Happy Ghosts Abound at the Minnesota State Fair

Oh to live on Sugar Mountain, where every corner holds a thousand wistful and wonderful memories.

Cooper Street is one of the main streets on the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, so of course we had to take this photo on a visit a few years back. My daughter lives in Seattle, but she’s taken to the Minnesota State Fair just like her mom did growing up in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

I went to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday. I’m 56. I’ve probably been to the Minnesota State Fair 50 times in my life — some years I didn’t go at all, some years I went probably three or four times.

When you grow up in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Fair is as much a part of your fall as apple orchards, the changing leaves, going back to school (after Labor Day as God intended), and wondering if you’ll have to wear a snowsuit over your Halloween costume.

Minnesota is not the biggest state, but it has the best state fair. That’s my husband, lower left, looking puzzled at something. Maybe the fact that a new Fair food this year is fried ranch dressing.

My Fair roots go way back. My dad, Ed Fashingbauer, was born in St. Paul in 1920, and told me about attending the Fair back when he was a kid, pre-Great Depression. His strongest memory was of talking to the sideshow “fat lady,” Dolly Dimples, who gave him a photo postcard of herself. (It’s probably still in a box somewhere, 10 years after Dad died. He didn’t throw many things out.)

The sideshows have mostly gone the way of the dodo now, for good reason, but they were still hanging on by a thread when I went as a teen in the 1980s. My friends and I found them both creepy and enthralling. One trailer advertised “THE HEADLESS CENTERFOLD,” and told the story of a beautiful woman who was decapitated in a horrific car crash but was rushed to some magical medical center and kept alive without her head.

We Catholic schoolgirls were never about to enter any exhibit with the word “centerfold” in it, so we hurried past this one, with a few furtive glances at the salacious paintings of the centerfold’s sexy pre-crash bod.

Another exhibited a man with the genetic condition ectrodactyly (I do not think it was the infamous murderer Grady Stiles, but maybe) under the name Lobster Boy. I didn’t go in, but I can never forget the barker’s repeated entreaties to “Get down on your KNEES and thank GOD you were not born like the LOBSTER BOY.” (Respect for people with physical differences has come a long way since fairs considered it OK to exhibit people like this, though I’m sure it hasn’t come far enough.)

Another famous Fair sideshow was located not on the Midway, but out on the main drag. It was a trailer where you could pay your money and go inside to see Little Irvy, a 20-ton frozen sperm whale who was harpooned back during the Johnson administration. Again, I never went inside, but the barker’s recorded spiel is ingrained in my brain. “IF HE’S NOT ALIVE, WE WILL GIVE YOU THIS TRUCK.”

I mean, he definitely wasn’t alive? But maybe they meant, if he’s not made of plastic? I did not challenge them. I was a little kid, who could not drive and had no use for a truck.

My dear friend Ann Biales and I got up the nerve to go to a Fair sideshow only once. It was the Girl-Turned-Gorilla exhibit. That’s the one where you go into a tent and see a curvy female silhouette behind a curtain, and the barker weaves some story about how they discovered this girl in the Amazon who could turn into a gorilla. Then her silhouette shifted into that of a guy in a gorilla suit (spoiler: it’s all done with mirrors) and when the curtain went up to reveal him, he “broke out” of the cage and we all screamed in terror and bolted for the exit.

I’m glad the questionable sideshow era is gone, but I’m also secretly glad I went to one, just one, before it slid off into the history books.

I took this totally boring photo on the Minnesota State Fair Midway because this is where the Girl Turned Gorilla sideshow exhibit used to stand. There’s no plaque marking it, and no sideshow exhibits left, but I’ll always remember.

This year, on the Midway with my husband, our ride-loving teen, and her friend, we grabbed a bench for a rest, and I realized we were right by where the Girl Turned Gorilla exhibit once stood. I took a photo, not meaning to capture what is there now, but only what once was there. Ann died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism in 1995 at age 28, so I’m the only person left on Earth who shares that memory of our lone sideshow venture. That photo, like a million State Fair memories held in a million hearts, looks like nothing of consequence to anyone in the world except me.

The Minnesota State Fair has featured thousands of foods over the years. These simple Tom Thumb mini-donuts, so iconic that they’re practically the Fair’s mascot, remain my favorite.

That’s part of the magic of the Minnesota State Fair. It changes, in some ways, every year — this year brought 35 new Fair foods and 60-plus new drinks. But the more it changes, the more it stays the same. And your memories wind themselves around the landmarks and intersections, ready to be called up at a moment’s notice.

