Perfect Sunday helps salvage a bad weather week at DuPage Co. Fair

There is one word organizers have to sum up this year's DuPage County Fair: Recovery.

The fair opened amid record-high temperatures, endured three days of torrential rain but ended with the picture-perfect, sunny day.

"It went extremely well in many ways, but it was also extremely challenging," Jim McGuire, president of the fair association, said of the five-day event that ran Wednesday through Sunday.

On Friday, the fair was hit with a major a storm that forced it to close. The few people already on hand took shelter during peak hours.

"Many people made the decision to stay home (on Friday) and that's the right decision," McGuire said. "It's smart. As much as we want people to be here on the fairgrounds we don't want anyone to be injured, and the people who did stay here we kept safe."

That storm left behind more than six inches of rain that flooded barns, inverted a food court tent and canceled two horse shows. The horse shows will be rescheduled for sometime in the near future.

But despite the four-day-long bad start, Sunday's perfect weather offered recovery at the fair, with a high turnout that equaled more than the other days' attendances combined. Exact numbers for attendance and revenue are still being calculated, though McGuire estimates they are about 50 percent lower than last year.

"We realize that the communities around us were dealing with a lot of other, more serious problems that were going to keep their minds off coming to the fair to ride a carnival ride or see what we're doing here," McGuire said.

Still, Sunday was one of the latest final nights at the fair McGuire has ever seen, with people walking around the fair's midway past 11 p.m.

"I think a lot of people who had gone through some difficult times, the same difficult times that we were dealing with, decided, 'Let's come out and enjoy a day of some fun' and we were able to provide that," McGuire said.

Some new and successful aspects of the fair that organizers want to bring back for next year include a "Future of Farming" exhibit, which featured a tractor guided by a satellite GPS system that visitors could ride for free.

"A lot of people took it in, from very young kids to very old kids," McGuire said. "It was very neat to see the new technology and what's happening in the farm fields today."

On Monday hundreds of people were working to clean up the fairgrounds, prompting this reflection from McGuire.

"You can't control all things in life," he said. "We only have control of how we react to it, and the group of people here reacted great."