September Brings THE BLOOMSBURG FAIR

     During the past weekend, long-time friends in Pennsylvania have reminded me that this is the week of The Bloomsburg Fair -- an annual event held in Bloomsburg, PA (where I lived with my family and taught mathematics at Bloomsburg University for a bunch of years).  Public schools in Bloomsburg started their fall classes a week early so that students could have vacation-time during Fair Week -- held near the end of September.  The fair brings farmers and gardeners and cooks and other creative country folk together to show their products and it was easy for me to get involved since I lived just a few blocks from the Bloomsburg Fairground.  Moreover, Pennsylvania county fairs were familiar to me from my childhood.  I grew up on a farm near Indiana, PA  -- home of the Indiana County Fair, in which my father participated by exhibiting crops and animals and which I attended to enjoy Ferris-wheel rides and other carnival entertainments.

     One of my celebrations of this fondly-remembered Bloomsburg event was to write a poem entitled "The Bloomsburg Fair," a poem with bits of math.  Here is one of its stanzas.

The Bloomsburg Fair -- with theorems and lies . . .

     Along the north branch of the Susquehanna River in east-central Pennsylvania lies the town of Bloomsburg -- known for Bloomsburg University (where I taught math for a bunch of years) and for the Bloomsburg Fair -- an annual celebration that attracts hundreds of thousands of people during each last week of September.  
     I grew up loving fairs -- in my hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, the last week of August brought the Indiana County Fair where we celebrated, with livestock and a carnival, the end of summer vacation.
     More than twenty years ago I gathered some of my Bloomsburg Fair memories in a poem.  The entire poem is found at this link; below I offer a sample of the mathy imagery from the poem.

from   The Bloomsburg Fair      by JoAnne Growney  
. . .
       In front of side-show tents,
       a barker barks his come-on-ins.
       Why don't my students receive theorems
       as willingly as passersby
       accept his lies?
. . .
       If parallels will never meet—
       then here's a man with snakes for hair,
       and there's a woman with three eyes.

      This poem appears in the anthology, COMMON WEALTH: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple, (2005, PSU Press).