If you close your eyes, you might still smell corn dogs

If you are directing one of those slasher horror movies where a bunch of sex-charged teenagers don't realize there is anything sinister about the old, abandoned fairgrounds until they find their missing friend's bloody carcass hanging from the rafters of the dairy barn with a fair queen sash around her neck and her mouth crammed with corn dogs and cotton candy, I know a location where you could film.

"It's like a deserted ghost town," Gregory G. Koeppen, manager of the Lake County Farm Bureau, says of the old Lake County Fairgrounds that abuts his office in Grayslake.

Last July, these fairgrounds were bustling with about 200,000 people, pigs, cows, sheep, roosters, 4-H projects, thrill rides, games of chance, three tiers of queen contests, demolition derbies and tractor pulls.

This year, with the planned mall of stores delayed by the economy, weeds poke through the blacktop. The barns are empty. A single police car patrols the area.

For more than 50 years, the fairgrounds near the intersection of Routes 120 and 45 in Grayslake hosted the county fair as comfortably as if the fair just happened to sprout up in that spot.

"You couldn't get more fairground," Koeppen says. "You knew you were going to sweat, and be out there in the dust and the grime - The smell and the feel and the look was still there."

The old fairgrounds soaked up enough elephant ear grease, spilled lemon shake-ups and manure during its half-century run to still smell like a fair on hot days. That land could tell stories of kids showing livestock in the same spot their grandfathers and even great-grandfathers once led their animals. It holds a special spot for teens who stole their first kiss near the Tilt-a-Whirl, kids who pondered the miracle of the sideshow snake woman "with the beautiful head of a woman and the ugly, ugly body of a snake," adults who thrilled to the smell of leaking radiator fluid and the sound of crunching bumpers, grandparents who remembered pushing a stroller through the muck of a sudden thunderstorm or -

"We're done with the old one. We're done with all the old fair stuff," Fair Association President Dave DeYoung barks, gruffly interrupting any longing for nostalgia. "We're all about the new fairgrounds."

That new virgin fairgrounds at Peterson and Midlothian roads in Grayslake is bustling with construction these days as fair officials scramble to get things ready for this year's fair, which begins July 28 and runs through Aug. 2.

A cartoon cow on the www.lcfair.net Web site announces, "Have you HERD the news? We've mooo-ved!" But new fences started going up Monday. Some of the buildings aren't finished. Neither are the memories of the old fairgrounds.

"Oh yeah, I think about it every day," admits Bill Obenauf, a fair board director whose fond memories of the old fairgrounds go back to 1949, when he was an eighth-grader showing cattle. He misses the comfort level and assuredness he had at the old fairgrounds.

"But I won't miss all the trouble we always had," Obenauf says, recalling electrical power outages, broken water pipes and the hassle immediately after the demolition derby. "We had a crew picking up pieces of glass and metal all night because we had a rodeo coming in the next day."

In addition to the new location, this year's fair offers new bands and a new beverage - beer.

Confessing his old-school ways, Obenauf says, "I wish people could have fun without alcohol."

But drinking will be confined to a beer tent, won't diminish the family atmosphere at the fair and will bring in much-needed income, DeYoung promises.

Suspecting that some people might still show up next week at the old fairgrounds, Koeppen quips, "We'll put in a Ferris wheel and a beer tent in our parking lot because people will still come here."

The traffic won't be missed by Donna Freitag, executive assistant at the Farm Bureau, who says, "We used to need parking passes to come to work."

But Freitag says she will miss moseying over to the old fairgrounds for a fix of Dutch Annie's waffles wrapped around some ice cream. She's not alone.

"I had one every day during the fair," Obenauf confesses without waffling. "I always had to cheat (on my diet) a bit during fair time."

He's not quite sure yet if those waffles will make the trip to the new fairgrounds. So many details remain up in the air.

"Once we get finished," Obenauf says, "this will be the envy of fairgrounds."

And 50 years from now, it should have compiled as many memories as the old fairgrounds.