This Iowan has been obsessed with the Iowa State Fair since childhood. Now, he’s the CEO

Jeremy Parsons’ homework was simple, a common grade school assignment, really: Think about what you want to be when you grow up and talk to someone in that field.

The Leon native was maybe 10 or 11 and this was the fall, so his elementary-school brain was still thinking of summer and long afternoons passed at the Iowa State Fair.

Well, he reasoned, someone has to be in charge of that, right?

Indeed someone was: Marion Lucas, the fair’s general manager from 1986 to 2001. So Parsons wrote him a letter asking all about the job, and Lucas replied in kind, detailing work at the helm and inviting him for a behind-the-scenes golf cart ride through the grounds the next time he was in town.

Parsons took Lucas up on his tour offer when his family made their annual fair trip the following summer. He did so the next summer, too. And every summer after that.

At 17, Parsons traded the ad hoc golf cart rides for official employment every August as a jack-of-all-trades. He worked in the special events department, in the marketing office and in the entertainment division. He’s helped with parking and waved campers “up the hill.” He’s even sweated his way down Grand Avenue as Rosetta, the State Fair’s mascot, in the annual kickoff parade.

He worked at the fair throughout high school and college and picked a career in education so he could ensure he had summers free to keep working on the grounds.

And now, after more than 15 years away, including 12 leading the Clay County Fair, Parsons is returning to take the reins of his dream job, the same one he wrote to Lucas about all those years ago: CEO of the Iowa State Fair.

“I’m back here where I started,” he says, his wide smile and easy laugh wordlessly confessing his pure elation.

While Parsons, 45, has long-term goals for his tenure as CEO — including developing new methods to tell the story of agriculture, maintaining the fairgrounds’ safety and nurturing the fair’s relationship to the east side and to Des Moines in general — he sees his role as that of a caretaker to the institution.

He’s not here to revolutionize, he says. But he is interested in continually striving for more and for better in the interim he holds this responsibility.

In that vein, he doesn’t make decisions for now — at least not really, he says. He makes decisions for the next generation, for the kids in strollers who will one day bring their kids in strollers.

With less than 100 days until the fair opens, the grounds are alive with the hammering and drilling of rehabs and revamps, and the office is abuzz with the excitement of a favorite son returned. For Parsons, too, the thought of being back on the east side for 11 days in August feels like coming home again — and he can’t wait to welcome more than a million of his closest friends in for a spell and a corndog.

“To me, it's kind of like this move was probably written in the cards,” says Marlene Jolliffe, executive director of the State Fair of Virginia and Parsons’ mentor and friend. “When you think about how things are supposed to play out, it just feels so right for him, and it feels right for the industry.”

Small-town childhood: Fairs, volunteering and building memories

In the Parsons household, summer weekends were for fairs.

Whether that be the local Decatur County Fair, where Parsons’ dad was a board member, or one of the family’s many, many road trips to check out the new and different at other local gatherings.

“I’ve probably been to at least half, maybe three-fourths of county fairs in the state of Iowa,” says Parsons’ little sister, Sara Tedford. And Jeremy “always seemed to be excited about each one of them.”

“There was something a little different that he really liked about that fair or about this fair, and he would take that home and try to implement that or try something new in our own county fair," she says.

Growing up in an agricultural community of about 2,000, Parsons’ childhood was the epitome of pastoral. There were the fairs, of course, the hot summer days at the local pool, hustling to mow yards for a bit of spending money and pitching in wherever the community needed. In Parsons’ case, volunteering included a lot of fixing up the fairgrounds, mostly beatifying projects like painting the cattle barn or weed-eating near exhibit areas.

The siblings joked that these tasks were “forced family fun,” but in a small town like Leon you have to rely on neighbors to bind together and move a community forward, Parsons says; you can’t just rely on the services provided.

