A Tribute to Fred Huff

last July. “I did all the hiring. Bill (Hayes) took me under his wing and took me to booking agents and all that for two years when he went to see them.

“Then he said, ‘Okay, you do the booking now.’ I did the booking, but only with Bill’s approval. He had to give me final approval.”

Bill Hayes sold the fairgrounds to the Saad Jabr family in 1979 after more than 50 years of family ownership.

The State of Illinois then bought the fairgrounds in 1986 for a reported $3.35 million (which would be more than $8 million in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation) and has operated it ever since.

“I am grateful to the State of Illinois for buying this fair because if they didn’t, it would not be here,” said Jaynes Hayes Rader, granddaughter of fair founder William R. Hayes, during a “Fair Memories” panel discussion as part of the 2018 festivities. “It was simply too much for private ownership to handle.”

By Pete Spiter Weekly-Press

DU QUOIN – There will be a bit of a cloud hanging over the Du Quoin State Fair this year, as it is the first without one of the city’s famous residents: Fred Huff Sr.

Huff died in March at age 94, just six months after the state celebrated the 100th fair (which technically was the 99th after COVID canceled the 2020 festivities).

Huff was a known writer, historian and promoter of Southern Illinois athletics and entertainment who wrote his first news story for the Du Quoin Evening Call at age 16 in 1945, covering a fire at the fairgrounds’ 3,000-seat, all-wood grandstand.

While plans were already in progress to move the fair several blocks east to its current location, an army of workers labored intensively for five weeks to complete enough of the present grandstand to hold the 1945 fair on schedule.

The orchestra seating was not in place and the seats in the upper grandstand were folding chairs, but the fair opened on time.

“As you can imagine, a lot of people came out to see the new grandstand,” said Huff, who called the rapid construction an “amazing achievement” in a 2018 interview with the Weekly-Press. “And the Du Quoin State Fair is one of the best-attended events in Southern Illinois.”

Huff was named publicity director for the fair in 1971 and a year later, assumed overall management of Hayes Fair Acres and the fair’s annual exhibition and celebrity showcase.

“We had some damn good fairs in the 1970s,” Huff said

Huff has previously credited Charles E. “Chuck” Flynn for his role in the growth of the 10-day fair, which drew more than 170,000 people to the fairgrounds last year - an increase of 13.5 percent from 2021.

A personal friend of Donald Hayes, the younger son of W.R. Hayes, Flynn - according to Huff - knew every important sports media person in the United States.

Flynn once famously rented 28 typewriters and brought in two Western Union agents to aid in national and international media coverage of the fair.

“Chuck knew these people not only professionally, but personally,” Huff said in previous comments to this newspaper. “The job that Chuck Flynn did to get the people here was outstanding.”

Among Huff’s published works are “The History of the Du Quoin State Fair (19232002)” and “The Hambletonian - 1926-1975.”

The Hambletonian, harness racing’s version of the Kentucky Derby, was a Du Quoin State Fair staple from 1957 to 1980.

“Fred was one of the staples for the fairgrounds,” Du Quoin State Fair Manager Josh Gross said last year. “The amount of time and effort he has put into the success of the fairgrounds for the past eight decades is just unprecedented.

“We’ll definitely miss him.”