66 TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART II. 



year unintentionally, we will put it, or else their program will fall 

 mightily behind this year in the amount allowed to races and ball games 

 and free acts. I think many fairs are misrepresenting the facts of their 

 fair. I think that each fair should take a change and an invoice of 

 themselves and see where they stand, and I think many of you men 

 here will agree with me that many of the fairs are going beyond 

 their means. 



So I say if the fair managers, whether by districts as laid out by 

 our association or not, take the fairs within say a radius of thirty 

 miles that have railroad connections, and have the managers meet at 

 some central point. In our eastern district we take in a list of fairs 

 such as Strawberry Point, Manchester, Independence, Jesup, Marion, 

 Maquoketa, Elkader and West Union. 



We take an invoice of ourselves. Are you furnishing everything free 

 to the exhibitors, are you allowing pass-out checks, and such things as 

 that? 



You should get together and talk over what purses you will put up, 

 what program you are going to put up. Personally, I think many of 

 us fairs, and I am including myself in this, have been trying to outdo 

 each other. I am in favor of the exhibitor and the concession man, and 

 I believe if we men will get together and talk over these things every 

 summer we will do away with some of these expenses. Arrange your 

 race cards. Arrange your baseball games. At Independence in our 

 district this year we put up a hundred dollar purse, divided sixty and 

 forty for baseball, and when I arrived home I had three letters upon my 

 desk in a week from baseball teams in our county that we had helped 

 while the war was on, saying that they would not play for that. These 

 baseball teams did not take into consideration what we had been doing 

 and they all wanted a $250 guarantee. By our organization our three 

 fairs saved ourselves $400. I believe we have to have our organizations 

 and I think that the secretary has got all your counties laid out on the 

 letterhead, and if you can't work in harmony with all of your fairs, in 

 your district, you should submit the question and have a change of ar- 

 rangement so that you can. Have it so it is convenient and then you 

 can meet and take up the smallest details and you can work them out. 

 I worked one year with Waverly on a change of acts, but that is an 

 exception and I know there are not many towns arranged on the railroads 

 so you can. But if the Iowa fair secretaries ever in the world should 

 take an invoice of themselves financially, I believe it is now and the dis- 

 trict meetings to me are the best thing we have ever had. 



President Estel : Mr. Wilkinson, our secretary, has very interest- 

 ing things to tell us in regard to the Toronto meeting which he 

 attended for the organization, and before we get into the questions it 

 would probably be well to have Mr. Wilkinson give us a review of 

 that meeting and what it accomplished. 



Secretary Wilkinson: I was going to give you a review of the year's 

 work starting from the last annual meeting. The results of the last 

 annual meeting you all received many months ago in this printed pam- 



