One woman sought higher ground during crush of fairgoers on the midway Saturday night between shows by super-attraction Kenny Rogers. © 2010 Tony Hertz/Telegram-Tribune
Over the decades since opening in 1955, Disneyland has fine tuned the art of getting large numbers of people from one place to another. Under manager Maynard Potter, the early 1980s the Mid-State Fair was working to become the Disneyland of fairs and judging by the front page photo they exceeded expectations. The fair designed improved crowd circulation for concerts after this event August 7, 1982.
Concerts set new record at fair
By Phil Dirkx
Staff Writer
More on the fair, Page B-1Record crowds jammed the county fairgrounds and the surrounding streets in Paso Robles over the weekend as recording stars attracted people to the fair from all over Central California.
Saturday’s paid attendance, not counting pass holders, at the San Luis Obispo County Mid-State Fair set an all-time one-day record of 31,782.
That is over 10,000 more than the figure for the same day last year, then believed to have been the record.
The big attraction on Saturday was the Kenny Rogers show that sold all 20,000 available tickets, according to fair spokesman Russ James.
The paid attendance on the fairgrounds Friday was 14,701 and Sunday it was 23,248. These last three days more than offset the 48 percent drop in attendance on opening day of the fair Thursday and paid attendance is now running 15 percent ahead of last year, James said.
Although a handful of people arrived by chartered bus, most people arrived by car and parked as far as 12 blocks away and then hopped one of the fair’s shuttle buses.
Lt. Edwin Bryant of the Paso Robles Police said more than 100 parking tickets were written during the weekend.
Formal reports were filed on only two traffic accidents but there were many fender benders with drivers just exchanging information he said.
Paso Robles Fire Chief John Steaffans said he had eight of his volunteer firemen on duty at two stations Saturday night.
Because so many of his volunteers were at the fair, he feared they could not get out to respond to a fire call.
“It was so jammed, if we got a call down there we’d never have got through,” he said.
This morning, a young cow broke loose from workers at the County Fair today injuring a fair board member of 19 years.
Roy Ferrari was trying to ear-tag the heifer about 11 a.m., said Jack Scott, superintendent of the Livestock Division.
The out of control cow struck him in the head.
The victim walked away from the encounter and was taken by car to Twin Cities Community Hospital.
Doctors in the emergency room sewed up the wound with a few stitches and Ferrari was later released.
The Highway Patrol had two officers directing traffic for three hours Saturday night at highways 101 and 46 east.
The most serious incident was the arrest of a 17-year-old Paso Robles boy who threw two beer bottles at a police car shortly after midnight this morning showering the patrol officer’s face when one of the bottles hit the car’s window.
Officer Philip McCormick who was standing next to the car handling a traffic violation was examined at Twin Cities Community Hospital for possible bits of glass in his eyes then released, Bryant said.
In other news on the page, Theodore C. Maino was appointed ambassador to Botswana by President Ronald Reagan. The land-locked nation in southern Africa is roughly the size of France and had a population of about one million.
Maino was an avid hunter and was president of Maino Construction.
He served as ambassador until September 1985. He died in September 1997 at the age of 83.
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Tom Keffury at the Mid-State Fair sent an e-mail that the all time attendance record was set when MC Hammer played two shows in 1991 with over 40,000 on the grounds.
By that time the fair had built a main entrance and exit for grandstand crowds rather than the small bottle-necked combination entry/exits that existed at the time of the Kenny Rogers concert.