Guessing for fun and profit
Professional prognosticators fail to
follow up on their mistakes

Last week my lovely wife Leslie and I drove to Winston-Salem to meet our good friend Sharon and her nine-year-old daughter Kira for an afternoon at the Dixie Classic Fair. If you’ve never been to the Dixie Classic, I highly recommend that you make plans to go next year. Only slightly smaller than the NC State Fair in Raleigh, the DCF has more than enough rides, carnival games, agricultural exhibits, live music and blue ribbon contests to keep you occupied for about eight hours or when your legs give out, whatever comes first.

The professional guesser at the Dixie Classic Fair tries to pin down the weight of a father and son combo. Photos by Jeff Eason

The only way out of the fun house is through the spinning funnel exit at the Dixie Classic Fair.

Billed as Western North Carolina’s Fair, the annual event started as the Forsyth County Fair 125 years ago and was given the name Dixie Classic in 1956. Like the State Fair, it sits on a permanent site that features barns, arenas, a giant midway area and huge buildings for farm, culinary and crafts exhibits.

One of my favorite aspects of the fair is the blue ribbon cooking and canning exhibit, and the Dixie Classic has a great one. You might not be aware that some people are still making their own candies and mints in old metal molds, but there are still categories covering these niche kitchen operations. The gingerbread house contest is another timeless classic that lives on at the fair, as well as the blue ribbon competitions for food preservation in every imaginable category (apple butter, cherry preserves, grape jam, marmalade, blackberry jelly, etc.).

Newer competitions at the DCF include photography, art and essay contests, all divided into age groups so that younger people can get into the spirit of the fair without having to compete against hard-nosed blue ribbon veterans.

Of course we spent a good deal of time riding the Ferris wheel, Himalayan and other rides. I try to pride myself on being rather stout of heart when it comes to jumping casually onto fair rides. But the truth is that every time I strap myself into one of these contraptions, I can’t help but looking at the various people working at the fair. These are the guys who are responsible for taking apart and putting together the metal machines that will hurl me through the air against the wishes of gravity. I know I should blindly trust their expertise in these matters, but somehow they always have more tattoos and fewer teeth than I would expect out of someone with an engineering degree. They couldn’t possibly forget a bolt or two, could they?

If I had to work at a fair, I would want the guesser job. In case you haven’t been to a big fair in a while, the guesser is the guy who sets up shop at one of the main midway intersections with a microphone in hand and challenges visitors to fool him in important matters of weight, age and birthday.

The Dixie Classic Fair had a superb guesser who kept his microphone patter moving at a lively pace while folks lined up for the privilege of paying him a dollar to do some guessing. He had to guess your age within two years, your birthday within two months, or your weight within three pounds. If he was wrong, you won a prize! Basically he was in a no-lose situation because even when he guessed wrong, all of the prizes cost the fair less than a dollar each. “We have a winner! Here’s your cheap plastic inflatable Dora the Explorer! Thank you very much!”

What made this guesser a cut above most was his willingness to guess the combined weight of a parent and a child at the same time. He probably didn’t invent that gimmick, but he played it perfectly, encouraging kids to climb on their fathers’ shoulders and step aboard the giant old-fashioned scale. Who could resist such a photo opportunity? He was raking in dollar bills they way landscapers rake in maple leaves at this time of year.

The guesser also had the good sense to go for the “under” on the “over/under” when guessing women’s ages and weights. He consistently guessed that they were two years younger and three pounds lighter than they actually were, all the while stuffing their dollar bills into his bank with a pleasant “Thank you very much!”

The Dixie Classic Fair is one of the few places left where prognostication (guessing) has stayed an art form. In the media it has become an obsession, I’m afraid. Journalistically speaking, it is not enough to simply report the news these days. To be a top-class reporter, especially on television, you have to predict the outcome of future events.

For instance, the reporters on ESPN these days spend less and less time giving us scores and statistics on games that have already been played. Instead, they have turned into professional prognosticators, sitting around debating what’s going to happen in the future. Will George Steinbrenner fire Yankees skipper Joe Torre? Will Michael Vick ever return to the NFL? Will Tiger Woods win more Majors in history than Jack Nicklaus?

These reporters are sneakier than any carnie that you’ll ever find at a fair. That’s because when they guess wrong, they don’t admit it. They just move on to the next guessing game. For example, before the college football season, several of the “experts” at ESPN stated that no less than four NCAA Division 1 teams would finish the regular season undefeated, including USC and Michigan. We all know how that turned out, but nobody’s going on the air to say “Oops. I was wrong.”

It’s the same thing with the presidential campaign. The election is more than a year away and the experts on television are already spending an inordinate amount of time guessing how badly Hillary Clinton will defeat Rudy Giuliani for the presidency.

I don’t mean to rain on the media’s premature inaugural parade, but we’ve got 13 months before anybody is elected…and a lot can happen between now and then. The primaries have a way of pulling the poll numbers a lot closer together so don’t be surprised to see Barak Obama and John Edwards pull within five points of Clinton by the middle of January. And if recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore enters the race, the current Las Vegas odds of Hillary skipping her way to the Oval Office are going to be erased right off the board.

As far as the Republicans go, Giuliani has a long way to go to fend off the charges of newcomer (to the race) Fred Thompson and grassroots and cyberspace darling Ron Paul.

All those prognosticators out there should do us all a favor and stick to guessing our weight, age and month of birth. Let the voters take care of electing a new president.