Bloomsburg Fair
Bloomsburg, PA (2024)
It's that time of year when I take a break from my routine of Mahoning Drive In Theater and limited edition snack food posts to indulge in one of my favorite parts of living in Northeast Pennsylvania, the Bloomsburg Fair.
Bloomsburg, PA (2024)
It's that time of year when I take a break from my routine of Mahoning Drive In Theater and limited edition snack food posts to indulge in one of my favorite parts of living in Northeast Pennsylvania, the Bloomsburg Fair.
I don't know how long Uncle Nick's Candy Game has been in business at the Bloomsburg Fair, but it's been there every year since I was too small to reach the numbers to put my quarter down. It's a pretty simple game. You put a quarter down on one (or more) of the numbers, and the guy in the blue sweatshirt spins the wheel. If your number comes up, you win a ticket that you can redeem at the end of the counter for candy or other snacks.
The amount of candy that you can win has been hit by shrinkflation over the years. From the time I was a kid up until a couple of years ago, the smallest prize that you could win on a single quarter was three candy bars, and the largest prize you could win was a full box of candy (24 bars). If you walked past the game, you'd hear the guy in the blue sweatshirt saying "get a bag, get a box" in a sing-songy voice to entice folks to come and play the game. Well, he doesn't sing that particular song anymore, because the prize amounts have been reduced to one, three, or six bars depending on where the wheel lands. It's still fun to play, but the thrill of being able to win a whole box of candy bars for a quarter is sadly a thing of the past.
My grandmother would always stop to play Uncle Nick's Candy Game when I was a kid. She always bet on #2, so that's the number that I play.
Grandma must have been looking out for us on Sunday because we ended up winning five candy bars, all on #2, and we didn't spend more than it would have cost us to buy the same candy at the store. It's not the kind of high stakes gambling victory that they make movies about, but I'll take it.
We did manage to hit the jackpot when it comes to pins. One of the vendors had thousands of them for sale all spread out on a table. We spent at least twenty minutes looking through them, and believe it or not, there weren't a whole lot of duplicates.
These are the four pins that I picked out. The Adam Bomb one is especially cool to me. Garbage Pail Kids are one of the things I've come to associate with the Bloomsburg Fair from my childhood. Every year, there were vendors who were selling wax or rack packs of them for a quarter or fifty cents, and my grandparents would let me get a few. I remember sitting in the back seat of my grandfather's car opening the packs and looking through the stickers on the drive home.
The other pins I picked up were The Dude staring into the Time Magazine mirror from The Big Lebowski, a Don't Panic logo from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and a VHS tape. I was shocked and happy to have found each of them.
We usually pick up a few Christmas ornaments at the Bloomsburg Fair. The stand where we regularly buy them didn't have anything that we wanted this year, but we found these at a stand called Saw Family Creations. They've got Etsy shop with many other nice ornaments.
The grandstand building didn't seem as packed as it had in previous years. I'm not sure if this is because the grounds have expanded giving vendors more places to set up shop or if the spots in the grandstand building have gotten more expensive. I was happy to see that one of the shops was still selling the old toys that I used to see here when I was a kid. It wouldn't surprise me too much if the ones in the picture above are the exact same merchandise that they had back in the 80's and 90's.
We always make a point of visiting The Spice Man in the grandstand building. They have an interesting mix of things including herbs, spices, extracts, baking sprinkles, soups, and loose leaf tea. We picked up some Christmas-themed teas and dried mushrooms this year.
This vendor has been in the exact same spot in the grandstand building at the Bloomsburg Fair every year for as long as I've been coming here. When I was in elementary school, their stock consisted entirely of VHS tapes of old movies, serials, and television shows from the 1930's through the 1950's. Each tape was sold in a big chunky white box with a photocopied black-and-white cover for $20.
These days, they mostly sell those same old movies, serials and shows on DVD, but they're still in chunky white boxes, and most of them still have the old photocopied black-and-white covers slipped into the front of the case. However, the price has been lowered to $10 for their close out sale, and it didn't take long to figure out why that was the case.
Saturday Afternoon At The Movies was owned and operated by a vendor named Jim Spotts. He passed away last January, and his store has been operated by a husband and wife who have another vendor table inside of the grandstand building. It seems like they're trying to sell off as much of the videos as they can, and that we're seeing the last days of a long standing tradition at the Fair. I can understand why. Back in the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's, most of the movies and shows on these tapes were hard to find. In 2024, you can find most of it on YouTube for free, or on other streaming platforms that will cost you considerably less than ten dollars for every two hours of content.
This may be the last time that I'll be able to indulge in this childhood memory, so I decided that I had to buy something, if only to serve as a souvenir from a part of the Bloomsburg Fair that I have always known, and I knew which video I wanted as soon as I made this decision.
When I was a kid, my grandparents would usually stop to let me look around at this stand for about two minutes before going into "distract the kid and shuffle him off" mode. In retrospect, they were pretty good at this. I stopped at Spencer Gifts just about every weekend when we went to the Wyoming Valley Mall, and it wasn't until my freshman year of high school that I noticed that they carried sex toys. However, there was one year when I was around 12 or 13 years old that they actually stopped to look at some of the videos that were being sold at this stand, and they ended up buying a Ma & Pa Kettle tape.
Ma & Pa Kettle was a film series from the 40's and 50's about and old hillbilly couple who lived on a farm, had a bunch of kids, and did their best to cope with modern living. It reminded me of The Beverly Hillbillies, but without the sudden wealth plot device. I wouldn't call it laugh-out-loud funny, but it's pleasant to watch and it made me chuckle even when I was a smart-ass teenager.
The Ma & Pa Kettle tape that my grandparents bought that day is still in a box in my garage somewhere. There are ten Ma & Pa Kettle films and I don't remember which ones were on that tape, but I think it might have been Ma & Pa Kettle Go To Town and Ma & Pa Kettle Back On The Farm. I didn't want to get the same movies just in case I ever manage to find that old tape that my grandparents bought in the early 90s, but I wanted to get one of their other movies. When I considered that I was buying this mostly as a souvenir of the fair itself, the DVD of Ma & Pa Kettle At The Fair was too perfect to pass up.
The theme in the Horticultural Building this year was America The Beautiful. This was pretty bland as far as themes go. I've never been real big on flag waiving mandatory pride being shoehorned into all aspects of life in this country. The only people whose pride in being an American makes any sense to me at all are the folks who have moved here from another county to become Americans. That pride is at least based on personal accomplishment. Being proud to be born here seems as silly to me as taking pride in the company that made the first mattress that you laid on as a baby in the hospital.
Walking around the Horticulture Building and looking at all of the flowers and plants is one of my favorite parts of the Bloomsburg Fair. I can't say that I know much of anything about different kinds of plants or how to grow them to look like this, but being here is a peaceful experience that I look forward to every year.
These photos were taken in the agricultural building. Being in here always reminds me of the US Acres cartoons that they used to show during Garfield & Friends when I was a kid.
As always, there were some pretty damn big pumpkins at the back of the agricultural building. I always wondered what they do with these after the fair has ended.
I am very jealous of whoever gets to taste all of the entries to the baking competition.
Last, but not least, is the artwork and the displays put together in local schools. All of them were impressive, but the ones in the photos above were my favorites. When I have a bit more time, I'll have to blow up the photos enough to read the tags so I can credit the artists by name. And if you think this was all a bit much, I apologize in advance because I have about three or four more days worth of posts about the Bloomsburg Fair coming up in the days ahead.
