Adams County Fair finishes four-day run in Othello

OTHELLO - The family just finished lunch and Mom had her eye on dessert. "I'm going to go get an elephant ear," she said.

"Better get three or four," Dad said.

The elephant ears at the Adams County Fair come from the Boy Scout booth. They're part of the tradition, like the cotton candy at the Othello Lions booth. The Lions have been at the fair for several years, so long that people have to stop and think about it.

"I don't know. What year is it now?" asked Bill Bethman as he worked the cotton candy machine Friday afternoon. The Lions have been at the fair at least since 1965, which is when the Lions rebuilt the booth, he said.

The cotton candy is "always a popular item," and an important fundraiser for Lions activities, Bethman said.

And it's tradition. It's one of the things that make it the fair. Tradition is a competitor in the round robin showing fighting it out with a lamb that didn't want to cooperate.

There's nothing more traditional than a kid in livestock competition, Zack Shade, of Othello, and his pig being examples. Shade got a callback into the final round and ultimately received a third place ribbon, he said. "I probably could've done better. It's just that my pig was tired," he said.

This is Shade's third year showing a pig, he said. The exhibitor can make the process of raising and showing a pig easy on themselves, or can make it difficult, he said. It depends on how the kid works with the pig. Kids who don't spend much time with a pig, just feed it and walk away, will find their pig gets stubborn, he said. If kids get to know the pig, the animal will follow the kid anywhere, he said.

Tradition is the FFA horse judging competition, where participants examine a small herd of horses, rate them, then explain their conclusions to judges.

What the judges were looking for wasn't immediately apparent to those showing for the first time.

"I'm not really sure. This is the first year I've done it," Leah Swannack, of Cheney, said. The judges really want to know if competitors understand anatomy, how the horse is built and how it moves, what's called confirmation.

The FFA awards came about the time some participants on the Cheney FFA team finally got a chance to eat; they went with corn dogs. When the awards were done, the FFA advisor wanted pictures, then started shooing everybody toward the bus, whether the corn dogs were done or not.

Fairgoers had lots of options for food in a good cause, including the corn dogs. The Othello Rotary sells barbecued chicken, while the Mid-Columbia Young Life youth group sells pulled pork. The Lions sell pizza in addition to their cotton candy. The Region 6 4-H clubs sell breakfast and lunch.

The chuck wagon cooks sell dinner, cooked in a Dutch oven over the campfire. It's a competition, and cooks are asked to prepare a five-course meal, including meat, bread, beans, potatoes and dessert. Friday afternoon Pat Myers, of Chewelah, was working on her apple crisp, and John Sicocan, of Milton-Freewater, Ore., was tossing a little wood on his fire pit and adding a little onion to the baked beans.

Myers said it was the second year in Othello for her and her husband Les. Les Myers builds horse-drawn vehicles and a family friend suggested they attend a cookoff in Arizona to advertise their wares. And maybe they could learn a little bit about camp cooking, he said. They attended the Arizona cookoff, "and that's when we got the bug," Pat Myers said. "We ended up buying a bunch of Dutches (Dutch ovens) and we keep buying more."

Sicocan said he got to thinking about what he called necessity, and how he would eat if there was a long-term electrical outage. "And as you can tell by my fine trim figure, I eat well," he said. He has a background in the restaurant business, he said, and his family likes to camp. It was all a natural fit, he said.

A Dutch oven cook learns the craft by doing, Myers said. "You get a feel for it," she said. "A knack you kind of gain from doing it. It's a practice-makes-perfect thing." Sicocan said cooking with a wood fire with a Dutch oven is both fun and challenging. There are a lot of variables, he said, like the wood as some burns hotter and faster than others, and the weather because a windy day changes cooking time.