New bandstand keeps music alive at Jacktown
Dr. Johnny Fever keeps the karaoke tunes coming as Satya Fezorowski sings in the new bandstand at the Jacktown Fair. The bandstand was finished a week before this year’s fair began and is now a permanent fixture.
A painting of the old grandstand by Barbara Deynzer in 1991, a year before it was torn down. This painting took first place in the Jacktown Fair Painting contest that used the grandstand as a commemorative theme.
WIND RIDGE – So what’s new at the Jacktown Fair? Well, for starters, the Wednesday night food-eating contest, now in its second year, is gaining in both popularity and choice of new things to eat besides hot dogs – hardboiled eggs, ketchup straight from the bottle and for the kiddies, plates of whipped cream with a piece of bubble gum in the bottom that has to be chewed and blown into a bubble to qualify.
But for anyone strolling on the fairgrounds looking for a place to sit and relax, the newest addition is the bandstand, tucked between the big oak and maple trees that have been growing on this hilltop at the edge of Wind Ridge since the fair began in 1865. It replaces the old one that was built in the 1920s or 1930s and then torn down in 1992.
A Jacktown Fair painting by Barbara Deynzer in 1991 that hangs in the exhibit hall captures the little square building that housed concession stands downstairs and offered a place for bands to play on its flat roof .
The painting shows one of the reasons it was finally removed – the crowd of teenagers who couldn’t resist playing king of the mountain on the roof where bands once played. People still danced, but now to records, and insurance concerns about safety were hard to ignore.
Once removed, the bandstand became the missing feature that never quite left the memory of those who make coming to the Jacktown Fair a yearly ritual. Sitting in the shade of those big old trees, looking out at the midway and beyond to a spectacular hilltop view while listening to music, hopefully live, has a strong allure. Now, with the 150th anniversary coming up next year, Walter “Buck” Burns and the fair board decided to replace the missing link.
“We hired block layers for the foundation and floor, then the Amish came in and put it up in a day,” Burns said. “I went to Walnut Creek, Ohio, to find what we wanted and had them add the banisters. It got finished a week before the fair. When the fair is over, we’ll start working on some of the plans we have for next year.”
Open, inviting and sporting a handsome copula instead of a flat roof, this new bandstand has become the place to gather on wooden benches under the trees and eat, visit and chill out. The music this year is live karaoke provided by Dr. Johnny Fever and anyone who wants to get up and sing. And as the sun goes down behind it the lights of another night at the fair begin to twinkle and the rides begin to run.
The bandstand may be new, but there’s nothing new about the down-home charm of the Jacktown Fair.