In today's Friday Know-It-All, Executive Vice President Brenna tells the history of the Great Minnesota Get-Together.
Some of us just know what is important in life, and we plan ahead. For instance, my spouse has a birthday at the end of August (tomorrow, in fact), and he truly only wants one thing, which I have dutifully planned around for over 16 years: he does not want to go to the Minnesota State Fair, don’t even ask, literally just leave him alone about it. So I do. That’s what a good relationship looks like: respecting your partner’s boundaries and sharing them, pityingly, with 14,000 newsletter subscribers.
Me, I gleefully go every year, ideally multiple times. I get my dates on the calendar as early as I can, which always includes one full weekday with just my best cousin.
The author (left) and her cousin at the 2023 MN State Fair.
What I’ve learned is not just the layout of the streets or the best beer to be found (it’s dollars to donuts on Lift Bridge’s Mini Donut Beer, hands down — mild brown ale with cinnamon sugar on the rim; it’s only served at the Ball Park Cafe, and only for these 12 days), but some of these fine facts.
On September 2, 1901, Teddy Roosevelt first said, "speak softly, and carry a big stick" in regards to foreign policy. He was still vice president at the time, and he was addressing a crowd at the Minnesota State Fair. To the best of my knowledge, the stick in question supported nothing edible, but it seems to me that offering food on sticks would have been part of a good foreign policy.
The original Banquet-on-a-Stick, the Pronto Pup, made its Minnesota State Fair debut in 1947 (though, to be fair, the patent for the frying mechanism was filed in 1927, so it’s not strictly true to say that fried food on a stick was invented here — it just feels like it). For the untried, a Pronto Pup is a corn dog, but with a smooth textured batter made without sweeteners (it’s not pancake batter, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise). Nosh on this delightfully profane review (from our friends at Racket!) for more fun facts.
As first made known to me from lyrics in “The Music Man,” legendary pacer horse Dan Patch set a world record time of 1:55 for one mile at the Grandstand in 1906 (Dan Patch Ave. is the name of the street that runs from the main gate to the current Grandstand, which opened in 1909 to house the huge crowds that came to see this one fast horse).
The biggest music crowd was in 2000, when 22,117 tickets were sold for Christina Aguilera. (They’ve since changed the seating from benches to individual chairs, so they can’t sell that many tickets anymore — her record is safe.) However, the band the most people have paid to see at the fair is Alabama. They’ve performed 19 times since 1983. That is a lot of times to play us some “Mountain Music.”
One of the most iconic buildings on the grounds is the 4-H building, a white WPA structure from 1939. Not only does it house some excellent dioramas, hand-sewn dresses, occasional bunny races, and painfully earnest youth theater performances, it’s also literally home to thousands of kids during the fair. They get to stay overnight in the dormitory floors, which would have been incentive enough for 10-year-old me to keep making bottle rockets with the group (except I was in 4-H in South Dakota, and any 4-H dormitory would have been in Huron, a real deterrent).
I will not be sleeping at the State Fair this year, but I will be there on Tuesday, Aug 27, to host our sixth of 12 games at the Star Tribune Stage (4 p.m., don’t be late). I will happily talk to you about cropart, the llama costumes, the best breakfast (grilled peach with herbed goat cheese and honey from the Produce Exchange + Maple Cream Cold Press Coffee from the Farmer’s Union), and whether you learned anything new this year.