If the Minnesota State Fair has an iconic food, it’s either mini-donuts or cheese curds. My favorite mini-donut stand sits right outside Ye Olde Mill, aka the Tunnel of Love, where I once necked with my high school boyfriend and later cuddled my daughter as we bumped through Windex-colored water looking at dumpy fairy-tale displays. Ye Olde Mill hasn’t changed, and neither have the donuts — still hot, sugary and worth the indulgence.

The Midway rides soar out of the same area of the Fairgrounds that they always have, even though the sideshows have been shooed out, and the prizes for the balloon-popping game are now SpongeBob stuffies and not feathered roach clips or cocaine mirrors depicting heavy-metal bands or bikinied babes. (Ann won a mirror once, and convinced the carny to let her trade her half-naked hottie mirror for a probably-unlicensed one showing Duran Duran.)

The animal barns are permanent structures, perched solidly where they always sit. Since I grew up on a farm, horses and cows were far from novel to me, and these smelly barns were never my favorite things. But one year, my niece Erin and I went with some horse-exhibiting friends and hung out in their stall. Our big entertainment was to tie a rubber spider to a string and fling it over a beam, dropping it on unsuspecting Fairgoers as they passed by us. I remember that giggly prank without fail when I wander past the animal barns, and wonder what mischief a whole new generation of farm kids are getting up to.

The Creative Activities building showcases the crafts and foods that people enter in hopes of winning a blue ribbon, and it’s still located right by the big entrance gate. When I worked for the local regional magazine, Mpls.St. Paul, my editors tried to convince the Fair to bring me on as a food judge so I could write an article about it. They said no for one reason — I did not major in home economics. One assumes that rule has since been lifted, since how many home ec majors are colleges churning out these days?

Still, of all the permanent buildings, this one resonates most deeply with me, and every time I wander past the quilts and home-sewn pantsuits and hand-smocked baby clothes, I create a cozy mental picture of the Minnesotans who created them, huddled safely in warm homes during the long winter months, putting untold hours into these projects. It’s enough to make me want to take up knitting or quilting. Almost.

You could blindfold me and spin me around and I could probably still locate the Spin-Paint booth at the Fair. My mom took me there when I was a kid in the 1970s, and I took my own daughter, Kelly, in the 2010s. The booth’s simplicity makes me wonder if it’s changed at all — no frills, no fancy fonts, no virtual assistants or AI. Just spinning easels, squeeze bottles full of brightly colored paint, and paper.

The only innovation I noted when I took Kelly there in the 2010s was that in addition to painting your design on paper, you could choose to paint it on a Frisbee. (Don’t do it, says this now-experienced mom. The paint chips off the rounded plastic like cheap nail polish.) But moms and dads still stand behind their entranced kids, just like mine did 50 years ago, and like I did with my daughter 10 years ago, watching them squeeze out a rainbow of creativity, one shade at a time.

I can still smell the paint of the Spin-Art booth in my memories.

Just as anyone who’s lived in a town for a long while still sees long-gone landmarks in their mental map, I see vanished places at the Fair. Creative Activities connects to another building that’s full of tables selling everything from Ginsu knives to jewelry cleaner. The Jewelry Joy stand was a favorite of Ann’s and mine, because for 25 cents they would clean our rings while giving us the spiel on how we should buy their cleaning solution. (Sometimes we did. Other times we thanked them for the 25 cent cleaning job and walked off with newly shiny jewelry.)

That building connects to the Education Building, where my college and many others have booths. Yet what I remember most is the time in 1983 when my high school friends and I stumbled upon the booth of a chiropractor named Karl, and two of us readily agreed to free spinal “adjustments,” merely because Karl was incredibly cute. I would not remember Karl’s name except that it became an inside joke for the four of us, and “KARL THE CHIRO” is written in at least one of our yearbooks.

I see vanished people at the Fair, too. Ann, of course, who loved the Fair with the same passion I do, and who left this world far too early. In 1982, she went to an Air Supply concert at the Grandstand where one of the two musicians fell off the stage and had to be hospitalized. Whenever we heard “All Out of Love” or “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All” after that, she would retell the story.

My parents, Dad with his Dolly Dimples memory, and Mom who faithfully attended the Fair well into her 80s.

