MOUNT VERNON — The 2009 Knox County Fair will technically open a day early in order to accommodate some changes to the harness racing schedule.
“We’re moving the racing from Thursday to Saturday night,” explained Senior Fair Board member Jim Shipley. “That will happen Saturday night before the fair officially opens, but we are using that as the first day of the fair.”
Shipley said it has to be an official fair date in order to have the racing but said it is not required to have concessions or rides going. There will, however, be some concessions open that Saturday night (July 25, 2009), but there will be no rides in operation. There will be no admission fee to the fairgrounds that night.
“We felt if we had racing on a Saturday night we could get a bigger crowd,” Shipley explained. “And have a little bit better betting.”
The change was not a simple procedure. The fair board could not just hold racing on whatever day or night it wanted.
“We have to go by a red book and I didn’t know that until about two weeks ago,” Shipley said. “I had called the racing commission when we decided to do this, and they said everything was fine and there was no problem. They called me back and said they’d had a meeting the day before with Bruce Benedict of the [Ohio Department of Agriculture] and he told them that we weren’t allowed to do that. And other fairs have been doing that all along. The racing commission told me to call Bruce Benedict and find out just what we had to do. We had already sent in our fair date, which we have to do in the fall. So we had to send in another day.”
What Shipley was told, basically, was the fair board could not have racing if it wasn’t a fair date. So The board sent in an amended schedule with the extra day added, which made it legal.
Shipley also had to check racing dates with other county fairs in contiguous counties.
“We had to make sure there wasn’t a surrounding fair [having a racing date the same night],” he added. “We couldn’t conflict with racing in other fairs. It was more work than I thought it would be.”
Logistics also played a part in the decision.
“This frees us up because we have the bus races on Thursday night,” Shipley explained. “It gives us more time to set up for the bus races. We did that [last year] with the rough trucks. We took [harness] racing off of Wednesday night last year because of the rough trucks. It made us hustle too much to go from racing to the other things. We have enough to keep us busy at the fair. This will take a lot of pressure off us.
“We’ll have Saturday night, Sunday afternoon and Tuesday night [harness] racing, so I think it’s going to be a lot better for us.”
The school bus races will be back this year with some minor changes to make the races more exciting.
“We’re going to make a few changes, but not a lot of changes,” Shipley explained. “We’ve already bought our buses. Thirteen of us drove to Lima and 11 drove buses back. Jaime, my son, drove one back because we bought it and we’re going to fix it up like we did last year. You can buy a bus for $1,100, just like last year, to race. We have 10 of them for sale.”
One of the changes is to make the course.
“We want to make our pit just a little bit bigger so we can get four buses in there,” Shipley said. “Last year we could only get three in and we only had two buses in at a time, and that’s no good. They would only go around in circles and there was no mashing or bashing, and that’s what the people came to see. We’ll have a bigger circle and have a little more action.”
The 2009 Knox County Fair is slated for July 25 through Aug. 1.
