news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Pass the blinking lights and the horror-film screams from a ride called the Fire Ball, and you'll find her in the Pavilion at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex.

She's the grandmother with the kind face. She'll be wearing glasses, with a silver-plated four-leaf clover hanging from her neck that's as big as a half dollar.

That's Carolyn Ivey. She's the Fair Queen. And she's been there for more than a half century.

Carolyn Ivey — "Mama Ivey" to a generation of 4-H kids — started volunteering in 1952 when everyone called it the Greensboro Agriculture Fair. You do the math; it's a long time.

Back then, the fair took place right where it is today. But it happened underneath a big tent on an expanse of packed dirt beside a dairy farm. That's right, a dairy farm. There was no coliseum. That came seven years later.

Since then, she's missed only one fair. She went to Oklahoma with her husband during his stint in the Army.

Other than that, Ivey has been right there, every September, off West Lee Street.

Ask her why, and in her own soft-spoken way, Ivey will mention Cherokee County, the mountains of North Carolina and the benefits of 4-H, a national youth organization whose 4 H's stand for head, heart, hands and health.

She always won blue ribbons at the fair. She could flat-out sew. But she never got the chance to visit, let alone see, the fair. She had to send her

4-H work through a friend. She lived too far away.

Still, she saw the fair in her mind. The rides. The exhibits. The fun. The possibilities.

She realized that even more when she traveled to Chicago to vie for a national 4-H scholarship.

She won that scholarship — for sewing. She won even though one of her two suitcases — the one holding the underwear she made out of cloth sacks used for chicken feed — was lost for two weeks.

She just knew the black suitcase she did have — men's pajamas, a fifth of whisky and "girlie magazines" — wasn't hers.

That scholarship was worth $300. She used it to attend Woman's College, now UNCG, where she earned a degree in home economics.

The day she graduated, she became a 4-H extension agent in Guilford County. And finally, she got to go to the fair.

"It's like the things you can't have," Ivey says, "is what you want the most."

Not anymore. She's an institution at what is now known as the Central Carolina Fair. The fair will end Sunday, and you can bet she'll be there.

Eleven years ago, she took over coordinating the exhibits for the fair's agricultural and homemaking side.

She had the experience. In 1963, she organized her own 4-H club — the Northeast McLeansville 4-H Club — and in the rolling hills outside McLeansville, she became a dairy farmer's wife, a mother to two adopted children, who could cook and grow anything.

Today, the 4-H exhibits have graduated from a small tent along the Midway to a large expanse inside the coliseum's Pavilion, covering nearly half of a 30,000-square-foot room.

She runs the contests, arranges the 4-H exhibits, corrals the judges, and until this year, finds the volunteers. And she hasn't slowed down.

Last year, she logged 200 hours. In nine days. When volunteers tell her to take it easy, she'll tell them in her own soft-spoken, yet persistent way: "The first year that I'm dead, I'll make up for the sleep I've lost."

So, she keeps going. She carries fair stuff from her pickup in a red wagon, passes a large fair mural and enters a huge room filled with work from her third generation of 4-H kids.

Look closely, and you'll see the painted version of "Mama Ivey" on the fair's mural. She's sitting in a Ferris wheel waving, with her husband, Mac, by her side.

But scan the Pavilion, and even in a sea of pastel paintings, arrowhead collections, electronic spiders and tall exhibits about something called "Cloverology," you can't miss her. She's the one in the glasses, with the silver-plated symbol of 4-H — a four-leaf clover — around her neck.

She's the Fair Queen, the smiling Fair Queen.

"I guess I'm just half kid," she says.

She's right.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jrowe@news-record.com