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By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
It won’t have the full scope and variety that folks are used to at the Clark County Fair. But scarcely more than a year after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be a very good substitute.
The Clark County Junior Livestock Show and 4-H Festival will be held this weekend at the Logandale Fairgrounds. And it promises to be a small-town event for the record books. There will be arts and crafts, food vendors, pie-eating contests, sack races, agricultural displays, cowboy poetry, a drifting car experience, local entertainment, rodeo events, live music concerts every night and much more. And at the center of it all will be the annual Clark County Junior Livestock Association (CCJLA) show and auction.
The three-day festival is being named in honor of Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick. And she is truly the mover and shaker that has made it all possible.
In an interview with The Progress, Kirkpatrick said that she had been surprised and disappointed when she heard, in early February, that Clark County Fair officials had pulled the plug on this year’s fair. Citing the myriad layers of regulation and requirements being mandated for such large-scale events, the Fair had decided that such a large-scale event was simply not do-able this year.
Kirkpatrick said that her first thought went to the youth exhibitors for the CCJLA. Last year’s livestock show and auction had been cancelled suddenly, along with the fair, due to COVID-19 restrictions. When that happened, the kids had been left holding the bag, after spending months raising their show animals for exhibit. Kirkpatrick was determined that this wouldn’t happen to them again.
“I promised those kids that they would be able to showcase their livestock this year,” Kirkpatrick said. “That was really my drive behind this whole thing because I made that promise. So we have pulled everybody together to try and support them in that.”
Kirkpatrick said that it would not have been hard to simply allow the CCJLA to use the livestock pavilion on their own and put on a scaled-back show. But without a big event like the Fair to bring in the crowds, she worried the kids might have difficulty finding buyers for their animals at the auction.
“What I was concerned about most was: Sure! The kids could show their animals, but they needed an audience for that. They needed buyers to want to come to the auction,” Kirkpatrick said. “So we decided we had to put on a real show to bring all that in for those kids.”
Kirkpatrick started making phone calls to friends and supporters from all across the state, looking for both financial and logistical help. The response she got was overwhelming.
“We have raised about $115,000 so we could do this right,” Kirkpatrick said. “We have a lot of sponsors from all over. When people heard it was all to support these kids, they were very willing to step up and help.”
Key among these sponsors was Dave Brown, a regional real estate developer from Las Vegas. Brown and Kirkpatrick have been friends for many years. When the Commissioner called to ask Brown if he would be willing to help, he didn’t hesitate.
“My kids do junior rodeo and they have also done 4-H, so all this is something that I have a passion for anyway,” Brown said in an interview. “So when my friend Marilyn called and asked if I’d be willing to help her, I was like, ‘Heck, yeah!’”
Brown was asked to coordinate the rodeo events and the nightly concert performances. He recruited a number of his friends and contacts in various fields to come along and help with that.
Brown explained that there would be a rodeo event each night of the festival starting at 6 pm. A concert performance will immediately follow at 9 pm.
Brown was instructed that everything was to be admission-free to the public. There will be no charge to get into the fairgrounds during the day, and no admissions charge to attend the rodeo or the concert.
“This was the Commissioner’s brainchild and she has been firm about this from the start,” Brown said.
“She is really trying to give back to the community at the end of a rough year. She recognizes that a lot of people just can’t afford to pay what it costs to attend a major event like the Fair. So this year we have paid for it all through sponsorships so that it can be a community event for the people out there.”
Brown pointed out that, though there will be no charge to enjoy the events in the rodeo arena, there will be an opportunity for attendees to give donations to various causes at the entry gate.
“Every night will have a different benefactor,” Brown said.
“That is a very giving community out there,” Kirkpatrick added. “So if they know that it is going right back into the community, some folks may want to put a donation in. We will have a donation bucket there, and that will go right back to things like 4-H and Junior Livestock.”
On Thursday night, the rodeo will offer a WRCA-sanctioned ‘locals’ rodeo. This will include amateur team roping, breakaway roping, barrel racing and other timed events. A slack event will also take place on Thursday at 3 pm. to allow for even more competitors
On Friday and Saturday nights the rough stock events will be added to the program, including bullriding and bronc riding. There will even be mini bull riding events for junior rodeo participants.
All three nights will feature a mutton bustin contest for kids ages 8 and under weighing less than 75 lbs. Signups for mutton bustin will be first-come-first-served and will take place on the evening of the event. There will be only 10 mutton bustin spots each night.
The main event live music concert will be held on Friday night. It will be an “All-Star Band” featuring performers from some of the great blockbuster bands of the past, all on one stage. These will include celebrity members from Jefferson Starship, Little River Band, Journey and more.
On Thursday night, the band will be Heers and Turner Overdrive featuring Siena Paglia.
And on Saturday night, the featured artist will be locally-raised musician Branson Anderson. Opening for Anderson will be Dell and the Rocket, featuring another local legend, Weston Adams.
Brown also recruited friends from Gatsby Racing to offer a “Drift Car” experience in the northwest paved parking lot of the fairgrounds. This will give participants an opportunity to ride along with a professional driver in a low-speed drift experience.
“That is the only thing that will cost money,” Brown said. “It will be $5 for kids and $10 for adults. And all that money will be donated back to the CCJLA.”
Meanwhile, the CCJLA will be busy each day. The Association will be hosting a number of events beginning Wednesday and continuing through the auction and traditional buyer’s dinner on Saturday. All of this will be held in the Glen Hardy Livestock Pavilion throughout the weekend.
The local 4-H organization will present a whole lineup of activities, demonstrations and exhibits in the Fine Arts Building each day. These will include robotics demonstrations, chess activities, ice cream making, cupcake decorating contests, youth arts and crafts exhibits and more.
The Plaza Stage will have local entertainment going on throughout the day including cowboy poets Delmar Leatham and Kenny Marshall, the Nelson Family Band, the Muddy River Cloggers and much more.
The local Parks and Rec staff will have a number of family-friendly activities taking place on the grounds. These will include sports challenges, water balloon tosses, races, pie eating contests and more. And the southwest lawn will be filled with inflatable bounce houses for the kids’ enjoyment.
Kirkpatrick and her staff will be assisting the Moapa Valley Rotary Club on Saturday morning in preparing and serving a free pancake breakfast for the community. The breakfast will start at 8:00 am at the Fairgrounds.
There will also be about a dozen food vendors throughout the weekend in the southwest midway area.
Kirkpatrick emphasized that the event is not exempt from the COVID health precautions and measures currently in place.
“We have actually had to create a full plan for public health,” Kirkpatrick said. “We had to come up a with a way for contact tracing so people will have to sign up as they come in. We also have to clean down the surfaces on a regular basis, including the bounce houses. That takes a little bit of coordinating. We have to space out the activity areas so no one area has too many people at once. And we will have separation between families at the rodeo and other entertainment venues. All that took some doing. But it wasn’t terribly difficult to make the plan.”
Kirkpatrick emphasized that the event is not being designed to replace the Clark County Fair or to take over that long-standing local event.
“That has been going on locally, very well, for many years,” she said. “I’ve been going out there since I was young myself. But I think we could stop and think about making the Fair more affordable to families so that they keep coming. We don’t want it to go away for lack of participation. A smaller-town event like this might provide a bit of a model for that.”
This week’s festivities will begin on Wednesday with CCJLA events only. Then things will kick into full gear on Thursday at 10 am. The hours will run from 10 am to 10 pm on each day. For more detailed information see a schedule of highlighted events on page 3A of this edition.
