454     October 9, 1961 (Taped same day)
Bill, Betsy, Henry, Bess

A special “Country Fair” episode has Garry and the panel in their finest country costumes and a fiddle band playing on a specially decorated stage.  A lot of unusual games are on the docket, in addition to two traditional Secrets.  The show is also not presented live, but had been recorded earlier that same evening.  The regular 10:30 airtime was probably after some of the younger participants’ bedtimes.                     

Each panelist picks a rooster, and the rooster who crows the most in the next twenty minutes is the winner, as judged by young members of a New Jersey 4-H club.  Betsy’s ends up being the only rooster who crows.  The 4-H’ers are given savings bonds. 
  

Mrs. W.E. Nielsen from Huron, South Dakota: “I’ve won more than 600 prizes at county fairs” 
Mrs. Nielsen has been winning prizes at various South Dakota fairs since the 1930s.  She also becomes the judge for the cakes the panelists baked for the show, based on one of Mrs. Nielsen’s recipes they all received the previous week.  Betsy wins.    


Max Kirkland from Hightstown, New Jersey: “I’m going to judge the panel in a corn shucking contest” 
Kirkland is not only an agriculture expert at Rutgers University, he also is a specialist in radio and television there.  The event is unsurprisingly slapstick, but after the shucks have settled, Bess is the winner.    


Pete Burgang, Mary Ann Herman, [Jerry Zucker] and [Estelle Reed], all experts from the Folk Dance House in New York, pair off with the panelists for an old-fashioned hoedown.  Bill becomes the caller (due to his physical limitations, though nothing is mentioned) and Garry dances.  Herman and her husband Michael run the Folk Dance House, and would become legends in the folk dancing community, teaching into the 1990s.

PREVIOUS NEXT