ELEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART V 269 



I used to attend regularly the Iowa State Fair twenty or twenty-two 

 years ago. It became a habit. And while I came here probably to be 

 entertained, I think at that age that was the main object, to be enter- 

 tained, yet I went away with a whole lot of information that I needed. 

 I believe that a large per cent of the average citizens who go to the 

 State Fair go to be entertained, but when they go to the Iowa State 

 Fair, for instance, they come away with a head full of ideas, they forget 

 about the entertainment features they were going there to enjoy and 

 come away with a lot of ideas that they will put into practice when they 

 go home, probably breeding better stock, or it may be corn, and 

 the buying of better machinery, and a hundred of other things you 

 might say. It seems to me that we cannot strike a point that will appeal 

 to people more than emphasizing the educational side of the fairs. We 

 have got to have the entertainment features, we must have them if we 

 get people inside the gates, and we have got to have people inside the 

 gates in order to run the fair. But when the pebple get into the grounds, 

 if the fair is so strongly educational that they forget the entertainment 

 side of it and immediately go to work studying the real exhibits, the 

 fair is fulfilling the purpose that it was intended for. 



I think, too, that fair managements should be very careful in arrang- 

 ing a fair so that the man who comes to the fair with his son will 

 at once become interested in the educational side of it more than the 

 entertainment side of it. I have observed that at some fairs, probably 

 not some of the better ones, it seemed to me that the reverse was the case, 

 the men would come there with the boys and there was too much other 

 stuff to entertain them and they did not get the best of it. But I 

 have attended the Iowa State Fair the last few years, as well as 

 twenty years ago, and it seems to me that a man loses sight of every- 

 thing else but education when he gets inside the grounds. It has 

 been the case here and it has been the case with me. And I tell 

 you that I am thoroughly imbued with the idea that there is no other 

 means of reaching the majority of men on the farms who are past middle 

 age as well as you can through a great state fair, and if you do this, after 

 you interest them, they may take up more thorough investigation of agri- 

 cultural problems, and I believe that this is the place they are interested. 

 I think Professor Curtis will bear me out in this statement, that to men 

 as a rule, agriculture has been talked so much that they are getting 

 tired of hearing mere spiel; they want to see something, they want to 

 see results, and if you can show that you can interest them, and the 

 state fair is where you interest them and get them started. 



The question of the state fair paying — there is no question about it in 

 the w r orld. I believe that the State Fair of Iowa has had as much 

 or more to do with the advanced values in the state of Iowa than any 

 other institution within its borders. The wonderful advancement that 

 has been made in agriculture in Iowa, the marked advancement in farm 

 values, can be traced back to the Iowa State Fair, I think. Now in 

 Missouri, our fair is younger than yours, but we have patterned after 

 the Iowa state fair as closely as we could, and I think that the wonder- 



