News

Editorial: Great memories come in all shapes and sizes

By Scott Wagar

06/19/2012

A county fair is always a fun time in the moment, but when one really thinks about it, it is the memories that one has afterward that makes a county fair so great.

Fairgoers have delightful memories of the rides they’ve been on, that special homemade pie they had the opportunity to taste, or that stout pig which won grand champion for its plump appearance.

For my great-grandmother, the memory that spun on the edges of her memory’s eye concerning the Bottineau County Fair, didn’t take place at the fairgrounds, but it had “county fair” written all over it, and a long lasting effect in her reminiscence of the fair.

Back in the 1940s, my great grandmother awoke early one morning and made her way outside to check on some sheets she had washed the day before and left out overnight. As she went to her clothes line, she heard something odd behind the sheets on the line. So, she quickly looked over the sheets and saw something that concerned her greatly.

She immediately returned back to her house and called my grandfather, who lived directly across the street from her. She asked him to come over to her house quickly because she had a strange animal eating out of her garden. My grandfather, who was still sleeping when the phone rang, was a little confused by what my great-grandmother was telling him. In fact, he joked with her, asking her if she had been drinking that morning. However, he made his way across the street, to the sheets on the clothes line, and peeked over to see what she was taking about. Sure enough, what my great-grandmother said was happening was true. Here, in her garden that morning, she found an elephant snacking on her vegetables.

During that time period, circuses traveled with midways from town to town; and apparently, this circus elephant grew tired of the fair and made his get-a-way out of the Bottineau fairgrounds and directly into my great-grandma’s vegetable garden.

The fair was contacted, the circus personal came and collected its elephant, and, everybody seemed to have a good laugh over the incident. More so, since that time, this story has left our family with a great memory of the fair.

Events and fantastic memories come in all shape and sizes in rural America fairs. But, for my great-grandmother, one of her favorite memories came in the shape of an elephant.