Dave Wood

Nowadays every town has a yearly event celebrating an edible the town is known for, be it curds or whey. 

My dad especially welcomed Blair’s Egg Festival every autumn because it always gave him the opportunity to earn extra money as a bartender at Archie Kokum’s popular saloon, which attracted hordes of thirsty festival goers from towns which didn’t have their own festivals dedicated to something that everyone ate.

Mom liked it too because she had grown up in Blair (Great Grandpa Ebenezer Thurston was the town’s first postmaster) and she loved getting into town to mingle with old friends and spoil me rotten by doling out nickels and dimes for non-agricultural edibles like spun sugar cones that buckled under my hot little tongue and also for the attractions that came every August for a weekend, then disappeared in a flash, yielding to the only other public event, the ice harvest on Lake Henry.

The festival attractions did NOT include kiddy tractor pulls or 10K foot races, demolition derbies or tractor pulls pitting ancient Massey-Ferguson combines against rusty trusty John Deeres.

Instead the event concentrated on down-home specialties like EGGS, which Blair claimed to be the capitol of for possessing Oswald Slette’s big hatchery, Art Beatty’s egg buying and candling station, and the hundreds of farm wives who all kept chicken coops full of egg layers, whose output financed the construction of two Lutheran churches in Blair alone, not to mention rural places of worship like Fagernes, French Creek, Tamarack, et alia.

The attraction that garnered the most spectators, of every size and creed, was the raw egg eating contest, won when I was a kid by a member of the Germanson tribe from Skutley Coulee, whom cousin Mel Germanson, a UWRF dean, still bragged about until he died last year. “Thirty-nine eggs at one sitting!”

Other agricultural pursuits included Blair’s Egg Festival Horse-Pulling Contest, which resulted in our neighbor Marshal Grass becoming the teamster who later won first in the heavy class nationals. When he practiced out on the flats abutting the Trempealeau River, those Belgians never pulled anything heavier than a hay tender until the national contests dawned. Talk about spoiled? None more than my Uncle Chet Back’s matched Percherons who appeared in each year’s parade with their washed, combed and meticulously braided tails bedecked with bright red ribbons—minus the antique tractors, which probably were still used in the fields.

There were free exhibitions in the empty lot next to the Blair Press, like the swarthy stranger who climbed a rickety steel structure, got to the top and dove 30 feet into a tub of water. 

The steel scaffold was dismantled after which appeared an assemblage of young farmers astride saddle-less work horses, each farmer cradling a croquet mallet. Township of Preston boys, including baseball great Bob Nehring and his brothers on one team, the other team from Fagernes, their names cloaked in history. Local sports legend Len Ellison (Eau Claire Bears) blew his whistle, tossed a volleyball onto the field and a bevy of spectators got their first and probably last dusty contest of agricultural polo.

When the dust cleared, I begged Mom for another dime to pay for another look at “The Mechanical Farm,” the most fantastical display I had ever seen upon a flatbed trailer. You paid a dime, crawled up wooden steps and entered the enclosure to see an entire farm with little buildings and fences, animals all hand-carved, that raised their heads and mooed. A farmer’s overalled knees protruded from the open door of an outhouse, a windmill overhead whirred and mom said it was time for dad to quit work so we can go home and do the milking. “Tomorrow it’ll be your turn, riding your tricycle in the parade.”

So it was that I entered the parade, my trike festooned with emptied eggshells from which she had blown out their contents, dyed them and sent me off to immortality. Half a century later I received a letter from my second-grade classmate Barbara Plunkett, with a snapshot on the backside of me astride my trike. Too bad for me the Blair Egg Festival never featured a contest in which tricycles pulled stone boats!