In Purebred and Homegrown, authors Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz travelled some 40,000 miles by both plane and car, over a period of ten years, across thirty-five states in order to attend ninety of the 2,230 county fairs that exist in the United States. Their sample, they wrote, ‘was shaped by the randomness of the calendar and the caprice of geography’ (ix). The purpose of their pursuit was to capture, with audiotape, notebooks and film, the sights, sounds and smells of this century old American tradition. For them the fair ‘is a fertile subject, nearby and rich with possibility and nuance’ (ix). While not ignoring the eccentricities of today's county fairs, the authors placed special attention on their commonalities: food, history, entertainment, livestock, competition, agricultural clubs for young people such as 4-H and FFA, people, and the resources in time and money that made fairs happen. Indeed, the book is ordered by chapters along such lines.

Of particular interest to the oral historian is Hokanson and Kratz's use of the individual voice. They interviewed judges of pie contests, the young and the old with their animals ready to enter the gate of competition, fair managers, food sellers, consumers of entertainment and the entertainers themselves, like ‘Dutch’ from the Indian River Olde Towne Lumberjack and Logrolling show and his dog Bingo, and many others. Their interview transcriptions resulted in over one thousand pages of single-spaced text. Some of their interviews you remember, others you do not. The first, and last in my book, is Hervy and Rose Ostiguy and their pair of brown and white oxen named Turk and Lion from the Adams Agricultural Fair, Adams, Massachusetts. They are photographed standing in the door-frame of an old, blue animal trailer; Hervy, crooked cap and glasses, stands with sturdy arms, suspenders, button-down shirt and rolled sleeves; Rose, a bit shorter and a few more pounds, wears an apron-like smock, black pants and bright white shoes. They are genuine fair people, and attend, on average, twenty-one fairs a year with their oxen. Hokanson and Kratz bring them alive for us. As they write:

In chapter nine, we meet Mildred Davy of Tillamook, Oregon, born in 1911, and a radio host during fair week of a daily, half-hour show called Women's World, a program she has steered since 1963. ‘She's a keeper of history,’ they write, ‘a connector of people, a celebrator of events large and small, and a tireless booster for the county and for her fair’ (105). Mildred has been exhibiting at the Tillamook Fair since the mid-1920s.

Some of the strengths of Purebred and Homegrown lie in the use of voices from people like Hervy and Rose Ostiguy and Mildred Davy. Through these interviews, and many others, Hokanson and Kratz allow the personal qualities of the county fair to come through. They paint the fair, accurately in my opinion, as a rural, seasonal, American holiday. ‘Tradition – individual, familial, and institutional – is the universal force at every fair we attended,’ they write. ‘Like gravity, it is ubiquitous, essential, affecting all things, welcome, but seldom considered directly’ (22). The county fair is the champion of, the supreme cheerleader for, everything that is rural and agricultural; it is, as they write, ‘a bastion of rural ideas.’ The fair is, they continue, ‘the greatest instrument in the nation devoted to the perpetuation of the idea that the country is a better place than the city’ (72). Since the first fair was introduced by Elkanah Watson in 1811, it has continued to reflect the principles of Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the virtues of manual work and practical education, of home and farm, common bonds, bountiful harvests, home-made, hard work, self-sufficiency, and frugality.

But, as we learn, the county fair was not immune to the changing tastes and paces of culture. Beginning with the mass production and mass consumption of the TV in the 1950s, the county fair saw a decline in attendance and overall popularity as a central point of experience. It was hit again in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s as agriculture grew more corporate and more concentrated. The fair's original purpose, ‘a national institution for the nation's material improvement’, where the best foods, the most efficient equipment, and the latest farming knowledge could be put on display, has changed. Fruit that is commercialised, for example, no longer sees representation at the fair. In some regions without dairies, cows must be borrowed and shipped in for milking contests. As the authors note, the county fair has had to adapt to the shift from the real agriculture of family farms to the recreational agriculture of weekend hobbies. As a response to this great sea change, Hokanson and Kratz took notice of the fair's ‘new educational mission’. ‘Increasingly’, they write, ‘fairs see the need to reconnect Americans with their agrarian roots’ (167). ‘Perhaps the greatest rural value of all’, they note at the end of their book, ‘is to have the fair every year.’

In the end, Purebred and Homegrown should be categorised as an interpretative study that draws upon oral material as one of several sources of information. Another source of information, and a particularly compelling one in this book, is the photograph. Indeed, there are 134 photographs in this 172 page book. But this is not your typical coffee table book. While it does not have a lengthy reference section, nor does it provide page numbers for the references it does use, what Purebred and Homegrown does well is provide us with a user-friendly and appealing history of an American tradition that has been too long ignored, by visitors, historians and sociologists alike. The county fair provides us with an opportunity, for ‘familiar voices’, ‘unconscious gestures and words of belonging’, and for ‘the time-tested comfort of growing older among people who've known you since you were too young to understand’ (169). We need to come home to the county fair.