Star-Journbal Editor
It's difficult for someone who hasn't experienced the Hillsboro Arts & Crafts Fair to imagine what downtown will look like on Saturday, when an anticipated 40,000 people come to town.
It's also difficult:
— To conceive 350 booths lined up and down Main Street and Grand Avenue, filled with some of the best handcrafted merchandise to be found
— To imagine nearly every not-for-profit organization and church in town selling food and drinks to the masses, making enough money in eight hours to fund their programs for an entire year.
— To believe that once the fair has departed, the mountain of waste and trash will be picked up and swept up so there will be no trace, and Hillsboro will be completely clean for church on Sunday morning.
And yet, local townsfolk say the unimaginable will become a reality, once again, for the 37th consecutive year, on Saturday.
"You obviously can't believe it until you've seen it," said Christy Wulf, community coordinator and director of the Hillsboro Arts and Crafts Fair.
Wulf, 37, spends eight months working behind the scenes, preparing for the fair.
And when the big day comes, wall to wall people will force her to stay behind the scenes, literally, as she takes the back alleys along Main Street moving from one urgent situation to another.
The forced detour is a sign of success for Wulf and dozens of volunteers from the Hillsboro Arts and Crafts Association who have worked so hard to make their annual event one of the top-100 rated arts and crafts shows in the nation.
"The first year, the only thing that got me through was the volunteers," said Wulf, who is leading the event for the third year in a row.
"Every year there are volunteers who come forward. They know their jobs and they do them."
The task of preparing for this year's arts and crafts fair began in February when the commission mailed out nearly 2,000 applications to prospective show participants. Artists were required to fill out an application, which included sending in at least three photos of their wares. At least one of the photos must show the craftsman actually working on their creations.
The purpose for the process, Wulf said, is to help guarantee that all of the products sold at the fair are indeed handmade by the vendors themselves.
"We are trying to weed out the buy-sell, or people who buy their merchandise from someplace else and then try to sell it as if they'd made it," Wulf said. "If you buy a T-shirt and you appliqué something on it, that's fine. But you just can't buy something at Hobby Lobby and bring it in."
After the selection process is completed, acceptance and rejection letters are mailed out by the end of May. Asked if she'd heard from those who'd been declined admission to the show, Wulf said, "Oh yes, yes, yes, yes."
She added, "We hear things like, 'I've been applying to this fair every year and my stuff is handmade, why am I not getting in?' They want to know why and sometimes that is easy and sometimes, you know, their stuff looks too professional. If it looks manufactured, we have to turn them down."
Putting together a successful arts and crafts show requires an artistry of its own, according to Hillsboro Chamber of Commerce president Jim Elliott.
"For a community our size to pull off an event like this is certainly a community effort, and the chamber of commerce and our local businesses downtown certainly benefit from that day," he said.
"It's our largest fund-raiser of the year for the chamber. The food booth that the chamber puts on will generate several thousand dollars for the chamber's work this year and for the day-to-day operations of our office."
Elliott has personal and professional reasons to appreciate the fair.
"I'm a guy who actually enjoys the arts and crafts fair," he said. "So I not only come and serve at the chamber food booth, but I like the booths and the shopping. I can get some Christmas shopping done for my wife and others, maybe some people at the office. And, it's a great way to get acquainted with people not only from Kansas, but all across the Midwest.
"In fact, my wife's sister and her husband are coming in from the Denver area just to experience the arts and crafts fair with us this year."
Elliot, the vice president of advancement at Tabor College, said the fact that the fair comes to town on the same day as a home football game puts extra points on the community scoreboard.
"A number of Tabor alum and friends of the college will be coming into town for the arts and crafts fair and staying in town for the game that night," Elliot said. "We should have a great crowd."
According to Hillsboro Mayor Delores Dalke, organizers of the first arts and crafts fair were pleased that 2,000 people came to town.
"We had booths on the sidewalks on Main Street and traffic was still going up and down the streets like normal," Dalke said.
Now, 37 years later, street barricades will be in place at 7 p.m. Friday, blocking seven city blocks downtown so that vendors can unload and set up their booths on the street.
"We put on the happy face for Hillsboro to make sure that it looks good for all these visitors," Dalke said. "We do all the little things that it takes so that Hillsboro looks good that day."
Hometown hospitality is one reason why the fair has become so popular, Dalke said. The whole town works together to help visitors feel welcome.
"I got a call from a lady close to Oklahoma needs electricity for what she is going to be doing in her booth, and she was given my name, that if she went in front of my business, maybe I would let her use my electricity," Dalke said. "And when she called me I said, 'Of course you can.'
"People do that kind of thing for that day because it is important for our community."
"It's just like when you have houseguests at your home, you want everything to look as nice as possible."
Merchants on Main Street Hillsboro are mostly mom-and- pop establishments. To them, the fair represents a veritable festival of free enterprise.
"That's exactly what it is," Dalke said, "And all of these little shops on Main Street do very well that day. And they've all learned that this is a day they should be there and be promoting, and it is interesting to see how the different ones take that opportunity to get people in their stores."
In addition to being a boon for local business, area not-for-profit groups also profit from the fair.
"It's a huge day for these groups, who can almost make their whole annual budgets selling their food," Dalke said. "I think it's wonderful that the association has stuck with their rules that you cannot be a food vendor if you are from out of town. It's all local because they want the local people to have that opportunity."
State law requires vendors to pay taxes on merchandise sold at the fair. In addition to state taxes, Hillsboro has a one and a half- cent sales tax and the county has a half-cent sales tax. All vendors are required to bring their receipts to the accounting table at the end of the day.
"The sales tax office in Topeka has been here to audit this fair many, many times to make sure all of the sales tax is being collected, it's such a big deal," Dalke said.
Wulf said she was "astounded" at the amounts on the receipts when she served as a volunteer at the table several years ago.
"There was up to $20,000 per day at one booth," Wulf said. "Not in the past four or five years, but we have gone over a million dollars changing hands in Hillsboro in a single day."
Thousands of purchases will be made on Saturday and longtime fair watchers like Dalke and Wulf say part of the fun is finding out which particular item will be hot this year.
"There is always somebody who has some new thing that is the hot thing that everybody wants that year," Dalke said. "It's amazing to see what people will stand in line to get. One year, it was a metal weathervane. They were big and everyone was walking around with them all day long. The guy who was making them was selling them just as fast he could put them together. I have no idea why the weathervane was so appealing that year."
Wulf said, "It will be something that you don't know about. One year it was these whirligig things that everybody bought, last year it was floral. It changes so much every year.
"Somebody is going to bring something into the fair that you have never seen anywhere else and it is going to blow everyone away!"
