What I perceived as a first-timer to the State Fair

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I’m learning that Minnesotans don’t typically toot their own horns. That’s a bit refreshing as a recent transplant from Cleveland, a city that considers the verbose boxing promoter Don King a favorite son.

Modesty has its limits, however. Approaching the Minnesota State Fair as domestic tourism seems like an exercise in reductionism. It strikes me as more of an experience.

I’ve visited other state fairs, but the visual and culinary spectacle hosted in Falcon Heights the past week and a half feels different. The annual Minnesota State Fair features the requisite Noah’s Ark sampling of livestock, carnival rides, the likes of Ludacris and Blake Shelton, and more fried food and sweet treats than you can shake a stick at. But I sense that there is much more to this annual spectacle, which humbly bills itself as the “Great Minnesota Get-Together.”

I met U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar at the fair Tuesday when she stopped by the Minnesota Star Tribune stage to listen in on a conversation about the innovations we’ve recently unveiled at the paper and our web presence. When Klobuchar learned I was taking in my first fair, she asked what I thought.

“It’s a lot,” was my immediate response.

I know what I saw. I saw an authentic Minnesota gathering.

Thousands of people walked around the fairgrounds just hours after a severe thunderstorm wreaked havoc on the region and scattered fair port-a-potties like bowling pins.

People of all ages, races and disposition milled about with buckets of cookies. One offered a cookie to a complete stranger.

No one was in a hurry. No one seemed stressed. Happiness was on display.

As I later reflected on the visit, I recalled a story about a fair held more than a century ago. The famed English scientist Francis Galton made a trip to a regional fair in the west of England in 1906. Galton was obsessed with animal breeding as well as the racist and now-discredited science of human eugenics, which he helped pioneer. Galton also had a keen interest in the psychology of crowds.

During his visit to the Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, Galton observed a lottery where nearly 800 fair visitors wagered that they could guess the weight of an ox after it was slaughtered and dressed.

Galton bet against the crowd. He presumed that none of the gamblers would correctly guess the weight of the ox, which came in at 1,197 pounds. He was correct. What stunned him was his follow-up statistical analysis that revealed that the average of the collective wagers came in at 1,198 pounds.

In 2004, James Surowiecki, a brilliant business writer formerly with the New Yorker magazine, authored a book that drew in part on Galton’s fair visit. He called the book “The Wisdom of Crowds.“ The thesis is remarkable: Large groups of everyday people are smarter than individual experts.

“What I think I know now is that in the long run, the crowd’s judgment is going to give us the best chance of making the right decision, and in the face of that knowledge, traditional notions of power and leadership should begin to pale,” Surowiecki wrote.

As I walked through the fairgrounds, I thought about what lies ahead for all of us, especially come November. I thought about the lived experiences and the energy that brought us all to a single space. It dawned on me that the fair is probably best experienced as an annual tradition — a reunion.

As I saw families, couples, singles and more tattooed specimens than I’ve witnessed since I was invited to leave a Hells Angels club in Cleveland years ago, I could only celebrate the humanity on display and the social currency that was being freely exchanged.

The fair is a mirror and a mosaic.