That he used his favorite artistic tool, a computer, to breathe new life into an original design rendered with colored pencils by his mother, Rose Smith, seems fair, too.
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That his mother, with her All-American name, also has been honored for baking the pair’s best pie — an apple pie, no less — would seem to put the story over the top were it not for one fact: She created the logo at a time in Clark County Fair history when finances were as lean as a malnourished feeder calf.
The Clark County Fair will mark its 70th year when it opens Friday, July 21.
In the early 1980s, when Gordon Flax approached his friend Ed Kranz to help straighten things out at the fair, there was no Champions Center, no plans for boat races and no talk that the fairgrounds might be one of Clark County’s biggest draws.
Nor was there much money.
Asking how he might help, Kranz remembers Flax saying, “Well, you can take over as manager,” though without pay.
A stipend eventually came his way. But when Kranz, then a guidance counselor at Northeastern High School, started spending his evenings, weekends and summers working on the fair, not a cent was promised.
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He took the job because the Kranz children were and had been active in the fair. Son Mike designed an early computer program that led people through a simple quiz that played the “Buckeye Battle Cry” for correct answers and “Hail to the Victors” for errors.
Daughter Michelle was active in FFA and the Junior Fair Board, and, would eventually go on to be the media coordinator at the fair.
Kranz soon found that when he asked others to help and promised them as much as he was earning, it was an offer they couldn’t refuse.
“When you’re under duress,” Kranz said, “more people do more things with a more cooperative attitude than at times when things are going well.”
So the Rust family organized ribbons and trophies. Doug Rader, fire chief of Springfield Twp., addressed safety concerns. Lloyd Kaffenbarger took on the calf scrambles. And so on.
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While others were helping with the standard fare, “We put in two things that made a huge difference,” Kranz said.
“We initiated a pay-one-price policy,” which though used at the Ohio State Fair “was pretty much unheard of at the county level,” he said.
That brought financial stability.
“Also, that was the first year we tried to bring in major name entertainment.”
Louise Mandrell, Boxcar Willie, Reba McIntyre and Marty Stewart were among the performers under a huge rented tent in the early years, Kranz recalled.
Other groups included New Kids on the Block and “some rookie nobody had ever heard of,” said Kranz, “Garth Brooks.”
The idea for a fair logo was one of many that emerged as the fair began upping its publicity efforts — “a marketing strategy, I think they called it,” said Kranz.
That called for a media luncheon the week before the fair and the idea of a fair logo. When Janice Smith, a Kranz neighbor and friend heard this, she suggested a second Mrs. Smith, her sister-in-law, Rose, who had rendered artwork and logos for the annual Fair Book.
Then leader of the Four Leaf Clovers 4H Club, Rose Smith went to work and, in about two weeks, penciled out a red, white and blue logo with a ribbon through a double star.
“It really didn’t take long to come up with that design,” she said. “It was all freehand.”
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And last year, when Marin Smith, a third Mrs. Smith, who teaches graphic arts at Clark State Community College, got wind that that the logo was going to be updated, she decided no one outside the family was going to lay a hand on her mother-in-law’s work.
“She’s awesome,” the youngest Mrs. Smith said. “Not that she doesn’t drive me crazy sometimes, because she’s a mom. But you couldn’t ask for a better mother-in law.”
Marin Smith quickly farmed out the project to her husband, Jerid Smith, who didn’t have to be briefed on Rose Smith’s artistic style.
“I even remember Mom drawing the logo back then,” said Jerid Smith, who creates advertising and promotional graphics for Heidelberg Distributing of Dayton.
Updating her design “didn’t feel like a competition,” he said. “At first, I was afraid it would. But it’s not really like that between her and me.”
Instead, he said, “It was fun to take what she had made and put a modern spin on it.”
The growth of computer art since the original was drawn allowed him to tweak the logo to perfect the stars’ shapes and add reflections and shadows that give the logo a greater sense of depth and dimension.
He also bounced the look, as it developed, off the third Mrs. Smith, the one he married.
“We collaborated on whether we had gone too far or should go a little farther,” Jerid Smith said, an indication of the trust he has in her judgment.
Marin Smith’s version of the collaboration is, like her artistic style, a little more freewheeling.
“I told him, ‘You still need to make it your own,’ and then he grumbled a little at me and went back and did that,” she said.
Encroaching arthritis and list of other things to do have separated Rose Smith from artwork over the years. In the same way, the cystic fibrosis that required Jerid Smith to have his brother’s help raising hogs during their fair days led to Jerid Smith’s receiving lung and liver transplants just before the 2007 fair.
Now long gone from the fair, Kranz still recalls how the late Bill Ferguson and Paul Shore were instrumental in helping; how Janet Paugh, then a library aide at South Vienna Learning Center, became a source of great stability for the Fair Board for years; and is thrilled that the fairgrounds has “really taken off.”
Dean Blair, executive director of the Clark County Fairgrounds, said the whole story of the logo is a beautiful thing for the fair to celebrate in its 70th year.
For Kranz and others, the continued use of a logo that reminds them of the time when they all worked together without pay to revitalize the fair they love may be the fairest thing of all.
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