How the fair keeps an Iowa town alive
Clearfield's Lions Club shuttle helps pay for field trips, library books and meals for the elderly
Iowa State Fair: Clearfield Shuttle: The Clearfield Lions Club operates the campground tractor shuttles at the Iowa State Fair. The manpower needed to keep the shuttles moving creates a void in the town.
RaNa Bailey, who works as a registered nurse in Clearfield, has spent the past 12 years driving shuttles for the Clearfield Lions Club during the Iowa State Fair.
Clearfield streets are so barren during the Iowa State Fair, you half expect a tumbleweed to roll past.
The few people who remain during the fair each year, many of them elderly widows with warm State Fair memories, say the annual event put this southwest Iowa town of 360 on the map.
The fair also might have kept Clearfield on the map.
The town is known for its Clearfield Lions Club shuttle, which runs from the fair campground down to the concourse. The dolled-up flatbeds — with freshly painted white bench seats, rails and awning — have been a common sight at the fair for 49 years. The money made running them funds everything a town that’s lost nearly half its population in 60 years can’t otherwise afford.
“In my opinion, if it wasn’t for the Lions Club, we wouldn’t have a town,” said Earl Matheny, owner of Mickey D’s bar, which closes the last Saturday of the fair. “They support everything.”
Most of the club budget is made at the fair. The money buys eyeglasses for poor kids and helps the blind afford guide dogs. It helps the school buy computers and take field trips and gives the elderly a place to eat congregate meals — in the club’s community center.
The Lions Club put playground equipment in the park and a walking trail on the edge of town. It paid for swimming lessons, library books and cemetery maintenance.
It helps the town celebrate holidays with Christmas lights and July 4 fireworks.
This year, a mural the club funded was unveiled on the side of an unsightly building exposed by neighboring demolition. The mural depicts a State Fair shuttle, pulled by an original Allis-Chalmers D17 tractor, which old farmers say could “go like the devil.”
This was a common-sense idea, dreamed up in 1963 by three Clearfield men tired of walking up the big hill to the fairgrounds campground. They asked fair officials to charge a dime to haul people up the hill. The officials thought it was such a good idea they decided to pay the men to do it, using campground proceeds.
At first, just a handful of men and a couple of old tractors took part. Today the town employs a fleet of nine shiny shuttles that run from 8 a.m. to midnight with dozens of volunteers, including people who help board passengers.
“Darn near everybody in town goes to the fair, because we have 180 members, the largest Lions Club in the state,” said Dale Juergens, one of the original shuttle creators. “To a lot of people, that’s their vacation.”
Nearly 90 fully equipped campers from Clearfield wedge into a reserved campground spot. In early years, they stayed in nothing more than pickup toppers or trucks with tarps.
“My mother went to the fair carrying me inside her,” said Deb Davenport, now middle-aged.
The next year, her mother placed her in a crib in an old stock truck with a tarp over it at the campground. “She thought we were in heaven.”
Lions Club president Gaylan Bell said his kids grew up at the fair, his middle daughter having celebrated every one of her 43 birthdays on the grounds.
The shuttles, which Clearfield folks call “buses,” zoom past every few minutes. Two are equipped with lifts for the disabled. People board with scooters, wheelchairs or strollers, every age weighed down with fair food or tired from miles of walking the grounds.
Brian Bickel, running the tractor on a day earlier this week, said he started driving at age 18 — this is his 19th consecutive year.
One day he counted the steps he saves a person: 4,725 down to the fairgrounds and back — nearly a mile.
On board the bus built by Clearfield blacksmiths was Kaitlyn Hamilton, carrying her 3-week-old baby in a chest harness. When asked if she enjoyed having a shuttle with such a tiny baby, she said, “I’m from Clearfield. I’m going down to help load the buses.”
The whole town is involved, it seems, in addition to people from the nearby countryside of Taylor and Ringgold counties. Halfway through this year’s fair, 119 volunteers had worked shifts.
Lions Club International officials say Clearfield’s 180 members represent an extraordinary number for such a small community, especially considering the average membership of the 14,000 U.S. clubs is just 30.
One of the Lions Club’s main passions is helping the blind.
Bob Cameron of Clearfield is blind. He said he didn’t receive, or need, help from the group’s charity. But as a youth coach of 15 years, the Lions Club helped buy his teams’ uniforms.
After all, he’s a Lions Club member, like most in town.
That’s why during the fair things can get pretty lonely, especially for livestock. Jerry Brown, one of this year’s shuttle organizers, was in town to check on his cattle before driving right back two hours to the fair.
Dale Bickel also left his wife and family at the fair to tend the farm for a couple of days. In addition to eating a lot of tomato and peanut butter sandwiches (he can’t cook), he discovered a loose heifer wandering around. The neighbors would normally tell him, but they’re all at the fair. He captured his grandchild’s loose animal, and then called his wife to ask how to run the clothes washer.
Earlier this week, only a handful of places were open on Broadway Street, a main street Mayor Sharon Brown says the town hopes to improve with the addition of a museum or other businesses. But the Lions Club’s community center was open, a shining example of this town’s dedication to people-hauling at the fair.
Elderly people shuffled in for their congregate meal, available for free or a $3 donation. Men in overalls like Harold Hancock drove the fair tractor for years but leave it to the younger generation now. Women like Dorothy Larson, who is 86 and lost her husband 20 years ago, have fond memories of meeting and visiting with people from all over at the fair.
The noon whistle echoed just as grace was said: “Keep us kind and humble and keep our hearts full of love.”
Some of the kindness these folks showed for decades — transplanting a town to Des Moines to haul people — has been returned to Clearfield.
“Men, come on forward,” called out the cook, and they filled their plates with loose-meat sandwiches
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