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The Biggest State Fair Ever May be the Best-Or a Bust

By Brad Bailey |

It’s not yet time to drape Big Tex in crepe-but the folks at the State Fair of Texas admit that they’re faced with what may become a sad state of affairs in this our Sesquicentennial year: the fair could get hurt and hurt bad this time around.

For the first time in more than a decade, since general manager Wayne Gallagher took over the fair and turned it into a profitable enterprise, there is talk of actually borrowing money to keep the State Fair afloat.

Not only that, but the fair will be sans some of its regular attractions when its doors open in October. Like the Dr Pepper Circus, because the soft-drink firm decided it didn’t want to be a pepper for thirty-one long, costly days. And the beloved Comet Coaster, that wooden-spined patriarch of the Midway, which will neither roll nor coast this year. How did things go so sour in Candy Apple Land? Blame it on an unfor-tunate combination of big plans and bad luck.

There were big dreams put to paper in those halcyon days a couple of years ago to make the 1986 fair, the “Texas 150” the biggest and bestest ever.

Whether that is the case remains to be seen, but it will certainly be the longest, running for a whopping thirty-one days. But will it be just an overly long fair or, as one fair observer put it, “a regular Bataan Death March”?

Undoubtedly, it’s the sizable built-in fixed costs that give fair officials the biggest headaches. To light, sanitize, secure, and man the sprawling production costs an estimated $225,000 per day. You need only be as smart as your pocket calculator to figure out that’s almost $7 million-and that is a very depressing figure indeed in light of the fact that mom and dad aren’t going to give Junior $50 or $100 to blow on corny dogs and such if mom and dad aren’t working.

That’s not the only problem. If you think the liability insurance situation isn’t a crisis yet, go talk to the folks at the fair. A mere two years ago, the State Fair was paying just $115,000 to insurers, for which it received $50 million in coverage. This year the fair paid more than $950,000 and received-for all that money-no more than $15 million in liability coverage.

What’s a million bucks mean to the fair? A lot. Take 1982, for instance, the fair’s best year ever. After all the expenses had been paid, the fair was overjoyed to report to itself that it had netted $1 million. “This year,” says fair spokesperson Nancy Wiley, “break-even would be welcomed.”

You can thank the skyrocketing liability insurance rates for the roller coaster’s silence this year. The fair’s liability insurance is contingency insurance-just in case the ride owner-operator’s insurance doesn’t cover liability from accidents or injuries, the fair’s policy serves as a backstop. But the State Fair owns and operates three rides of its own: the Carousel, the Log Flume, and the Comet.

As Wiley puts it: “When we are up to a million in insurance premiums already, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for buying more.” Rather than insure the Carousel and the Flume, the fair will allow those to be leased to an operator who is already insured. But the fair was hesitant to turn over the complicated coaster to anyone else and decided, to be on the safe side, not to operate it this year. “Hopefully, some sanity will be returned to the liability situation by next year,” says Wiley.

This year Ross Perot and the fair have gotten each other all hepped up about the Texas Pavil-ion. Perot’s autographed copy of the Magna Charta will be enshrined in the Hall of State along with many other attractions- among them “Goddess I,” the retired Goddess of Liberty recently liberated from the top of the state Capitol. Also included in the pavilion will be the Declaration of Independence of the U.S. and of Texas and Travis’s letter from the Alamo.

But again, money problems are pulling on the reins. Says Wiley: “Our original hope was that it was going to be sponsored, that it was going to be ’brought to you by Mobil Oil’ or something like that. We hoped someone would underwrite the entire project. Perot and EDS have put up a substantial amount, but the bottom line for the fair is that most of the bottom line is coming out of our pockets. And we are talking between a half and three quarters of a million dollars.”

Good attendance is badly needed at this year’s fair. “I hate to make predictions,” says Wiley. “But we’re hoping for between three and four million-give or take a million.” The record doesn’t provide cause for optimism. The best attendance ever was 3.1 million, established during the seventeen-day run in 1977; the twenty-four-day run in 1984 netted only 2.9 million visitors.

And then there’s the State Fair’s traditional worst enemy, one not even Paul Volcker and all the Arabs in the emirates can control: the weather. As October sloshes on toward November, precipitation traditionally increases.

A truly bad fair, income-wise, could have some far-reaching implications, since the fair organization lives the other eleven months of the year off interest income from the fair’s earnings. Lower gate receipts mean less organization; less organization means less fair. And we all know that less fair means less fun-for kids from one to ninety-two.

Fair folks are pinning some hope on the belief that an exasperating economy may leave people more hungry for fun than usual-and thus boost attendance. And. Wiley said, knocking wood, “It cannot possibly rain for thirty-one straight days.” But she acknowledged those worst fears: “We could get hurt on this one.”

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