Three weeks later, the fairgrounds were packed for opening day. Music filled the air as I walked toward the main gate, carrying my old volunteer badge in my shirt pocket along with a printed email I’d received two days earlier from the state fair association’s regional office, after a phone call I’d made mostly to satisfy my own curiosity about something I half-remembered from years back.
Fourteen years earlier, the association had opened nominations for its statewide Volunteer Hall of Fame, honoring individuals with exceptional long-term service to county fairs across the state. I’d been nominated by a fair board member who’d since passed on, and I’d genuinely forgotten the nomination had ever been formally approved, filed away in a state database nobody at our local fair had apparently thought to check before deciding I needed replacing with a “younger face.”
The regional office confirmed it for me in writing.
“Nomination approved and inducted into the State County Fair Volunteer Hall of Fame; inductees are entitled to permanent recognition and standing invitation at all affiliated fair events within the state, regardless of local staffing or volunteer program changes.”
I hadn’t come to make a scene at the gate. I found the new fair director near the entrance and simply showed her the email, along with my old badge, and asked, gently, whether she’d known the state association considered my role something closer to permanent than the local volunteer roster had apparently assumed.
She hadn’t known, and she said so plainly, a little embarrassed once she understood the actual weight of what she’d casually dismissed a few weeks earlier. A statewide recognition isn’t something a local fair board can quietly override, and she knew it the moment she read the confirmation for herself.
She invited me back to the gate that same morning, badge and all, and asked if I’d be willing to help train the new greeters instead of being replaced by them — showing them not just where the maps were kept, but the small things, which families came back every year, which kids got scared of the livestock barn, the parts of the job that never make it into a training manual.
I still greet families at that gate most autumns. The Ferris wheel still turns the same lazy circle it always has. Twenty-nine years taught me that a smile at a gate is a small thing to most people passing through it, but it adds up, year after year, into something a state association apparently noticed long before the people running the gate day to day ever thought to ask.