Excerpt 6 from STATE FAIR by Phil Stong

Abel Frake smiled. By deliberately snapping off his sense of direction he could almost imagine that he was driving, as he had been driving seven days before, to the carnival--to the Fair. There was Blue Boy murmuring objections at every pit in the road; there was the sleeping family; there was the yellow roadway with its fringe of varying shadow; there was the crackling mist of light which was the universe, spread out over Abel Frake at regular intervals, and over Blue Boy, the finest Hampshire stud boar in the world.

That, of course, ended the illusion and with surprise Abel Frake realized that he was glad that he was not going to the Fair--that he was going home. He was gorged with the excitement and the triumphs of that strange place; reality, as he had made it for himself, pleased and satisfied him. The Frakes had stepped for a moment into a fantasy; now, unchanged, they were returning to that five hundred acres where only birth and death--not even marriage--had been the only changes for four generations.


State Fair, by Phil Stong

Excerpt 5 from STATE FAIR by Phil Stong

Even on Friday the glory of Blue Boy's triumph had not died out. The horse-show had come, and was going that night, but the grandeur that was Blue Boy, somehow, picked up by the Des Moines Register and the Tribune, had lingered over every stock section of the Fair.

For some reason, Blue Boy had been build up by the two papers to the stature of a Middle Western hero. Did you think of Governor Drake, of Tama Jim Wilson, of doddering Senator Allison, or Gullible Cummins, of Lillian Russell and Senator Copper King Clark--you thought also of Blue Boy. And Iowa's litterateurs--Rupert Hughes, Lewis Worthington Smith, Herbert Quick, Emerson Hough, Susan Glaspell, Ellis Parker Butler--why, was not this last author's greatest achievement called "Pigs is Pigs"?

Abel wondered a little, even in the greatest glow of his triumph, at the sudden fame which had come to Blue Boy. Even in Chicago papers they had shown the boar's picture with the caption, "The World's Greatest Hog." That hardly seemed reasonable, though Abel knew that the fact was a fact. Still, he saw no good reason why the country should be stirred by prospects of cheaper pork. Sport was sport, but pigs, it was true, were pigs.

State Fair, by Phil Stong

Excerpt 4 from STATE FAIR by Phil Stong

There was one man in the car, a young man, who wearily waved a small card at the loader. Margy caught a glimpse of the card and recognized a miniature reproduction of a logotype she saw every day, the masthead of the Des Moines Evening Tribune. With awe she realized that she was about to occupy a car with the Press.

The Press was a young man of twenty-seven or eight, with sleepy eyes, a  pleasant, not unattractive face, and a faint smile. His suit, of light gray tweed, set off a well-browned face and picked up hair of platinum blond for which any chorus-girl would have given her soul a dozen times over. He had evidently been around the world hundreds of times, had tired of wine, women, and song, and had taken up roller-coastering as an End in Life.

Margy took a seat demurely in the place to which the attendance beckoned her, at the young man's side. The bar was dropped over their laps and the car started, slowly.

Before they had gone twenty feet, Margy realized that she was not riding on the roller-coaster of the previous year. The first climb was tremendous, was mountainous. She felt a faint alarm. The young man lay back, relaxed, inspecting the Fair Grounds from the increasingly advantageous heights. He took out a cigarette, looked at it critically, and put it back in his pocket. Margy smiled and nodded at the cigarette. He thanked her with a glance, but shook his head.

The next moment they fell ninety feet.


State Fair, by Phil Stong