LUMBERYARD LOGS: Collecting summer memories

I went to the Orange County Fair for the first time Sunday, and it was a blast.

Since moving here from Los Angeles about three years ago, I’ve been meaning to get to the fair, which is much more accessible than the Los Angeles County Fair way out in Pomona — I mean, that’s even past the Valley, and when I lived in Santa Monica I didn’t like to go east of Centinela, which is the eastern border of the city.

(I was talking to another ex-LAite the other day who swore he never went east of Lincoln Boulevard — that’s the equivalent of Glenneyre Street in Laguna Beach — for at least 10 years while living on the “west side,” but I was never that provincial.)

Now back to the fair.

But first, this. When I lived in the Midwest (going way back), we went to Cedar Point in Ohio every summer, which I still contend is the best amusement park ever, and I include Disneyland in that. It’s great the same way the OC Fair is great: It’s unpretentious and doesn’t try to be more than it is. It’s a come-as-you-are, family-friendly place.

Of course, Cedar Point has punched up its rides a lot over the years, and I don’t think you’ll find anything more exciting in the way of twist-whirl-drop-spin amusement rides and roller coasters anywhere.

There’s a bullet-train ride that shoots you out and up 300 feet at warp speed. These are the kinds of rides where they remove not only hats and purses, but jewelry, shoes and even nose rings. They really should give a blood pressure test. For the squeamish, they’re as fun to watch as they are (presumably) to ride.

Another summery thing we used to do in Ohio was something called an ice cream social, where everyone would get together and crank out (literally) gallons and gallons of fresh ice cream, livened up with fresh-picked strawberries, peaches or any other summer fruit. It was a friendly get-together just for the enjoyment of it. I miss that.

The OC Fair has that kind of feeling, plus stuff you don’t find anywhere else. People set up gardens and compete for the best garden plot. Kids trot out their Holstein heifers before judges. Folks bring out their biggest zucchinis or tomatoes, which quickly lose their bloom. For those who’ve never seen a live chicken or rooster (not this Ohio gal, of course), there are exhibits of those, too.

One guy even brought his over-sized Belgian draft horse, named Hercules, and was charging $1 per adult (50 cents for kids) to see it, just like at a country carny show. He was raking it in.

But best of all, to me, are the collections.

I was astonished to find that people enter collections of just about anything. Bottle caps. Refrigerator magnets. Movie memorabilia. Souvenirs from favorite restaurants. Matchbook covers. One little girl of 9 or 10 rather unexpectedly entered a collection of seven or eight wine corks, carefully mounted on construction paper.

The best part is reading the stories behind the collections. (I’m hoping the little girl with the wine cork collection doesn’t know the real story behind all her corks, but her parents must.)

I love the story from the man who entered a prize-winning collection of wheat pennies. Those are U.S. pennies from the early to mid-20th century.

The story was that he was working at a car wash, and noticed a lot of this particular type of penny being sucked up by the vacuum cleaner he operated. He began to look into these discarded pennies and thus was born a collection. He tried to see if he could get a penny from every year the wheat penny was made by the U.S. Treasury. He did have to pay $600 for one penny, a rare one, obviously, to complete the collection. From a humble enterprise of washing cars grew a wonderful collection of coins that spans the history of the country, during good times and bad, from the turn of the last century through the Depression, two wars and the boom years of the late 1950s. It’s all there — collected mostly from the floors of people’s cars.

Some of the collections are remarkable for the length of time it took to make them.

A woman entered a collection of fancy dolls that began when she was 6 with a gift from her grandmother, and to which she kept adding for decades. There was a story behind each doll.

Others are “collectible” collections.

One Laguna Beach woman, Verna Glancy, entered an unusual collection of Depression-glass candlestick holders, which took third place in her division. Another Lagunan, Don Smith, won first place again for his collection of exquisite beer steins — covered beer mugs — which I learned from his story were invented during the Plague to keep germs from settling in the brew. There’s always something to learn from a collection.

Sometimes all you learn is what’s important to someone.

One young person had a collection of tiny Etch A Sketches, the kind used for key chains. Just anything can be a collection.

By next year, I’m going to have to come up with a collection to enter. It could be my collection of childhood ceramic horses with one mended leg (lots of stories there), or all the floppy disks from my old computers that can no longer be read, which I keep around for no apparent reason, or the dozens of rejection slips from my two novels, or maybe a year’s worth of press invitations to varied and sundry events.

Everybody has a collection of something. What’s yours?

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at (949) 494-2087 or cindy.frazier@latimes.com.