Joy and melancholy flow in equal portions this week in Valparaiso for those who remember Tom Seibel.
It’s county fair week — actually 10 days — No. 165, when all the lovely scents of rural culture converge south of town astride Indiana 49. The midway lights twinkle in the shimmering afterglow of dusk. The grandstand rocks, the cotton candy billows, lemonade gushes. Many cows moo.
Tom was a glorious specimen during Porter County Fair week — a chronicler resplendent in his element. He was a writer who found his perfect place to tell perfect little stories. Sometimes that convergence never happens, even for talented writers.
But it did for Tom.
As a reporter, he always could capture the details of capital murder court cases and the grimy residue of government news. But for two summer weeks, he was a reborn monarch butterfly. For the years we worked together in Valparaiso, he owned the Porter County Fair as much as any person could.
He was the Bard of the Midway.
He was recruited to the job on a hunch, and it did not take long to see his poet’s instincts.
But Tom was very ill. And four months after his last fair column closed the books on 2002, he was gone. Diabetes and heart failure took him at 59. His body just stopped working and, as much as any early death is a sadness, this was more so for those fans who had found him, just as he had found them.
I was one of those fans. We all were deprived of the decade of gentle, funny, insightful writing he most certainly would have produced. Those are losses from which a newspaper and its readers never fully recover.
In truth, my fair memories are a perfect amalgam of nostalgia, fun and rare courage. It’s the only place where I could ride a tall Ferris wheel without vertigo and eat as many corn dogs as my stomach could accommodate.
Perhaps Porter Countians know this, but perhaps not. Not all county fairs are wonderful. Some are mismanaged, lifeless drudges and worse. But as a veteran of county fairs in 10 states, I can testify that Porter County’s annual show is a glittering, mesmerizing jewel and easily the best fair week of my life.
This is Porter County’s greatest glory.
And then there were Tom’s stories.
He had grown up in ribald Chicago newsrooms and had been a fishing buddy of legendary columnist Mike Royko. Whatever had flowered in his professional reporter’s mind, the fair touched it.
The 30 or so personal columns he did from the Indiana 49 grounds remain testaments to Indiana county fairs in general and Porter County’s interpretation of homespun showbiz specifically.
He loved the odd, carny freak-show purveyor who traveled with a large alligator in a mobile tank and displayed the creature as though it were a surviving dinosaur. He loved weird animals and weird people.
He spent one afternoon standing near the 4-H animal pens secretly compiling what visitors said to the animals when they thought no one was listening. If you were an odd person with odder life experiences, he could find you at the fair and tell your story.
He loved the fair with an open, unambiguous devotion.
As he wrote on the eve of his final fair in 2002:
“Got Japanese beetles on your begonia or wild rose? Follow a Slurpee truck down the street?
“Hear a distant drone of a calliope?
“As sure as the pesky beetles at fair time are akin to robins in spring, any of the above could be signs that the fair — the 152nd Porter County Agricultural Fair — has begun.”
Later that week, his nose perked up at the airborne scents.
“On Thursday afternoon, flags fronting the Porter County Fair grounds were blowing west, bringing the scent of fair food to the west parking lot. It’s been a year of wind, a new one every day, it seems.
“On this one traveled an odor of corn dogs, elephant ears, sweet potato fries and popcorn.
“The smell was combined with the fragrances coming out of animal barns.
“Compounded it was, by the humidity falling from the sky.
” ‘It’s been slow,’ said Judy Davis at George’s, a trailer noted for its elephant ears.”
This is the week I think of Tom, the fair and how they belong together. With any luck, heaven is a county fair that never ends, a place where gentle poets hold court.
