Dutchess County Fair Manager Bob Grems was named the 2010 Fair Person of the Year by the New York State Showpeople”™s Association this month, honored for his lifelong involvement with county fairs and for his success presenting new programs within the industry. He also was honored for his commitment and rapport with show people and fair workers.
Grems said it comes naturally. “I grew up across the street from the Oneida County Fairgrounds,” said Grems. “When the first travel trailer pulled up on the fairgrounds my eyes opened wide and I went right over there.” He noted wryly that while his father thought the fair to be a bothersome inconvenience, his mother loved it and annually entered her produce in the competitions, while imbuing her son with a love of the fair.
But a love of tradition does not mean a static outlook. Grems is making changes in the Dutchess Fair to further its mission of promoting agriculture and fomenting tourism. Thus, recently, the fairgrounds began to tap the 100 maple trees on the 162-acre property in Rhinebeck for use in a weekend-long festival complete with pancakes and educational programs on making maple syrup. There is also a working apple-cider press on the grounds now and discussion of possibly creating a wine press to help showcase regional vineyards.
Â
And plans are in the works, in coming years, to extend the fair run from six to nine days, so that two weekends are available, lessening the traffic impact on the surrounding area that develops during the current single weekend, and also lessening the chances that rains drown attendance and dampen the financial prospects of vendors and the fair itself.
Â
The ideas developed from some 40 years experience in the field. After attending the fairs as a child, Grems worked at the Oneida County Fair during college, from early morning trash collection up to the front office, and loved the life of shows and traveling attractions so much that in his mid-20s, he traded in his life as a school teacher for work as the announcer in the Joie Chitwood Auto Thrill Show, performing throughout the country. He was also VP of Marketing for Fiesta Shows in the New England area.
In the late 1980s, he returned home to manage the Oneida County Fair and developed programs to bring economically disadvantaged children there for an Ideal County Holiday, with free rides, lunches and shows.
Grems became manager of the Dutchess County Fair in 2007. The Fairgrounds have an annual budget of about $3.5 million and witness 40 shows there over the course of a year, including a popular antique car show.
The Dutchess Fair is the largest six-day county fair in the state, attracting around 300,000 people annually during its run, a crowd roughly the size of Dutchess County”™s population.
Grems has replicated his Ideal County Holiday idea and brought in new methods of selling advance tickets and food from fair vendors online at discount rates.
Mostly, however, Grems said that while the rides are faster and more complex, the crux of county fairs remains largely unchanged from the first such fair two hundred years ago. He noted Dutchess County will celebrate its 165th annual fair this year and said that then as now agriculture and promoting farmers is the main reason to hold the fair and the main reason visitors attend.
“The beautiful thing is fairs haven”™t changed that much,” said Grems “We are here to showcase agriculture, the No. 1 industry in New York state and still why we are here. The jams, the jellies, the pies, the cakes, the cows, are the essence of the Fair.”
