Summer exhibition always nostalgic time

July 05, 2026

Key points from this story:

• Yorkton Summer Fair part of his life
• Won a fair prize at age five
• Dad took him on fair circuit
• Attended many prairie fairs and towns
• Nearly 40 years covering exhibitions
• Livestock summer shows now lost

While I remember - thanks largely to a small trophy that came with it - I won a prize at a local summer fair at age five. A couple of years later Dad headed out on the summer fair circuit and I tagged along of course, and for the next decade and a half or so, summer fairs were part summer camp, part vacation, part work excursion for me.

I loved almost every part of the experience as we attended shows in Saskatoon, Yorkton, Melfort, Nipawin, Prince Albert, Swan River, Dauphin, Golburn, Shand, Connaught, Invermay, etc. I made friends - Sharon Wallace-Storm I'm thinking of you, which have lasted longer than most, even from my school years.

I met my first wife at a fair (Yorkton), and while that didn't work out long-term, the family we created are life highlights. So, when I am still treading the Yorkton fairgrounds each July it's highly nostalgic.

To be fair to the fair, most of what I see - from chuckwagon races to bumper cars to corndogs to lumberjack shows - are not new. I have seen them before - multiple times - as you might expect with near 40-years as a journalist covering the exhibition and 15-plus showing at it. So I'll admit as I sat waiting for the ponies to run this week it felt sort of 'samey'.

But from my seat I could look across the track to the barn where the pigs we showed all those years were housed, and all the memories tumbled into focus. For example how good the bacon and eggs were at the Tonkin Booth in the barn area.

Or, what a character Jim Wallace with his standardbred horses or Joe Moffat with his sheep, or John Bergman with his pigs were - and I could name others from most of the fairs mentioned above. And there was the fun on the midway, or the long-gone cafeteria, or the craziness of showing chickens (that was at Shand), or calves in Nipawin, or helping with draft horses in Prince Albert, or running cement for a new barn at Connaught the day after my Grade 12 grad party (ouch, that one hurt).

As the memories flowed as I looked at the barn in the distance I know I would have gladly stepped through a shimmering circle to go back in time for another summer of 'the circuit'. Of course you can't go back and the summer livestock shows are all lost to the past now, but that didn't lessen the desire to dream that it were possible.

Wouldn't it be grand if we could recapture the best of our youth - and for me much of that was tied to summer fairs.