Today's Daily Star takes up a vexing problem: The county fair is getting old. Really old.
Many of the directors of the county fairs in Chenango, Delaware, Otsego and Schoharie counties and the town fair in Afton have served for years. There are between nine and 15 members on each board, and most of them range in age from 40 to almost 80, with very few 20- and 30-somethings, according to fair officials.
Lewis Miller, the 79-year-old president of the Otsego County Fair board of directors, says even a few more boomers would help shore up the aging board:
"The majority of our board members are older people," Miller said. "I think we have to get new young people, but they don't have the time when they are raising families. We need people in the 50 to 60 range who have the time and the experience."
County fairs aren't the only rural pasttime that's going gray. Another American tradition that's losing its young people: NASCAR.
"The biggest problem facing NASCAR is that the young males have left the sport,” said David Hill, Fox Sports Media Group CEO. (Fox is paying $4.5 billion to run carry NASCAR through 2014.) “And if I was NASCAR, and I was an owner (of a race team), it would be something that I would be burning the midnight oil on a nightly basis, worrying where they’ve gone and how do I get them back."
It's a symptom of a much larger problem: Young people are leaving rural America behind. In Delaware County, the percent of the population 65 and older is 19.3 -- dramatically larger than the share for New York State (13.4 percent) or the nation as a whole (12.8 percent).
Last October, sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas tackled the issue in their book, Hollowing Out The Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America. From the Daily Yonder's thoughtful review:
...Carr and Kefalas recognize the danger to rural communities posed by educating rural youth to envision their future lives elsewhere.
Most impressively, the authors keyed into what concerns rural youths about their adult lives and how these quandaries fuel the exodus of young people from rural places. Their dilemma, in short, is between remaining as adults in rural communities where they sacrifice educational or economic opportunities or leaving beloved rural places for expanded options in urban areas. Rural kids find that they must negotiate between their commitment to place and their commitment to the American ideal of individualist achievement, an ideal increasingly difficult to reach as the economic foundations of many rural communities continue to crumble. “When moving up implies moving out,” what should young people do?