My friend Teresa, one of the friends who nabbed a free adjustment from KARL THE CHIRO, the same Teresa who joined and fled three separate convents on the bumpy road to try and find herself, and eventually left this world by her own choice.

There are ghosts at the Fair, and when the wind is right and I’m feeling melancholy about the world and my place in it, I am with them there.

And I see other ghosts, too. One of my sisters, Clio, discovered herself in a historic photo of the Fair that’s hanging on display. It shows her, with cool-kid sunglasses and a Marlo Thomas flip hairdo, sitting on the ground in the long-renamed Teen Age Fair area back in 1972. It’s eerie, but in the photo she looks almost exactly like me. It reminds me not only of my family’s connection to the Fair over the decades, but of Minnesota’s, an unbroken chain from the GI Generation to the Silents, to the Baby Boom, to my own Gen Xers and beyond.

Our family spotted this 1972 photo in a building displaying State Fair history, and we’re convinced the young woman in sunglasses is my sister, Clio, though anyone who knows me will tell you it looks exactly like me.

Trends come and go at the Fair. In the 1980s, we high schoolers flocked to the Fair video-game arcades to play Centipede, Space Invaders and Pac-Man, just as we did in the then-novel shopping mall arcades. The Fair arcades are still there, though perhaps not as bustling, as the kids of 2024 have better video games on the phone in their pocket than we ever dreamed of.

This used to be the only place to stop for water at the Fair back in the day.

Even something as simple as water at the Fair has changed over the years. The Fair is always held on the 10 days up to and including Labor Day, when Minnesota’s weather can range from scorching hot to “uh-oh, I feel the tickle of colder days in the air.” Back in the day, the only place we knew to stop for a gulp of much-needed water was the Culligan water stand, where you could stop at a drinking fountain or fill an empty cup. Today, everyone walks around toting personal water bottles, and if not, there’s plenty of bottled water for sale. Paying for water? That would’ve seemed as alien to us as self-driving cars.

If you were somehow able to go back to 1984 and zap me and my high school friends off the Fairgrounds and land us in the same exact spot today, exactly 40 years later, we’d know where we are without question. We’d be able to find our way around the familiar streets and Fair buildings without a doubt.

But we would see changes everywhere — pay phones replaced by cell phones, cash payments replaced by taps from watches, no one smoking cigarettes but an underlying scent of marijuana (legal now in the state, if not at the Fair). We’d marvel at the new foods (Kool-Aid pickles? Deep-fried ranch dressing?) and give thanks that no one took away our mini-donuts and cheese curds. We’d faint at the entrance price of $18 and that the all-you-can-drink milk booth has gone from 25 cents to $3. We’d be confused by the electric cars and probably fall over laughing if we spotted a Cybertruck.

Ch-ch-ch-changes, as David Bowie sang, back in the decade of my first-ever Fair visit. Turn and face the strange. And that’s the thing about change, you have to face it, you have no choice in the matter. Friends and parents die, beloved old hangouts and landmarks close, and if you’re lucky, you have a huge part of memory invested in a place like the Fair, that keeps going, year after year, offering you a time warp back to your childhood, your teen years, college days, the sleepless nights of early parenthood.

Neil Young once sang about lost youth in a song that seems tailor-made for the Minnesota State Fair and its ghosts.

Oh to live on Sugar Mountain,
With the barkers and the colored balloons.
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain,
Though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon.

Maybe I can’t be twenty there, but I can be ten, and seventeen, and twenty-five, and forty. And I can see dancing ghost memories of all of those lost ages, all those lost friends and family, on the Midway where the sideshows once stood, in the rainbow whirls of the Spin-Paint booth, and in the lapping electric-blue waves of Ye Olde Mill.

The Fair used to let you donate a small amount of money for an engraved brick in the Grandstand plaza. I donated one for Ann that reads, “FAIR COMPANION” and one for my parents that cites their favorite Kris Kristofferson song, “For the Good Times.”

Ann’s memorial brick is older than most, and the engraving is tough to read. It took me a long time to find it this year, but I persisted. (I try to remember to look for a large nearby brick with a carved soft pretzel on it as a locator.)

I visit them when I make my Fair pilgrimages, much like you might visit a cemetery, kissing two fingers and touching them gently to each brick, germs be damned.

Hi guys, hi, I say in my head. I miss you. You’re not here, but somehow you’re always here, at this special gathering place, a place that changes and yet never changes, a place that mattered to you, to me, to Minnesota. Happy Fair. See you next year.