In 1932, it became a two-day event with no entertainment; after that, it was run strictly as a 4-H show until 1943, when the Fair Board was resurrected and reorganized, thanks mostly to a man named John Avala Jones (who was a former treasurer of the Ringling Brothers Circus).
Jones brought the fair back to a five-day schedule.
By 1954, the fair had grown to a six-day affair ー with carnivals and entertainment booked once again. It was during this renaissance that Hefner took an interest in the fair.
He first became involved in 1948, assisting with the hog and swine departments. He happily worked this department until 1956, when he was elected to serve as Fair Board president, replacing Walter Hanrahan, who had served for 14 years. Hefner held the board’s top spot until 1989.
“The Porter County Fair is not a one-man show ー it’s an effort put together by an awful lot of people and I want to stress that,” Hefner said.
“I don’t know why I originally joined. I just love fairs; I never thought then that the fair would get to be the size it is now. I guess you’d say you like to work with people when you work with fairs.”
By the mid-60s, the Fair Board saw the need for more acreage, but city zoning regulations stifled expansion
“Obstructions were put in front of it (one old fairgrounds), so that the county commissioners couldn’t develop it much more,” Hefner recalls.
After years of haggling and in-fighting between the governmental bodies in the ‘70s, the Fair Board was finally able to move into the new Porter County Fairgrounds and Exposition Center in Washington Township in 1985.
The move allowed the fair an expansion from 29 to 80 acres, and it is held there to this day.
Managing the fair has never been easy for Hefner, a Pleasant Township farmer.
His most time-consuming responsibility is supervising all the department heads and coordinating their activities.
Filling empty positions, signing food contracts and booking the entertainment is a year round job.
And the fair is not without its share of bad luck. Though Hefner fails to recall exactly when they happened, he tells of four tragedies.
In the early ‘60s, a commercial exhibition tent caught fire due to an electrical shortage. No one was killed or injured.
In a freak accident once, a carnival employee had a gun go off when it fell from his pocket. The bullet ricocheted off of a carnival ride bar he was cleaning, and came back to kill him. Police took over the fair office that day, Hefner recalls.
Another time a carnival employee died of a heart attack under a truck as he was taking refuge from a rainstorm.
Another incident occurred in which a man fatally fell from a double ferris wheel, Hefner said.
But tragedies like these have not kept people away from rides, attractions and rural unity.
The biblical command ー “Thou shalt not judge…” ー certainly never applied to the county fair. It is a festival bent on judging everything, be it human, animal, vegetable or mineral.
Porter County Fair queens have learned grace over the years; a few have gone on to win state fair competition. Diane Lynn Martin, 1981 Miss Porter County Fair went on to participate in the Miss America Pageant as Miss Arizona, and later went on to marry a popular rock star, Hefner said.