” he said.  

My own family left South Africa to make a life in America, too. My father was from the East Rand of Johannesburg — a tiny speck of a town called Brakpan that Jews shaped before mines lacerated the land like honeycomb. Both sides of my paternal family left Lithuania in the early 20th century for this new hemisphere, first passing through Palestine before reaching the foot of Africa. My maternal grandfather, an Austrian Jew, left Vienna by train in October 1938, before vanishing into the forest as the Schutzstaffel boarded the train. He survived the war, returned to Vienna, and married. They had my mother, who later followed her mother to South Africa, where she met my father.

Much of my family escaped the first and second world wars in Europe only to witness another form of political tyranny during Apartheid in South Africa. I remember with odd clarity the way my grandmother coarsely spoke to the live-in servants who helped raise me — the derogatory codes that confirmed their place in the cruel hierarchy. I remember being told not to tell anyone I was Jewish while driving through the Karoo. I remember the mass exodus in the wake of Apartheid, the election of Nelson Mandela, fireworks over the Indian Ocean marking the Millennium.

 The dark history there was the first I knew, and America has always reminded me of it, especially today. To think about that while throwing pingpong balls into fish bowls felt deeply strange and deeply American.

This year, a long tent dispensed Trump-branded paraphernalia. It was filled with the slogans you’ve probably seen on bumper stickers like “BUILD THE WALL” and “PROMISES MADE PROMISES KEPT.” There were flags and banners with the president’s likeness. It was a big tent of soft goods, stickers, and coffee mugs that made people feel like they belonged — by supporting Trump and the values or beliefs they ascribed to those five letters. If that collection of stuff didn’t make you feel like you belong, though, it was hard to ignore. The fair, the state, and the country have never felt more polarized, people never so weary of difference and so eager to stake their identity on something you can buy for the cost of a corn dog.

As the Fair closed that night, Thomas and I waddled down the midway with a plastic bag containing a single goldfish. Back at his house, we placed the bag in a puddle he referred to as his home’s “water feature,” and we waited for the water inside the bag to acclimate to the puddle’s temperature. Then we released the fish. We both went to sleep. We both woke up. I still remember the look on Thomas’ face when he said, This made my day better.

On Saturday night, Thomas, his wife, their daughter, and her boyfriend returned to the fair as did Manny, Kalin, and their family. Worship of the steers took place. Emily, Thomas’ wife, climbed the twisty ladder thing as a carnie marshalled a megaphone to insult her. The quarter game claimed an undisclosed amount of Thomas’ family dowry. Miro, my friend’s newborn, gazed from his stroller, sucking on a pacifier and surveying the scene. We drank frozen lemonades. Picked at buckets of fries. Passed gyros around a sticky, ketchup-stained picnic table. And we shared a doughnut burger, the culinary cardiac episode that is a hamburger dressed with lettuce, tomato, onion, bacon, and processed cheese, with two glazed doughnuts in place of buns. It was divine. We returned, of course, to the fishbowl game and walked out the gates with the next generation of fish for Thomas’ water feature, three goldfish not yet named swimming in a little cellophane world.

Late that night, we slid through the barn after the swine auction closed. Most of the sweet animals slumbered, snorting and snoring. In one pen, three kids sat together with a pig. One of the boys was lying in the pine shavings, spooning his animal. His two friends were trying to comfort him. Tomorrow morning, ranchers would arrive with trailers to haul out their quarry. The boy was crying, saying goodbye to the soul he had cared for during the past year. He was losing the animal, a tradition he would likely endure annually as a kid raised in old Sarasota, but of course, it was the sort of loss none of us escapes.

 Sunday marked the end of the fair’s run and my nine-day marathon. I got to see all the folks I’d met in the past nine days: security guards, ranchers, and South African carnies. I rode the haunted house ride, one of the few remaining hand-painted fun houses that doubles as a chiropractic adjustment, as my little treat. I did not eat tacos, gyros, or doughnut burgers. 

I did not play games, but I said goodbye to the sirens at the fishbowl tent. One of them asked about the fish we’d taken home to Thomas’ water feature. She asked if I wanted to take any others. She liked the idea of them finding a stable home in Sarasota, rather than returning to the tank before driving four hours north to Green Cove Springs. I chose a goldfish and asked her to name it. She named it for herself, and when I got home, I poured some water into a curvy vase for my new friend, now named Antoinette. By first light, we were both still alive, although I had Covid, and Antoinette was bound for the water feature. ◊

Michael Adno has worked for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and his Bitter Southerner profile of Ernest Mickler, the author of White Trash Cooking, won a James Beard Award. This year, his portrait of a Florida couples’ life conjuring worms out of the ground will be included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited by Susan Orlean. He lives in South Florida with a sweet dog named Georgia.

Subscribe to The Bitter Southerner

Shop the Collection. Fill the Food Banks.

The Best of The Bitter Southerner’s Food Stories