For six days straight, 12 hours a day, in Booth 16 in Commercial Building No. 37, I celebrated the 70th Anniversary of the Berrien County Youth Fair. I had the time of my life raising money for the proposed Expo Arena at the Berrien County Youth Fair, the $17 million project nearing its ground breaking goal of $5 million.

The week started on Monday, August 17 with a tremendous boost from this newspaper. The Expo Arena was given a ringing endorsement in the paper’s main editorial. It was a terrific way to begin my week at the fair!

By the time the fair ended on Saturday, August 22, the Expo Arena project had received over $10,600, thanks to young Matt Koebel who auctioned off the milk from his champion dairy cow and presented the Expo Arena with his winnings. What a fine gift from a fine young man from one of the county’s finest families!

Tuesday was “Kids Day” and children under 18 got in free! We all know that every day is kids day at the fair and this middle-aged kid had a ring-side seat for some of the best people watching anywhere. I was even treated to a complete melt-down by a very precocious 6-year-old who told his mother, “We’ve had a perfectly wonderful and memorable day at the fair and you won’t buy me anything to commemorate it with!”

The Berrien County Youth Fair is one of the largest “youth fairs” in the nation. It is NOT a 4-H fair like many of our surrounding county fairs. You do not have to belong to a 4-H club to be an exhibitor. You just have to be a young person between the ages of 5 and 20.

Berrien County is truly blessed to have an institution like the Berrien County Youth Fair. The grounds are always immaculate. In fact, the fair began recycling over 40 years ago, before recycling became the norm. There are beautiful gardens everywhere, but during Fair Week it is hard to notice them because of the crowds. The scores of fair buildings are always neatly painted and well-scrubbed.

It is evident that the people who attend the fair have great pride in the facility. It is even more clear that the people who have been running the fair for over 70 years — the staff, the volunteers, and the board of directors — take great joy in presenting a decades old tradition of honoring our young people with the best county fair anywhere.

After spending 35 years working in Washington as a congressional staffer and a registered lobbyist, my annual week at the fair always reminds me how lucky I am to have come home to Berrien County when I did.

I want to thank everyone who attended this year’s Berrien County Youth Fair and I want to thank the Niles Daily Star for supporting us!

 

A native of Niles, Jack Strayer moved back home in 2009 after living and working in Washington DC since 1976. Strayer has served as a congressional staffer, state legislative press secretary, federal registered lobbyist and Vice President of the National Center for Policy Analysis. He is a nationally recognized expert on federal health policy reform and led the fight for the enactment of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).