“At the time, I didn't think about what we were doing, but looking back, my parents volunteered everywhere and were involved in so many community things,” Parsons says. “When I look back on my childhood, I think of really the typical Iowa small-town upbringing and all that that brings with it, respect and hard work.”

But Parsons was also so creative, Tedford says, someone who always thought outside the box. He would come up with activities to pass the time, like when he produced a fake radio talk show for the family or when he invented Leon Olympics for his friends, complete with construction paper medals for the winners.

“He can think of something and make it a reality and not everyone is that forward-thinking,” Tedford says.

And, honestly, that’s sort of what he did with his life in fairs, she adds. He got a job as an English teacher, but always found a way to feed his fair side hustle, traveling up to Des Moines for his annual pilgrimage.

Those summers are when he “really learned the importance of this fair to Iowans,” Parsons says.

“This is like a combination of a fair and a family reunion. It's deep in the fabric of our state,” he says. “It's lifelong memories of showing livestock, or in the campgrounds, or a fair food.”

So that's what we’re building here, he adds, we’re building memories.

In a lot of ways, a great fair is just a bonus.

‘Strong leaders naturally rise’: Parsons’ journey to the Iowa State Fair

The job requirements of a fair director change nearly daily, says Jerry Hammer, the soon-to-retire, longtime CEO of the Minnesota State Fair. You go where you’re needed, whether that be the boardroom or the cattle barn or the midway.

But the heart of the CEO gig is relationships, he says, the ability to bring people together physically and metaphorically.

And Parsons has been working on those relationships, even if in some small way, since he wrote that letter in grade school.

After 11 years of teaching, Parsons finally got the chance to make his avocation his vocation when Lucas called him with an opportunity to join the Missouri State Fair Foundation as executive director. Lucas had come out of retirement briefly to help the Missouri institution get on the right track after a difficult few years, and he needed someone he could count on, he said.

Parsons jumped at the chance, but by his own admission, he’s not a fundraiser extraordinaire, which is what foundation work necessitates.

“I’m no Peter Cownie,” he says with a laugh, referencing the Iowa State Fair Blue Ribbon Foundation’s celebrated executive director.

But little more than a year after taking the Missouri job, a post that would better align with his skill set became available: CEO of the Clay County Fair.

The self-appointed “World’s Greatest County Fair,” the Clay County Fair regularly sees some 300,000 fairgoers over its nine-day run, making it at least as big as many state fairs in the area, including Nebraska, Missouri, South Dakota and North Dakota.

Like much larger fairs, the Clay County event has a wide audience, says Hammer, and families make coming to Clay County a tradition, even their one annual vacation if they’re coming from far away.

And the about 10,000 residents of Spencer, Iowa, put out the welcome mat for those visitors, Parsons says.

“Everybody in Spencer does something at the fair,” he says. “I think back to growing up with this sense of community spirit. You see that there, too. It’s just a great place.”

Parsons' new role in Clay County allowed him to get more involved in fair industry groups and conferences, where his integrity was noticed right away, says Jolliffe, the Virginia fair’s executive director.

“Here was this young guy that just seemed to be building a huge amount of respect and was just very well-liked,” she says. “I remember thinking early on: There's somebody that's gonna do well.”

Indeed, he did, even rising last year to the chairmanship of the main industry group, the International Association of Fairs and Expositions.

As their working relationship grew, Jolliffe came to see Parsons’ steadfastness and trustworthiness as “unsurpassed.”

“There are people who set out on leadership paths because they think, 'I want to be that role,'” she says. “And then there are people like Jeremy, who just work hard, be the best leader, stay engaged, help people, and the positions come because they’ve been earned.”

“Strong leaders naturally rise,” she adds.

When Parsons interviewed for the Clay County job more than a decade ago, he told the board that he was honored to be considered for a job that felt so reminiscent of his own childhood — one that felt cyclical in how connected it was to a small town and how much its success relied on the kindness of community members.

He told them there was only one position he’d leave Clay County for ― and that was a job he’d coveted since he was about 10 years old.

