No detail is too small for the attention of longtime Van Buren County Fair Manager Corrine Weatherly — not even ants.
One recent day she was in a golf cart, cruising the parking lot at the fairgrounds in Clinton with ant killer in her hand, fighting the army of ants that she said have moved into the county with a vengeance.
“The ant is a blister ant,” she said, adding that the bites on her feet and hands can attest.
Weatherly wants everything to be perfect for this year’s fair, which starts Monday and goes through Saturday.
At 76, she’s been involved with the Van Buren County Fair since 1979 when the board was about to dissolve; she’s served in different roles, including as fair manager the past 35 years.
She also was crowned Arkansas Senior Mrs. Fair Queen in 2017 after winning the one in Van Buren County.
“I was 74 years old when I entered my first pageant,” she said, laughing. Weatherly modeled fair wear, which she made. She has a sewing business and has made countless pageant and wedding gowns and dance costumes.
She also had to undergo an interview and answer a question onstage, which was “Who inspires you?”
Weatherly said her answer was “everyone who surrounds me,” her family, starting with her four grown children; her customers and the public. “I draw inspiration from everybody who is right there in my perimeter,” she said.
Although there was no talent portion of the contest, she plays the piano, so that wouldn’t have been a problem.
One of her best memories from the decades she’s been involved with the Van Buren County Fair is in 1986 when her daughter Denise Weatherly-Green, now of Texas, won Van Buren County Fair Queen. “That was wonderful,” Weatherly said. “She went to state fair and that’s how I really got involved in the pageant end and youth talent end of the fair. I manage the pageant now, but I didn’t then.”
Weatherly also judges fair pageants in other counties, and has already been a judge for Stone, Cleburne and Fulton counties this year. She has seen a couple of generations come through the pageant and talent-show at the Van Buren County Fair.
“I feel like I have touched a lot of lives, and I love it. I’ve been there long enough that I dressed little girls or fair queens and now I dress their children — probably grandchildren,” she said.
County fairs have been a part of Weatherly’s life since she was growing up on a farm in Nebraska, when she showed livestock and entered baked goods and fashions she made. She still has a trove of trophies from her wins.
“I’ve been raised with the county fair since I was 7; I am passionate about fairs and what they do for 4-H kids. They have to have a showcase, and this is it, besides the state fair,” she said.
Weatherly and her family — Dean, her husband of 56 years, and their four children — moved in 1976 from Nebraska to Clinton, after his parents bought land in Fairfield Bay.
A couple of years later she got involved with the fair because “the fair board was getting ready to dissolve and chunk the whole thing, and we said, ‘No, we can’t let that happen,’” Weatherly said.
Formed in 1937, the Van Buren County Livestock Show and Fair Association Inc. is the oldest corporation in Van Buren County, she said.
Weatherly said she and her husband and a group of eight to 10 others worked then to keep the fair going. It had been on school property, but the Arkansas Legislature ruled that nonschool activities had to be conducted before the school year started.
The fair association bought 32 acres in 1982 on Arkansas 16 east and built from the ground up. The first year the fair was held at the new fairgrounds, 1985, was memorable, for sure, Weatherly said.
“In 30 days before the first fair opened on property where it is now, we had to clear the land, haul rocks and stuff like that. We moved one pole barn from the old property. Now we have a huge barn complex.
We had … picnics under the big oak tree. We went out early every morning and worked one or two hours before our “real life jobs” and came back and worked till sundown. We had breakfast together and supper together out there.
“Our first one was intense. We had big bathrooms and a pole barn for livestock. Ran a telephone line out of the bathroom and set up a big tent for the office. The exhibits, produce, sewing, household arts — were all in tents. One person per tent guarding them at night because dogs will come in …. I fell asleep on the job, and dogs came in and got into the eggs and wreaked havoc with them.”
Weatherly still feels guilty about it and joked that she’ll be talking about that experience until her dying day.
“Today, the fair has different methods in canning, in grooming and showing livestock; it’s so much different, that part of it, than when I was a kid,” she said.
“Fairs now have competitions that pull people away, other things to do for their time. That [the fair] used to be all they had and agriculture was huge; it is still huge, but it’s not individually huge; it’s conglomerate huge,” she said.
The fair is still important for the county, Weatherly said. “I hope it pulls people together, and it’s family, and it’s about promoting agriculture. I feel like we’re part of the chain that feeds America. You have to have food; you can’t fake it, not your whole life. You have to have that seed that has to grow. Agriculture is real,” she said.
The Van Buren County fair has outgrown its “huge barn system,” she said, so livestock and other animals come in to be judged on alternate days.
“It’s a good problem to have. It would be nice to have it all at one time for people to walk through and see,” she said. “We have a tremendous hog show, sheep and goats.”
This year a new carnival company has been hired and rides will open on Tuesday night instead of Wednesday. On Friday night after the Clinton High School football game, the fair will hold Midnight Madness, a special wristband event from 10 p.m. till midnight.
When the property isn’t used for the fair, the buildings are rented for a variety of events, including a dog show in October and a youth deer hunt in November. Weatherly is in charge of those rentals.
The list of her responsibilities is never-ending, said her friend Alice Chambers, who has been part of the fair board for 18 years.
“Oh, my gosh, I don’t know where to start,” Chambers said when asked what Weatherly brings to her position.
“She’s brought that fair so far — she’s done amazing things with the pageants” with help from others, Chambers said.
“She’s a wonderful fair manager. She takes each job and she guides somebody through that and gets everything done. She’s involved in construction …. I’m telling you, you can find her out at the fairgrounds doing everything from plumbing to cleaning to making sure a new air conditioner is installed correctly.
“She’s 100 percent involved,” Chambers said, despite Weatherly working 40-plus hours a week in her sewing and rental business.
Chambers said Weatherly is finally starting to delegate a little.
Weatherly said that is a change – she used to sleep at the fair.
“I used to just about move out there for the length of the fair,” Weatherly said. “I used to stay in the office and sleep in a recliner. Now, I come home at 11 and go back at 6:30 or 7 [the next morning]. We have paid security. I don’t rest when I go home, so I might as well stay out there. I rest better with my thumb on something.”
Even though Weatherly said she’s exhausted at this point, “the whole thing is, I draw energy from the first people through the gate. If I get one thank-you a year, I can survive — and the hugs, I just love it,” she said.
“You do what you’re passionate about,” she said. “We have a wonderful board right now and the whole family, husbands, kids, get involved.”
It’s not just a bunch of gray-haired senior citizens running it, either, Weatherly said.
“We have a lot of young members who have stepped up, which is good, because I feel good about walking away from it at some time. I’ll know I’ve left it in good hands,” she said.
And hopefully, she will have won the war on those ants.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.