State Fair: "She Crawls on Her Belly Like a Reptile"

The State Fair of Texas is a big, wide, awkwardly handsome affair, of Texans, by Texans and for Texans. Its virtues and excesses require a native's perspective. TIME Writer Mark Goodman was born and raised in Dallas, and returned for a nostalgic look at the fair. His report:

TEXAS is really two distinct countries. There is high-rolling Texas, oil-rich and cattle-fat, iridescent with electronic gadgetry. This is the Texas of the Hunts and the Murchison brothers and Neiman-Marcus, and multimillion-dollar transactions conducted in private jets that whisper swiftly through the silvery prairie night. Then there is the hardscrabble Texas, dusty and dun, which fans out westward from Fort Worth to towns like Dilley and Draw and Del Rio, where the good ole boys gather round gas-station coolers to drink RC Colas and tell lazy lies. It is a sullen land, worked by silent, leathery men and their resilient women.

The two Texases converge each year on the state fair, held for 16 days in October on permanent, 200-acre grounds in East Dallas. Inevitably, it is the largest fair in the nation, attracting more than 3,000,000 visitors this year. Moreover, it is unique as a monument to Texas' preference for hip-shooting free enterprise, a self-sustaining, $2,000,000 hoedown that does not take one thin dime from the state treasury.

The fair indeed has its fancified features. Promises, Promises plays to large audiences in the State Fair Music Hall. In the Automobile Building, fairgoers get a glimpse of the trim 1972 models, foreign as well as domestic. Their virtues are purred into microphones by trim Texas models in cutaway gowns. It is a sex-and-power display that, as they say down home, Madison Avenue couldn't beat with a stick.

But follow the right-hand signal of Big Tex--a 52-ft.-high drugstore cowboy statue giving directions in a mechanical voice that sounds like a blend of Charlton Heston and Chill Wills. Then you come upon the preserve of the second Texas: the livestock exhibitions. In the Swine Building, Brobdingnagian hogs slumber peacefully in their stalls. Photographs of the various Quality Pork Champions are posted on a bulletin board in two neat rows, like so many Miss Rheingold winners on a barroom wall. The most frenetic activity takes place in the Livestock Pavilion, where coveralled owners lavish on their animals care that would do credit to Elizabeth Arden. In one stall a West Texas matron in toreador pants, see-through blouse and perhaps the last bouffant hairdo in Western civilization teased the tip of her Hereford's tail with a hot comb. Her loving efforts were of little avail, however; most of the significant Hereford trophies went to Winrock Farms, owned by a former Governor of Arkansas name of Winthrop Rockefeller.

Between Big Tex and the livestock beauty parades lies the heart of every fair: the midway. Texan or otherwise, breathes there a man with soul so dead that he did not once thrill to the gut-wrenching twists and turns of the Caterpillar and the Black Widow? Or pit his adolescent's rolled-steel stomach against the depredations of Corny Dogs and Bar-B-Q mystery meat burgers and loomfuls of pink cotton candy? Even those barbaric relics of carnival days, the sideshow freaks, are still present. Hear the saw-throated barker cry of the Headless Body Beautiful: "Yessir, folks, step right up and see Lola, the living, decapitated victim of a hideous automobile accident!" There is the Frog Boy, and Giant Hong Kong Rats, and a "gen-ewe-ine female cannibal," ominously billed as Zoma the Depraved. And, of course, there is the terrible, eternal Alligator Lady: "She walks, she talks, she crawls on her belly like a reptile, a leapin', screamin', creepin', crawlin' mawnster! She's eleven feet lawng and she's alahv!"

Since football is every bit as important to the Texas social structure as bourbon and the Baptist Church, it is only fitting that the fair should kick off with the annual Texas-Oklahoma game. This Southwestern tribal ritual more closely resembles a vigorous bloodletting in the Circus Maximus than a friendly athletic contest. Instead of musky wine from handwrought goblets, though, the spectators knock down rye whisky from leather-bound flasks while the hot-blooded young gladiators, as they say down home, whup ole Billy outa one another. Turns out, for the first time in five years, it is Oklahoma that does the whupping. By day's end Texas has lost its first-and second-string quarterbacks, a linebacker, a tight end, the game (by a score of 48-27) and considerable face. One disconsolate Longhorn fan moans: "Them Oklahoma boys was meaner'n seven hunnerd elves!"

The state fair predates the Texas-O.U. rivalry by 14 years. Begun in 1886, the fair expanded to nearly its present size in 1936, the year of the Texas Centennial. While it has traditionally been a showcase for Texas chauvinism, the character of the fair has changed somewhat in the past two decades. Says General Manager Joseph B. Rucker Jr.: "We wanted the fair to have an educational and cultural justification to place it beyond the ordinary festival." This year the motif is "Expo-Trans-Port," and the fair features an impressive mock-up of the new four-terminal airport presently under construction between Dallas and Fort Worth. There is also a new emphasis on Texas ethnic groups (German Day, Czech Day) and a growing spirit of Pan-Americanism. Cattlemen from Argentina, Nicaragua and Costa Rica flock to the fair to buy prime breeding cattle. They are treated like visiting royalty, right down to a barbecue for 1,500 on Lamar Hunt's Circle T Ranch. While the wealthy Latin Americans take the 5,000-acre spread in stride, their home-grown counterparts are visibly awed. Drawls one weathered wrangler: "Ole Lamar got so much money, he coulda greased Pontius Pilate's palm and got Jesus Christ off with three weeks on the county correction farm."

For all the innovations, the state fair is too rooted in traditional carnival tackiness ever to change appreciably. Yet in these volatile days, any sort of permanence, even homespun vulgarity, has a stabilizing effect. So it is momentarily comforting to go home again and rediscover this preposterous adobe Oz, where benevolent witches primp their flocks with hot combs, and happy little people fly giddily about on magic Caterpillars and Black Widows, and raspy wizards chant tall, dark tales of the Alligator Lady who crawls on her belly like a reptile. Ah, yes, the State Fair of Texas still has the power to charm, because the more it changes, the more it stays the same. Or, like they say down home, plus c,a change, ole buddy.

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