L.A. County Fair a Bit of Country in the Big City

For the first time in her life, Pat Grisinger has entered the County Fair, submitting a single offering: Sizzling Bombay Peach Chutney, no less.

“This is so un-me,” said Grisinger, who in the 1940s was a city girl growing up in Los Angeles’ Lincoln Heights section and now lives in Pasadena. “I’m on the executive board of the State Bar Assn. People at work are laughing at me. But I say that I make my chutney every year, and this year I am entering the fair!”

Grisinger has plenty of company in the 1990 Los Angeles County Fair, which opened Friday in Pomona and is billed by organizers as the nation’s biggest county fair.

Grisinger and other San Gabriel Valley residents are well represented among the 2,500 contestants from throughout the United States, who have submitted a total of 10,000 entries in 935 Home Arts categories alone.

Many contestants say they are seeking a simpler form of expression in a complex age. And Home Arts, one of the fair’s numerous exhibition competitions, represents the opposite of fast food and fast times in the L.A. fast lane.

The entries range from the sublime (peach preserves and kumquat marmalade) to the practical (a walking stick and a wedding dress) to the highly unusual (a fake-fur tissue container in the shape of a dog’s head, and a 3-D display of china broken during the March 1990 Upland earthquake).

Quilts, afghans, rocking chairs, hooked rugs and needlepoint samplers, all homemade, fill an exhibition hall that Home Arts coordinator Silvia Bishop said is “big enough to house most county fairs.”

The labors there celebrate hearth and home. They hearken to earlier times, when the smell of homemade bread routinely filled the kitchen, the aroma of sawdust frequently engulfed a back-yard workshop or the sound of a sewing machine carried through a house each night after the evening meal.

“It’s carrying on the traditions of our country, from long ago, when people had to knit their own sweaters and make their own blankets,” said Bishop, a Diamond Bar resident. “Knitting, crocheting, quilting, those are all part of what makes up our history.”

“A rarity these days,” said her assistant, Marge Garvey.

James T. Cardinal, a retired Los Angeles school teacher who lives in San Marino, has baked bread for the last 10 years. “We don’t buy bread anymore,” said 70-year-old Cardinal. “In your store-bought bread, you don’t get much.”

But the bread he makes, he said, “has got some body to it. It’s something to eat, not just fat and fluff. It’s something you can really eat for lunch.”

Last Tuesday he stayed up overnight to bake his fair entries of rye, white and honey bread, so they would be fresh when he arrived for judging on Wednesday.

For three years he has entered the fair and each year, he said, he learns from his mistakes and from discussion with competitors. “There’s no swapping of recipes or tricks of the trade, though. That you kind of keep a secret.”

For many of the entrants, the homespun activities are very much a part of their lives, and the fair competition enlivens their avocations as well.

Ralph V. Dahlquist, 73, said he learned plenty of tricks of the trade as a carpenter building houses for years in eastern Los Angeles County, but the Pomona resident considers himself an amateur when it comes to woodworking.

“I grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, and it was my job to do all the carpentry work,” said Dahlquist, who moved to California when he was 21.

An award-winning fair competitor for three years, whose inspiration comes from the work of famed furniture maker Sam Maloof of Alta Loma, Dahlquist’s entries this year were months in the making. From scratch, he fashioned a black walnut rocking chair and a 20-inch round pedestal table, both hand-rubbed and hand-sculpted.

“I get so absorbed. It’s not like work at all,” Dahlquist said the other day, sitting in his tool-cluttered, sawdust-covered workshop area behind his house.

Last year, Dahlquist said, the judges saw that underneath a chair he entered was inscribed the number 12. This, he said, led the judges to think that he had violated the rules and was mass-producing his work and selling it. So the chair was disqualified.

But the number, Dahlquist said, simply recorded how many chairs he had made in his life. His daughters were so upset, he said, they registered a formal complaint and in the end, he said, he won a blue ribbon. “I don’t sell anything,” he said. Besides, he said, there is no way to put a price on an object as treasured as his homemade furniture.

Gwen Casilli of Altadena values her preserves just as highly, and bestows the bounty of her kitchen on her friends and family. And this year she submitted enough fair entries to fill a good-sized kitchen cupboard.

Casilli, 57, uses a six-burner Wolf gas stove in her huge, high-ceilinged kitchen, which she says is “big enough to swing a cat around in.”

Canning and preserving since 1976 but a fair contestant only in the last few years, she grew up on a small farm in Virginia and makes regular trips for fresh supplies to the farmers market at Villa Parke in Pasadena on Tuesdays.

“I’m definitely a farm person,” she said. “I think I have squirrel blood. So when it gets to be harvest time I squirrel things away.”

At her church, she said, children call her “The Jam Lady.” She said, “It’s a challenge to get the stuff to jell just right and have a good taste and look good, too. I like marrying the subtleties of flavors.”

The fair, she said, is inspiring, and “it helps you have an appreciation of the artistry of food preparation. It really does.”

She likes the competition, too.

So do many of the other entrants. “Competition is stiff and people want those ribbons,” coordinator Bishop said. The ribbons hold treasured places in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms across Southern California.

Passions seem to run high every year around fair time. An Anaheim woman shrieked last year as she arrived with her entry, a fresh-baked pie. “She dropped her pie in the parking lot,” Bishop said. “But her husband convinced her to enter it anyway.”

Already, Dahlquist has launched the laborious work of crafting next year’s entry, a miniature replica of a turn-of-the-century carousel horse.

And Grisinger, who was shocked to see how her lone sample of Sizzling Bombay Peach Chutney stacked up against more extensive entries, faced the competition bravely.

She said she turned to her daughter and said: “Well, come fall, I’ll be making applesauce. Come winter, I’ll be doing my marmalade. Whether I win or not, I’ll be back next year.”