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In the southeast corner of the Minnesota State Fair, there’s a big pale yellow house. It’s attached to a collection of greenhouses right next to the Space Tower and across the street from the Agriculture-Horticulture building.
“This was home for 22 years. This is where mom and dad lived. This was our home,” said Sue Quam.
Quam and her five siblings grew up at the State Fair and lived year-round in what’s known as the J.V. Bailey house from 1973 to1994. Their dad, Bill Hermes, was the State Fair gardener and groundskeeper.
“When we think back on our childhood, this is still and will always be home,” Quam said, standing in what used to be her family’s living room right next to Snelling Avenue.
The house has since been converted into office space for the State Fair Foundation. But a few decades ago, it was where the Hermes family celebrated Christmas and Easter.
On a rainy day this summer Quam and her sisters Mary Parnell and Anne Burt and Anne’s daughter Sarah Ollerich went back to their childhood home for a visit and a trip down memory lane.
“It was fun growing up (here),” Quam said. “We had the whole grounds as our, you know, playground, you might say. No traffic. We could ride bikes anywhere. It was good.”
The two weeks of the State Fair were some of the Hermes’ sisters’ favorite times of the year. They could get mini donuts for breakfast every morning just outside their front door. They watched the nightly firework show from the roof of their porch.
“The talent show was always a big deal. We watched that every evening, the finals,” Anne Burt said.
“And then, of course, the cheese curds!” Mary Parnell added. “I don’t think Mom cooked very much during the fair.”
For a few winters the grounds crew flooded the inner court of the food building to turn it into a skating rink for the kids. And in the summers, before the fair opened, the sisters got the annual job of testing out arcade games, carnival rides and the giant slide.
“There were arcades,” Parnell said. “They would give us buckets of quarters to make sure the machines all worked.”
Anne Burt met her husband at the fair one summer when he worked there as a driver.
“We had a mutual boss, so she was the one that was in charge of the drivers, and I was one of the receptionists at the office,” Burt said.
The boss set them up.
“She got us to go to a grandstand show one night, just spur the moment. I got off early,” Burt remembered “The rest is history.”
But there were downsides to living at the fair, including the day after Labor Day, when everything ended, and all the kids had to go back to school.
The sisters also have memories of their least favorite fair attraction: a frozen whale carcass that was on display in a trailer across the street from their house. All day every day during the last weeks of August they heard a recording advertising the decomposing whale.
“Are we going to talk about Little Irvy?” Mary Parnell joked. “He was a dead whale captured off the coast of San Francisco, 20 tons, 40,000 pounds. We heard this (audio) loop for 12 days, and (the whale) was parked in the yard. You couldn’t go to bed at night until they turn off the little tape.”
Even though their former house has been turned into office space, there are still traces of the Hermes family at the fair. A big yellow bench outside the home has their dad’s name on it. And Bill Hermes, who was in charge of the greenhouses and grounds, spent countless hours caring for canna lily bulbs and designing some of the fair’s iconic gardening features like a liberty bell made entirely of succulents.
Many of the plants Hermes cared for over the decades are still blooming in rows around the fairgrounds.
For the sisters, a lot of their memories of their dad come back when they’re standing in the greenhouse.
“He liked to listen to the comments people would make,” Parnell said. “(He would) stand by the bell or the gate and hear people talk about it.”
Now when the Hermes sisters visit the State Fair, they make sure to enjoy the taffy and the pork sandwiches, but they also remember their dad and all the memories they had growing up next to the Space Tower and the greenhouses.
English (US) ·