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Ulster County Fair: Time for kids, animals to shine
Jeremiah Horrigan,The Times Herald-Record
NEW PALTZ: Some kids get hooked on PlayStations and GameBoys. Other kids have discovered an older, non-virtual reality.
It seems a universal condition: young people hypnotized by a virtual reality that vanishes at the flick of a button.
Parents worry about it. Educators battle it. Sociologists crank out reports about it. The virtual reality bred by computers and the Internet sometimes appears to be consuming its non-virtual inspiration, together with the young people who've become bedazzled by it.
But visitors to the Ulster County Fair, which opens today at 4 p.m., may notice a different, though not new, breed of boy or girl there: young people for whom reality is as real the bleat of a hungry sheep or the stamp of a horse's hoof.
Scott Goodnow grew up to those sounds. Today, although he lives in the Village of New Paltz and drives a truck to make a living, he has made sure that his sons hear those sounds too.
Sometimes, it means his boys get laughed at.
"Oh, they'll be called 'farmer boys,' that kind of thing, but they take it in stride, they're proud to be farm kids," Goodnow said.
Goodnow raises Clydesdale horses and rents space on farms in the towns of Wallkill and Montgomery to make sure his boys can lay claim to those "insults."
"My kids do all that kids' stuff, but they also find time for animals. It's tough, but it's important," he said.
From Martha Koenig's point of view, young people who are involved in 4-H Clubs or similar agricultural-based programs aren't any different than other young people. You could say they're just luckier.
"You can live as an island these days," Koenig said yesterday. "Computers can be very isolating."
Koenig is the adviser for a 4-H group called Teen Council, the group responsible for making and selling the fair's famous milk shakes. The group uses its profits from the milk shakes to visit nursing homes and participate in food pantries, along with the occasional field trip that's just for fun.
"What makes it good is that they're called on to consider someone other than themselves — they learn to become active members of the community," she said.
And to do that, says her 16-year-old son Johann, it's not necessary to give up the electronic things that everyone his age is into.
"I've got a GameBoy and a nice computer. They're fun, but they can get kind of boring," he said.
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