Kids Fair Game for the Camera

For many of the camera-brandishing parents at Saturday’s Ventura County Fair parade, provoking a little embarrassment among their marching offspring was almost as important as capturing the moment for posterity.

Take Dorothy and Dean Richardson of Santa Paula. Before the parade, the couple were sedately seated in deck chairs patiently awaiting an appearance by their 17-year-old daughter, a cheerleader at Ventura’s St. Bonaventure High School.

Darla is the third child the couple have proudly watched taking part in the parade during the past three decades, Dorothy explained. The routine is pretty much the same.

“I go right up to the float and embarrass them and take pictures like crazy,” she said enthusiastically. “And I follow them down the block until I embarrass them enough and they give me hand signals and say ‘enough is enough.’ ”

The Richardsons were far from the only parents plotting to hatch a little mischievous mayhem on unsuspecting, self-conscious adolescents.

“I always embarrass my children,” said Sergio Garcia Sr., 39, of Port Hueneme, with a perfectly straight face as he stood waiting, video camera in hand, for 14-year-old Sergio Garcia Jr. to march past playing his tenor sax in the Rio Mesa High School Band.

“I capture all my children’s events on video. I have T-ball, baseball, jazz dance and tap and karate and soccer. You name it, I’ve got it.”

Charlene Coutee-McGee, 34, of Oxnard lay in wait along with a dozen or so exuberant relatives to ambush her clarinet-playing daughter, a member of the Oxnard High School Band.

“I’m going to get right in her face,” she said gleefully. “I was in the parade several times when I was a little girl. That’s why I come out here now to see my children.”

The 2 1/2-hour parade, which drew 13,000 spectators to downtown Ventura on Saturday morning, featured nearly 140 entries.

Other entries this year included the fair-themed “Planting Memories” float, which boasted a space shuttle surrounded by a squadron of green martians on bicycles. Earlier, a bevy of women clad in black workout gear gyrated nonstop atop the float of a local gym. And much later, Oxnard Olympian Fernando Vargas received a rousing reception from the crowd.

“There was so much interest in the parade this year we have actually had to turn people down,” said parade coordinator Bob Cornett. “It seems like it gets better every year.”

Disaster almost struck at one point, when a horse ridden by Tom McGrath of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Mounted Posse was startled near Santa Cruz and Main streets, Cornett said. The horse reared, threw his rider to the asphalt, then fell and landed on McGrath.

Neither man nor horse was seriously injured.

At the fairgrounds, participants in the inaugural Academic Rodeo had no such problems.

Eight four-person teams of middle-school-age students from throughout the county faced off in a College Bowl-like contest to measure brains rather than brawn.

Quiz questions ranged from geography and grammar to politics and pop culture. Participants reeled off answers to questions about mythology and algebra with little hesitation, but were stumped when asked which television show posed the question “Who shot J.R?” (The answer: the defunct prime-time soap “Dallas.”)

“I’m really glad they didn’t know that,” said mom Angela Wetch, whose 11-year-old daughter attends Ventura Missionary, a private Christian school.

The winner will be decided at 3 p.m. today in the Youth Building when a spelling bee concludes the competition.

Adults who attend should be prepared to be embarrassed, organizers said.

“It’s a very humbling experience,” said fair spokeswoman and mother Teri Raley. “These kids are sharp cookies.”

* EVENTS: B9