"Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there." ~ Thomas Edison
Fairs Year-round Information	F.Y.I. Volume 8, Issue 15 July 31, 1998

IN FOCUS

While visiting a San Diego water park with his son, Tom Amberson, a member of CFSA’s Safety Unit and the unit’s First Aid and CPR instructor, helped save the life of a 4-year-old boy.

Tom and his son were swimming in one of the park’s pools when a 12-year-old girl pulled an unconscious boy from the deep end of the pool. Tom lifted the unconscious boy - who was blue and not breathing - out of the pool, and coached the park’s lifeguard as the two of them began the rescue-breathing procedure. (The lifeguard had "First Responder" training from the Red Cross.) After working on the boy for about a minute, the boy began coughing up water and breathing on his own.

The moral of the story? You never know when, where or for whom first aid skills will be needed. According to water park officials, this was the first near drowning in the past five or six years. The bottom line: if it was you or a loved one who was injured, wouldn’t you want someone nearby trained in first aid?

To help fair staff get this training, Tom provides Red Cross certification courses in first aid and CPR, including infant and child CPR when requested, at no charge to CFSA-member fairs. Training takes between eight and 12 hours, depending on the material you want covered and the number of class participants. For more information, or to set up a first aid training session, call Tom Amberson at 916/263-6180.

In the market for some ceiling tiles or a large capacity hammer mill grinder? Shasta District Fair has both up for sale or trade. Here’s your chance to get what you need, and perhaps trade away something you don’t need, but the Shasta Fairgrounds does. In the offering are:

• Approximately 1,700 ceiling tiles. Each tile measures 2’ x 2’. They’re fire rated and in excellent condition.
• Hammer mill grinder - 220-volt, three-phase.

For more information, or to make an offer, please contact Ken Scheeler at 530/378-6792.

The California State Fair, August 21 - September 7, is bringing back its successful Poppy Pak, offering four fair admissions, four monorail rides, four midway rides and $12 in food coupons for $29.95, a savings of nearly 50 percent. The paks are available at selected grocery stores through August 16. During the fair, the pak will be offered on one day only at the fair’s box office.

Advance admission tickets are also available through August 16, with adult admission set at $5, $2 off the regular $7 price; children’s (ages 5 - 12) tickets are $3, a savings of $1. On Gold Rush Day, visitors who donate a can of Maxwell House coffee are admitted free. Midway bargains include an opening day special featuring all rides and games for $1 each, in addition to wristband specials throughout the fair.

Visitors to the San Mateo Fair, August 14 - 23, save more than 25 percent by purchasing their admission tickets in advance. Adult admission is $5, a savings of $2; $3 for children (6-12) and seniors (62 and over), both $2 off the regular $5 admission prices. Advance tickets are on sale through August 12, and can be purchased by phone, mail, e-mail, or at the Expo Center. In addition, children ages 6-12 will be admitted free on Kids’ Day, and Seniors pay just $2.50 - half price - on Senior Day.

If so, share your strategy and your strategy’s results with your fellow fairs through F.Y.I. Simply give Melissa Thurber a call, send a fax, or make life really easy for yourself and add her to your fair’s press release mailing list (thanks again to all fairs who’ve already done so):

Did you know Windows95 creates a lot of temporary files when it opens documents? It puts these files into your C:\WINDOWS\TEMP folder and although it intends to close them when the application is finished with them, sometimes these files can become permanent, taking up space on your hard drive.

To check if you have any of these files, open this folder periodically (after you shut down all your apps) and delete any permanent "temporary" files you find.

At the 1998 San Fernando Valley Fair, paid attendance was up 33 percent. Exhibit entries were also up, thanks in part to a successful outreach program between the fair and local elementary schools. Strawberry seedlings were donated to the students, who in turn exhibited their plants at the fair, along with photos, posters, poems and other creative berry inspirations.

Bert Owens, CEO of the Tehama District Fair, summed up his fair in a word: HOT. The average temperature for four of the fair’s five days was 106 scorching degrees, which played havoc with the fair’s attendance.

The weather was more cooperative during the Glenn County Fair, when daytime temperatures were almost 50 percent lower than in 1997. Among the firsts for the fair was a well-received beer "walk-around policy." As a result, beer sales were up 20 percent, while alcohol-related incidents dropped to zero.

To date, 11 fairs have reported their total paid attendances:

• 1998: 346,897 visitors
• 1997: 336,279 visitors
• OTAL: +10,618 visitors
• Up: 3.16%

F.Y.I. thanks all the fairs who’ve returned their total paid attendance faxes along with attendance influencing fair highlights. If your fair is completed, and you haven’t yet faxed or mailed in your report sheet, please do so as soon as possible. Don’t have a report sheet? Please call Melissa Thurber at 916/263-6178.