A new day at the fair

Enter the Utah State Fair from Gate 19 in the north part of the Fairpark and you'll be met by a booth for a service combining satellite TV, the Internet and telephone services.

"Feed your need for speed," a banner reads.

Not far away, other stands promote jewelry cleaning, real estate, mortgages, time shares, weight-loss products, hot tubs, cool sunglasses and sundry videos, including religious ones.

The providers are among 272 commercial vendors listed, many of which hint of home show more than state fair.

There's so much commercialism and hawking of goods (and not-so-goods) going on some might wonder if they've wandered into an "in-fair-mercial." Now there's more advertising than agriculture, more trading post than trade show, more mall than manure.

Calvin and Linnie Stevens, an Orem couple in their 80s raised on Idaho farms, used to attend to the fair annually. They stopped coming about five years ago because, as Calvin puts it, "It got kind of boring." They gave it another chance this year because an RV show hadn't opened yet.

"It got where they didn't have any animals," Linnie said. "They don't have any momma pigs with their little ones. That was the highlight of the fair. They used to have tables of flowers. Now they're very scant."

Calvin says kids nowadays don't want to look at plants and animals, they want to play on the rides while others would prefer buying gadgets. He's fine with that. He just wishes the farming aspect didn't take a back seat.

There are petting zoos and buildings with farm animals, but you have to walk to the outer edges to find the Bambouillet sheep, the billy goats and the pens stocked with large, lounging pigs from Allred Hog Farm, which, as the sign claims, produces the "best pork on a fork!"

"In our time, that's what a lot of people were interested in. . . . People nowadays are more interested in the commercial end of it," Calvin said. "It takes a whole lot of things to interest everybody. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to please everybody."

David Christiansen, a retired electrical engineer from Bountiful, said the mix is fine, but the former 4A and FFA club member comes for the exhibits that end with -culture.