By Mike Rogers

It was in our search for something new at the Cuyahoga County Fair in 2003 that we found the Norman Rockwell Art Exhibit. This traveling display was provided by The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We found a sponsor for this exhibit – National City Bank.

Rockwell’s mainstream American image was what the Fair needed and what the bank wanted to be identified with. We obtained 44 of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers and 16 illustrations from his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn series.

Like Mark Twain and Will Rogers, Rockwell was a story-teller with a sense of humor. He’s also been compared to filmmaker Frank Capra whose movies celebrated the ordinary citizen in America. Capra’s famous movie, It’s A Wonderful Life, is the theme for most of Rockwell’s work.

Rockwell painted ordinary people, country life and family scenes realistically. As modern art became more abstract, critics viewed Rockwell’s realistic down home images with contempt. He became a target because of his great popularity. His work was not in art galleries, rather he was in American homes on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

Rockwell wrote, “I painted pictures that everyone could understand and that, in general, would not offend. I depicted life as I would like it to be.”

His work is honored in galleries now, but it was the first time for this exhibit in Ohio. The news media got into this event by covering his life and work, and thereby assisted the Fair with all of the added coverage. It also helped that fair director Joanne Scudder used props effectively in the exhibit to enhance the display.

Now the problem was what to do for an encore in 2004.

When I was in Las Vegas in December of 2003 to accept an advertising award from the IAFE, I had the opportunity to chat with Wayne McCary of the New England Expo – “The Big E.” He told me about the “Headlines in History” display that had been so popular at his event.

I met with Greg Parkinson, the creator of this exhibit, who was attending the IAFE meeting. The Las Vegas slogan is “What happens here stays here.” What happens at the IAFE convention isn’t supposed to stay there. Attendees take those ideas and information back to their fairs and exhibitions. That’s what I did.

The Fair Board directors were enthusiastic and National City signed on again as an exclusive sponsor. This time we were given 4,500 square feet to work with for the display. We made the theme of the Fair “Good News” to tie in with the Headlines in History exhibit, which garnered media coverage from set-up to take-down.

There were 125 original front pages from over 50 newspapers from over 20 states, from the Boston Globe to the Los Angeles Times. Locally, The Plain Dealer provided historic headlines and each day it sent us that day’s front page, which was the last panel fairgoers saw.

Instead of paintings, the exhibit included framed front-page headline stories from the Wright Brothers inventing the airplane to the airplanes that struck the Twin Towers on 9/11. It was like walking through an art gallery, but it was actually a walk through the 20th century.

The major events of the last 100 years included coverage of the sinking of the Titanic, Lindbergh’s solo cross-Atlantic flight to Paris, Pearl Harbor attack, Nazi surrender, Moon Landing, fall of the Berlin wall and the bombing of Baghdad.

The exhibit was divided into four sections with recorded narration in each section featuring speeches and music from the various decades.

I was then being asked by reporters, “What is going to be your 2005 featured exhibit?” Answer: “The Million Dollar Movie Museum.”

Like me, America has long had a love affair with the movies. Perhaps Orson Welles described it best: “A film is a ribbon of dreams. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.”

This featured exhibit contained hundreds of original posters, lobby cars and memorabilia as well as costumes worn by Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Julie Andrews and Vivian Leigh. Items included a cane head used in the original The Wolf Man movie.

Costumes came from Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, The Maltese Falcon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Giant and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Because of the movie display, the theme for our fair was “Rated ‘E’ for Everyone”.

Long-time collectors Morris Everett and Dwayne Pinkney of The Last Moving Picture Show had organized a series of displays featuring hundreds of movie posters, lobby cards, photos, props and other memorabilia. Everett has the largest private collection in the world.

His original posters in our exhibit included Oklahoma, Bonnie and Clyde, Spartacus, Gunga Din and Alfred Hitchcock’s large billboard poster of Spellbound.

Costumes came from former Hollywood studio fashion designer John LeBold. Moving his valuable collection of costumes from Cape Cod to Cleveland was as much fun as a root canal because of the logistics and the insurance. But it was worth it. Thankfully, Fair Board President Dave Stephan’s cool head solved the complex insurance issues.

For 2006 the featured display was “Memories of Cleveland”. This was the first public display of Cleveland State University’s Memories Project that is housed in the University’s Special Collections Library. Over 150 photos from that collection were on display at the fair. The man in charge was CSU librarian Bill Barrow who selected the pictures from over half a million sources.

The fair was the perfect location for these photos because Barrow doesn’t want the collection locked up in a room out of sight from the public. “You preserve things to make sure they can be assessed and used. Local history is a shared experience.”

The exhibit was themed under headings such as Business, City Scenes, Entertainment, Media, People, Hard Times and Sports. Photos include scenes of Downtown Christmas shopping, Great Lake Exposition, Cleveland Sports Teams, and Cleveland’s Famous Citizens. Scenes ranged primarily from the beginning of the 20th century up until present time.

It was from this exhibit that we got the idea for the “Tribute to Ohio Amusement Parks” in 2007. Fairgoers responded to the amusement parks in their comments about the Memory Project.

For more than seventy-five years these boisterous, colorful, exciting amusement parks fulfilled the fantasies of entertainment-hungry Clevelanders. Each park had its own peculiarities, and its own alluring array of popular attractions. Each park had its own atmosphere. The display focused on Euclid Beach Park, Chippewa Lake, Geauga Lake and Cedar Point.

The amusement park was born into a briskly expanding family of leisure-time entertainments for turn of the century Northeastern Ohio. The amusement parks were offshoots of the circus, the carnival, burlesque, vaudeville, dance halls, roller-skating rinks, moving pictures and county fairs.

More than just business establishments, these entertainment centers were the birthplace of treasured memories for children and adults alike. Fairgoers who had never visited these parks let their imagination run wild and enjoyed the parks that thrilled their parents and grandparents.

National City has sponsored all of our special exhibits, including the 2008 display that is now being created. None of the displays would have been possible without the bank’s support. National City has done more to support the arts, education, and community than any other organization in Cleveland.