HARRISON -- Dr. Geoff Dunaway's barn was overrun Friday with fans of fans.
About 65 collectors of antique electric fans traveled to Harrison this weekend for Pig Pickin' XXI, a fan festival held annually for the past 20 years by Dunaway and his wife, Linda.
Most of the attendees are members of the Antique Fan Collectors Association, but Dunaway said the event, which will continue through Sunday, is open to the public.
Dunaway has more than 3,000 electric fans.
He had a childhood fascination with rotary motion.
"It was from being a toddler in diapers at my grandmother's house in Texarkana," he said. "She had a big old fan that I could stick my hand in and make it turn."
Dunaway didn't do that when the fan was on, though.
But electricity made for a totally different fascination.
"The sound, whirring, napping with the white noise," he said.
It was mesmerizing.
Dunaway has an interest in the history of American manufacturing, but he collects fans that were made all over the world.
Dunaway holds the annual Pig Pickin' event in his barn and an adjacent house on his property. They used to roast a pig every year, hence the name of the event. Now they have some pork catered in along with chicken and other food.
Attendees show, sell and swap electric fans. There is a workshop where they can repair old fans and learn from other collectors about fan repair.
"Part of the big draw for these guys is the mechanical skills," said Jim Henderson, a collector from Houston who attended the festival. "They like to tear things down and put them back together."
The appeal of antique fans is both mechanical and aesthetic, said Mike "Ozzy" Mirin, a collector from Merrillville, Ind.
"They're mechanical miracles is what they are," he said.
In general, collectors at Pig Pickin' seemed to hold pre-World War II fans in high esteem.
Henderson said he only collects pre-World War I fans. They are from what fan collectors refer to as "the brass era," a time when brass was often used for fans, before it was in demand for munitions.
This year, Dunaway is hosting collectors from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, in addition to Arkansas.
Dunaway said he sees some of the same people year after year.
"It's kind of family sort of," he said. "Some of them have been coming here for 20 years. It started with fans, and it continues with friends."
Wilene Rigsby of North Little Rock said she and her husband, Kelly Rigsby, became collectors when their son died in 2007 and they inherited 1,000 fans from him.
They've been coming to the Pig Pickin' event ever since.
"My son was the collector," said Wilene Rigsby, "so we took it up where he left off."
"It's a reunion," Kelly Rigsby said of Dunaway's event.
Stan Lancaster of Fayetteville is a regular at Pig Pickin', but he was holding off until today to go this year.
Lancaster and his wife own Baba Boudan's, an espresso cafe in Fayetteville. On the coffee shop's counter, Lancaster has a General Electric coin-operated fan, which were common in hotel rooms in the early 20th century, before the advent of air conditioning. A nickel would pay for an hour of fan operation.
Lancaster grew up in Arkansas and his family's house didn't have air conditioning, so he got used to fans.
He began collecting fans in the early 1980s, but not on purpose.
"I like them," he said. "I just wanted to have them around. The thing about collecting is you don't realize you're a collector until somebody says, 'You've got a bunch of this stuff.'"
Lancaster estimated he has about 350 fans.
He said two things are needed for serious collectors: money and space.
"You can't have everything," he said. "Where are you going to keep it?"
Lancaster said he's fascinated by the look of the mechanics of fans. Their industrial design paralleled that of automobiles, he said.
Dunaway is a former president of the Antique Fan Collectors Association, which has about 475 members and a Zionsville, Ind., museum of fans on loan from members (fanimation.com/museum).
Electric fans were first made in the 1880s in the industrial Northeast and St. Louis.
When fans were first made, a family could probably afford only one -- "and they would move that fan around," Dunaway says.
After World War II, fans became more reasonably priced, and people might have one in the living room and each bedroom.
Fans were expensive in the early 20th century. Based on a sampling of catalogs from the 1930s, prices for Emerson fans ranged from about $3, for a desk fan with 8-inch blades, to $76.25, for a chrome pedestal fan with 30-inch blades. Those prices would be $56 to $1,322 today, adjusted for inflation.
For the standard 10-inch desk fan, Emerson's 1930s prices ranged from about $9 to $20, which would be $167 to $346 today.
When he first started collecting, Dunaway said he could find fans at flea markets. Now, because of the Internet and eBay, they are more likely to be found in the hands of other collectors or online. And he often has to pay the going price.
Fans can sell for thousands of dollars depending on what their buyer is willing to pay. Dunaway said a fan made personally for Thomas Edison sold for more than $30,000 on eBay 20 years ago.
Metro on 06/03/2017