John’s Rice County Fair Recollections And Thanks

When you work in smaller market media, you don't have a team of people to set up your booth at a fair. Put the signs up. Set the broadcast equipment up. You have to use the people you have to get it done.

Monday a number of us set up the booth. Jerry brought the deck in on his farm truck and trailer. It's stored in the off season at the Goodhue fair site. The fair people took the deck off the truck and Paul, Mike, Jerry and myself got the deck in place and put our Faribault Rental tent up. I set up the equipment with help from Mike. Kelly Krage's assignment was to keep things running in the studio that day.

Things went fairly smooth all week despite the heat and some possessed equipment that worked at the booth Wednesday morning, but would not work when we moved to the beer garden for the farm broadcast. When it went back to the booth, everything worked fine.

But we had great guests all week and the whole team did a great job. From those on the air, to the sales staff who came and helped and still had to do some selling. To Missi and Paul  who kept the office humming when many of the team was at the fair, to all the announcers and board ops that helped out. Thanks to Gordy for all of his live newscasts and AM Minnesota programs from the fair, and being emcee for the queen coronation and senior programs. To Tamara for getting video and other things online. Watching the coronation live on Facebook was cool. It was nice to see something good on Facebook last week after the violence of the previous weeks. And Jerry for taking on extra duties in a pinch as well as putting himself on a mechanical bull.

Special thanks to the Cardinal Café crew for a great job on breakfasts and other food. If I were a rich man I would make some donation to make up some of your losses last week.

Thanks to you our listeners for your comments, visiting with us, playing some games and dealing with some program changes that have to happen during the fair.

Thanks most importantly to John Dvorak and Kathy Cap and the fair crew for all you did under tough conditions.

It's sometimes not the most relished work during fair week, but having a great team of people to work with makes it much easier to deal with.