Questions mount as Ohio State Fair
winds down
By Felix Hoover
For Your News
Columbus
The closing
weekend of the Ohio State Fair was filled with intrigue and mystery on the
midway, in the dairy barn and in the rabbit exhibit area.
Was it J. Long
or Tamekah Holt who won the OSU-sweatered teddy bear in just two tries
shooting hoops?
How did vendors
fare this year?
What did Ezinne
Ndukwe of Dublin think of the butter sculpture of her brother, Chinedum, a
safety for the Cincinnati Bengals?
And will Sue
Haupt of Cleveland find her missing bunny?
The basketball
question will probably remain a mystery to outsiders.
Response was
mixed among vendors. One necklace salesman said last year was much better, but
Allamar Young, 24, of the North Side, said things worked out “pretty good” in
the sales of rosewood crafts for Wood Signature. He’s looking forward to
continuing the effort in Springfield.
Ezinne Ndukwe’s
reaction to the butter sculpture of her brother was, “It doesn’t look exactly
like him, I hope.”
Photos of the
art piece were emailed to her brother and, “He thought it was funny,” she
said.
Ezinne liked the
idea that the display, which also included butter sculptures of Cleveland
Brown’s lineman Joe Thomas, a football and the traditional cow, promoted the
Play60 campaign to encourage healthful activity for youths.
Ezinne, a
nephrology researcher at Ohio State University, graduated from the University
of Notre Dame, where her brother played before entering the NFL. She
rationalized that the exhibit was in the same room where fair-goers lined up
to buy brain-freezing shakes and monster bowls of ice cream to suggest that
it‘s OK to have the ice cream if you do appropriate exercise.
In the final
hours of this year's fair, a half-dozen sleepy meat chickens were the only
occupants in the Poultry-Rabbit area until Haupt and two of her friends from
Cleveland began a search for a Dutch bunny she had bought earlier in the day.
Food they had, a
bag of rabbit pellets for the missing animal and a bag of human pellets, or
saltwater taffy, for the trip home.
Haupt hasn’t
owned a rabbit before, but bought one at the fair because in was cheap, $10,
nowhere near the record $27,000 bid for the meat chickens shown in the
Poultry-Rabbit area.
Some of the fur markings make the
unnamed rabbit a poor show animal, but it's a cute, potentially good pet,
Haupt said. She has access to a cage and other items from her brother.
A livestock
official said the fair doesn’t encourage such transactions, but she exchanged
information with the Clevelanders to aid their pursuit of the missing bunny
the first day after the fair ended.