LA County Fair runs one extra day in 2026, a modest boost – Daily Bulletin

Some of us bear in mind when the Los Angeles County Fair operated 5 days a week for anyplace from 18 days to 24 days. (And that month was September, not May — though there is no going again.)

When the Pomona occasions returned in 2022 after the COVID-19 pandemicthe truthful was 4 days a week and 17 days in all. The final three years, it dropped to 16 days.

This 12 months’s truthful, which runs May 7-31it’s nonetheless 4 days a week. But it is 17 days, not 16, and the primary day is Thursday, quite than a Friday. That hasn’t occurred in 4 years.

“It’s a day longer,” stated Renee Hernandez, a truthful spokesperson. “And six hours earlier.”

Six hours earlier? Beginning in 2023, the truthful would host a non-public pre-opening reception for stakeholders on Friday afternoon, then open the gates at 5 pm Not this 12 months.

“Instead of starting at 5 pm on opening day, we’re starting at 11 am,” Hernandez defined. “The fair is open 11 to 11 every day, Thursday to Sunday, and Memorial Day.”

That’s nearer to the truthful’s basic schedule. In the 2000s, the truthful ran Wednesday by Sunday for 18 days. An growth to 24 days, to embody 5 weekends, together with Labor Day, got here through the 2010s.

Opening for 17 days in May is trickier than you’d assume. Hernandez defined among the issues.

The 2022 truthful opened on Thursday, May 5, to coincide with Cinco de Mayo. Smart, proper? The truthful, nonetheless, would not function in a vacuum. Its carnival firm, Ray Cammack Shows, got here immediately from Arizona’s Pima County Fair, which ended the earlier Sunday.

The carnies will need to have ridden hell-bent for leather-based. (I’m referring to their outerwear and their pores and skin.)

On opening day in Pomona, “there were still a couple of carnival rides that hadn’t been set up because of that time squeeze,” Hernandez recalled. “In 2023, we moved to opening on Friday instead of Thursday to give the carnival company an extra day.”

This 12 months, with Cinco de Mayo on Tuesday, the truthful did not stretch its schedule to incorporate it. And the truthful in Tucson ended April 26, giving Cammack a breather.

Those two circumstances, Hernandez stated, “gave us the opportunity to go back to opening on a Thursday and having a 17-day fair once again.”

I’ll take it.

Hernandez spent an hour Monday morning displaying me across the grounds and telling me about what’s new and what’s not. Look for some county truthful protection from me right here in the approaching weeks as time permits.

I’ve put myself on the truthful beat yearly since 1998. As a rural Midwesterner by delivery, the downhome doings are at all times of curiosity to me. I, actually, wrote the book on the fair.

Which hardly makes me an knowledgeable. Several instances Monday, Hernandez would level one thing out, I might ask if it is new and she or he’d say, “It’s been here a few years.”

As our golf cart tour got here to an finish, we bumped into truthful advisor Lucas Rivera. (None of us had been injured.) That’s once we all bought into a dialog concerning the schedule.

“It’s great to have another day — and another full day,” Rivera declared with a smile. “Jump proper into enjoyable. ‘Let’s go have some fried turkey legs.’ ”

Many will say, “That sounds like a plan.”

truthful climate

There was once a joke in late August when the already excessive temperature would abruptly rise 5 or 10 levels: It should be time for the LA County Fair.

That joke would not work in May. Milder climate is why the truthful switched from late summer season to spring. Monday and Tuesday had been overcast and 63 levels.

Yet I’ll be aware for the file that opening day is predicted to be sunny and 83.

Change in plans

Did I write right here final week that I might be taking a few days off to go to Joshua Tree? As I typed these phrases, I used to be feeling a bit draggy and questioned if I used to be actually going to make it. By the time of my deliberate departure two days later, a virus had knocked me out.

No means was I going to be climbing round a nationwide park. I may barely stroll across the block.

This week I’ll strive once more, however with a completely different vacation spot: Palm Springs, website of the annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival on May 7-10. Until then, maintain your germs to your self, please.

Dave Mason, R.I.P.

English singer-songwriter Dave Mason, who died April 19 at 79carried out not less than twice in the Inland Empire. Mason headlined at San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium on Jan. 24, 1975, if the web is to be believed.

And he carried out at Ontario Motor Speedway on March 18, 1978 as a part of the California Jam 2 rock festival. Some 300,000 individuals heard him play, amongst different songs, his hits “Feelin’ Alright?” and “We Just Disagree.”

A rising Sun?

Arriving in San Bernardino by train one day in mid-April, I walked to lunch at a diner on E Street. On a desk close to the entry was a print version of that morning’s Sun, left behind by a earlier buyer as a courtesy.

Having forgotten in my rush out the door to learn it, I took it to my desk, as if this had been some earlier decadence. It was nostalgic.

After lunch, and earlier than an appointment, I spent a half hour on my laptop computer on the Feldheym Library. As I packed up, a man on the subsequent desk had simply sat down with, sure, the library’s copy of that morning’s Sun.