154 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



who call each other Bill and John and Mary, and say "Hello" and have a 

 fine, neighborly, social time, that makes Lfe worth the living. You can- 

 not make a fair attractive without amusements at the fair, and it is these 

 fair amusements that I know are your greatest puzzle and the hardest 

 tilings to solve. You can get up an exhibition of hogs and corn and cattle 

 without much trouble, because you know where to put your hand on 

 them, how to arrange all of the. pens and facilities for showing and judg- 

 ing, and any such thing; but the amusements you have forgotten. You 

 have- satisfied yourselves — and when I say "yourselves," I mean all of us 

 — we have satisfied ourselves to go to town and buy some amusements for 

 our fair. I think we cannot get along without buying our amusements, 

 but the amusements which please us most are the things which we do 

 ourselves, things we are interested in. 



Now, I have something to suggest to you. I never like to make a criti- 

 cism without offering the way out. Every community has a resource for 

 amusement, which if assembled and put to work will surprise you in its 

 results. The other night I went out to a municipal concert in Omaha. I never 

 was to one before, and it cost nothing, and I went down. Five thousand peo- 

 ple packed in our auditorium, and the best thing they had was a little show 

 staged by a bunch of Rumanians who are workers in the packing house 

 at South Omaha. Men and w^omen came in there with their native cos- 

 tumes on, and they gave us their native music and a Rumanian folk dance. 

 Their costumes were black and white, with skirts on the men that flut- 

 tered a good deal when they danced, and the simple thing about it was 

 that it was nothing more than what we called "Ring Around the Rosey" 

 when we were children, and they danced with a lot of enthusiasm. Their 

 folk songs, strangely enough, had no — well, we will say they all sang the 

 air, there were no parts to their music, the men and women all sang 

 their native songs in that way. Now, you could take a Scotch community 

 or an Irish community and find some one in there who can give you the 

 Irish jokes and the Scotch reel, and possibly if they are artists they could 

 give the sword dance or the Highland fling. I can tell you right now that 

 Glen Gordon of Omaha can stage one-half hour of Scotch amusement and 

 entertainment to the King's taste, and it will be as good in the day time 

 as in the night time. I saw a big Hebrew girl, Miss Deliebenfels of Daven- 

 port, dance the Highland fling at a Burns celebration with so much en- 

 thusiasm and so much inspiration to joy that there is no man or woman 

 in the world that wouldn't have enjoyed that for ten minutes. And so it is 

 all along the line. We neglect some very simple things. There isn't a 

 man in Iowa that hasn't pitched horseshoes, and you can get more abso- 

 lute enjoyment out of pitching a game of horseshoes than you get out of 

 any horserace. And in saying that I do not belittle the horse race, for we 

 couldn't get along without the horse races. And your baseball games are 

 a great attraction, and when your home nine stays at home that fair 

 week and defies all comers, it is an attraction. 



And community singing. There is not a time in the history of the 

 world when people are fonder of music than just now among the American 

 people, and when you get thousands of people together with a good leader 

 and a band to help them, and ask them to sing "America" or "Old Black 



