TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 155 



Joe" or "The Star Spangled Banner," and all those things, and have them 

 get up on their feet and sing and enjoy life generally, they go home feel- 

 ing that they have had something worth while — because they have been 

 a part of it. That's the idea. And that is the idea of community amuse- 

 ment. It constitutes the best advertising medium that any fair can have. 

 You have got to pick your talent. You can find men or women here who 

 can do something, and you get them to come together and help you. You 

 have got to get a chorus together and train them, and they go home and 

 cackle about it and tell their neighbors that they are going to be in it, 

 and it is just absolutely the best advertising in the world, and when it 

 is pulled off it is an amusement that we can share ourselves, for we have 

 made it. That is the sort of thing that is open to us, and which can be 

 carried on. 



Now then, this promotion business, just a word on it. I have written 

 to some of you men about the promotion business. You cannot organize 

 and keep together and make any business successful by working at it one 

 week in the year. You cannot promote any business without a promotion 

 fund. You cannot promote anything without somebody to do the work, 

 but this is a day of duplicating machines and stamping machines and 

 printing machines. Every county fair secretary must have a mailing list, 

 and the means for using it. That means may be used only once a month 

 — have a girl come in there once a month with a duplicator and mail out 

 your literature to everybody and reach everybody personally with some- 

 thing about a fair. You say you are going to have so-and-so amusements 

 and send it out to them, telling them to plant something for the fair, how 

 to plant it, how to give it a little attention. Harvest comes along, and tell 

 them to harvest something for the fair, how to harvest it, how to take 

 care of it, how to show it. Those little things keep the interest perpetu- 

 ally before the people. It doesn't matter especially whether the people 

 who get that thing act on it, but their interest is renewed. 



Now then, interest them in the producing of things for the fair, and 

 interest them in producing the amusements for the fair, and you have got 

 your whole community interested all the time, and when the fair is pulled 

 off they simply cannot stay away. Of course, it will be a busy time. No 

 doubt it was then like I was one year. The fair was coming on and I 

 wanted to go, but the alfalfa farm wasn't obeying the regulations, the 

 alfalfa hay was just properly matured and had to be cut on the first day 

 of the fair. We started out early in the morning and by hard work got the 

 forty acres cut and shoved it together with the sweeps and then went 

 away and left it — as fine a bunch of hay, 30 tons probably, as you ever 

 saw, and it seemed to be getting along fine, the finest kind of weather, 

 and we had a nice fair to attend. In those days before the war we had a 

 German Day, when it was permissible to have such a German Day, and 

 they all gathered there and had some German speeches and some German 

 songs, and we had a fine concert and a fine crowd, and everybody enjoyed 

 themselves. But the last hour of that fair a storm suddenly came up, as 

 you know they do out there, and we had an inch of rain, and my alfalfa 

 hay was worth that (snapping his fingers). That happens in our carrying 