‘Jeremy is Iowa’: A dream job realized

With less than 100 days to go before the gates open, Parsons is content to listen and learn as he works his first Iowa State Fair in more than a decade. Sure, he has long-term hopes around neighborliness, ag education and security, but he wants to get his bearings first.

Still, if his time in fairs has taught him anything, he knows much of his job will be navigating the tightrope between tradition and originality. The fair represents a multigenerational ritual for some, but in a world where there are so many other options for entertainment, attention and value, he will have to figure out how to retain and celebrate the past without being beholden to it.

“Half your fairgoers are very much about the tradition of the fair: ‘Don't move my corndog stand,’ ‘Don't change that livestock show,’” Parsons says. “But the other half of fairgoers say, ‘If it's the same as last year, why am I gonna go back?’”

“So it's all about the middle road, finding the middle.”

Equally as important, Parsons says, is finding the balance between the weightiness of people’s emotional connection to the fair and the reality that the annual gathering is entertainment, meant to be light and carefree.

“I said at our staff meeting the other day: Ultimately, fairs are places of fun,” Parsons says. “We're not heart surgeons, and we're not funeral home directors, so nothing we do here is life or death. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

Given Parsons’ seemingly limitless knowledge of the industry and his deep understanding of the state, Hammer can’t think of a better person to take this iconic institution “into what will certainly be a very bright and shiny future.”

“He's not coming in from one of the coasts learning about Iowa; Jeremy is Iowa,” he adds.

As Parsons has navigated his first few weeks in the gig, he keeps coming back to the idea of being a caretaker. It’s not his fair; it’s not any one person’s fair. This is Iowa’s fair.

He’s not the first CEO, and he won’t be the last. He’s a connector between eras.

“My job is to take care of it, make it better, so I can then someday hand it off,” he says.

For Parsons, this job feels as cyclical as the Clay County one did. He’s not in a small town anymore, but his three boys will grow up on the fairgrounds and surely participate in their own versions of “forced family fun,” he says, learning its lessons of respect and hard work.

In more ways than one, Parsons has ended up where his story began ― and he plans to be here for a long time.

Courtney Crowder, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. Her Iowa State Fair must-haves include cheese fries, A&W root beer and Bauder's peppermint bars. Reach her at ccrowder@dmreg.com or 515-284-8360. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.

Parsons' goals for the Iowa State Fair:

Jeremy Parsons is content to spend this year listening and learning all the ins and outs of the Iowa State Fair, but he has the following goals for his tenure as CEO:

1) Ensure agriculture remains the foundation of the fair: “A challenge for the Iowa State Fair in the future is going to be how do we effectively tell the story of agriculture because it is changing,” Parsons says. “Thirty years ago at the Iowa State Fair, you didn't see the Ag Learning Centers, you didn't see those ag education opportunities, because the majority of people were directly related to the farm or were first-generation removed. Well, as that changes, the Iowa State Fair and fairs in general had to change and provide more education for people who maybe don't know where their food comes from.”

2) Bring in more off-season business: “Fairs have the worst business model in the world because no business would say, ‘OK, we're going to be open 11 days a year and that's it, and we're going to make all of our money in 11 days,’” he says. “But I think what's been done so well here in the last 20-plus years is the development of year-round facilities. When buildings have been remodeled, they've been turned into buildings that can be used year-round.”

3) Maintain the safety of the Iowa State Fair, including investing in an improved security facility: “If families do not feel safe when they come to the fair, they're not coming,” he says. Security “is something that you can't ever check off a list because that area has to keep evolving.”

4) Nurture the fair’s relationship to the east side and to Des Moines: “Everybody wants to have a good neighbor, and so I want the Iowa State Fair to be a good neighbor,” he says. “While we're good economically, we disrupt a lot of lives and people who live around here. I know that from Spencer.”

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa State Fair: How the new CEO sees the future of a fair he loves