The Old Ways Work Best at the Canfield Fair
CANFIELD, Ohio – The Canfield Fair is the original social media.
It’s a time-tested way to quickly reach a huge audience that represents a cross section of the community.
The 178th iteration of the fair opened Wednesday and will run through Monday. As always, it’s a marketplace of ideas, services, new products – and corndogs.
With an average annual attendance of 350,000, all you need is a booth and a sign to get the word out about a business, a politician or anything that deserves recognition.
Sooner or later, everyone is going to see your “post.” With any luck, it could go viral.
That’s what Cassandra Vega is hoping for.
From her booth, she is spreading the word – and hopefully raising money – for a film she will shoot next year in Youngstown.
The West Side native is a 2018 graduate of Ursuline High School and a 2022 graduate of New York University, where she majored in film and television studies.
Her film, “Tune Up,” is inspired by her father. It will be the first feature film that she has created and will direct.
The title plays off the term “Youngstown tuneup” – local slang for the Mafia car bombings in the area in the 1970s – but encompasses much more.
“It has ties to the Mafia, but I don’t want it to be a Mafia movie,” Vega said. “That’s not my thing. It’s a movie about identity.”
The main character is based on the circumstances of the life of her father, who grew up in the Youngstown area. Her father’s father, Nicholas Alexander Jr., was killed by a Mafia car bomb in 1975. That changed the trajectory of her father’s life.
“My grandmother remarried, and my father was adopted by her new husband,” Vega said. “They changed his name and his identity. His biological family was still around, and he did get an offer to join the family business, but he turned it down. This film follows a series of events that might have happened if he had said yes. It’s about his identity, and how he learns what his father was involved in.”
The film has not yet been cast.
Vega has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the $20,000 needed for preproduction work.
“We want to shoot it here next year,” she said. “We also need extras and volunteers. We want it to be a community effort.”
She is shooting for a total production budget of $495,000. For information, contact producer Alexandria Hellman at [email protected].
Shooting will take place at several businesses and locations in downtown Youngstown and the West Side.
Political Season
The Canfield Fair has been known to attract political candidates for the highest offices. Both the Mahoning County Democratic and Republican parties have tents at which they register voters and where local candidates stop by to greet the public.
With this being a presidential year, and a contentious one, does the friendly banter sometimes get heated?
So far, the answer is no – although one passerby stopped at the Democratic tent to share his disagreement on some farming and environmental policies.
One longtime volunteer at the Democratic tent, who wanted to remain anonymous, heard him out.
“I’m 74 years old and I’ve been volunteering here for a long time,” the volunteer said. “I’ve seen it all, but I’ve never had this happen before.”
At the Republican tent Wednesday morning, a volunteer passing out fans said she had not had any visitors in a testy mood. “Everybody’s been really friendly,” she said.
AG Hall of Fame
The Mahoning County Agricultural Hall of Fame inducted its class of 2024 on Wednesday morning at the small stage outside the grandstand. It’s the third year for the Hall of Fame, and the inductees were Roger Greenawalt, Francis and Jane Less, Paul E. Myers and Harvey S. Firestone.
At its core, the Canfield Fair is about agriculture, and to broaden the recognition for the Hall of Fame inductees, a series of cloth banners have been put up around the grounds.
“This is the first year we’ve put the banners up,” said Elwood Woolman, a fair board director. “As we induct new people each year, each will get a banner. So 300,000 people will know about them, and not just a few.”
The 4-foot banners, which include the name and a photo of each inductee, are mounted on poles along Springfield Drive on the fairgrounds.
Scaregrounds
It’s sweltering hot right now. But Halloween is right around the corner, and that means the Canfield Fairgrounds will become the Canfield Scaregrounds haunted attraction.
The Scaregrounds has put up a large tent at the fair in recent years that includes a haunted maze and a merchandise shop. Look for the giant skeletons.
The goal is to drum up interest in the attraction and also maybe land a few young people to work there, scaring visitors.
Like social media, it works.
Chuck Burns and Scaregrounds general manager Ken Beckett were manning the tent Wednesday.
“One girl last year went through the maze 10 times and then hung out in here all night,” Burns said. “She wound up working at the Scaregrounds.”
Spinning Wool
Away from the midways, along the edges of the fairgrounds are animal barns, antique tractors and engines that were used in farming and sawmills, and other aspects of rural life from the old days.
At one such structure, Janice Graham of Farrell, Pa., demonstrates the art of spinning wool into yarn. She has been a fixture at the fair for 12 years.
With a pedal-driven wooden spindle, she shows how fine merino wool from Australia is slowly turned into the soft and warm thread and then woven or crocheted into garments.
Graham sees it as a craft that deserves to be kept alive, if only to serve as a reminder of how people lived in centuries past.
“They would barter their services,” she said, explaining that there were no stores, so neighbors would trade woolen items for other goods or services.
Graham will give a spinning demonstration at the Community Library of the Shenango Valley in Sharon, Pa., at 2 p.m. Sept. 17.
The Great Pumpkin
Giant pumpkins and misshapen gourds have become a signature of the Canfield Fair, and the building that houses the annual display is always crowded.
The display is at a new location this year, inside a building directly behind where the old pumpkin building once stood.
The former building was torn down, and empty land is all that’s there now. No word on why it was razed, or if a new building will be built on the site.
By the way, the winner of this year’s giant pumpkin contest is Kali McMillin of Salem, who grew one that tipped the scales at 1,951 pounds.
Improvements
The Canfield Fair is all about tradition, and keeping things the way they always were is how you keep people coming back every year.
But a few improvements were made to create a better experience for visitors.
Infrastructure was added to improve wireless reception on the grounds. Anyone with a cellphone will notice the difference.
Also new this year is a series of kiosks in the middle of the amusement ride section, where guests can more rapidly purchase wristbands or ride credits.
Pictured at top: The exterior of the Canfield Scaregrounds booth beckons to brave visitors.
Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
