Visit Rapid City | A Fair To Remember

How do you view the future of Rapid City? People are inquiring from all parts of the country. How do we do this? How do we do that? What other community of this size is at economically diverse as this is? We have a major tourism industry. We have major ag industry. We're a major medical regional hub. We have universities. We have the air. I'm going to state it this way. What a great time to be living in Rapid City. Hello friends across America and beyond. Welcome to Amplify Rapid City. Whether you live in Rapid City, whether you're planning a visit, planning to move yourself, or maybe even your business here, Amplify Rapid City is your headquarters for valuable and exciting information and news. I'm Chris Johnson, your host, and I'd love nothing more than for you to be my guest, sit back, relax, and enjoy as we Amplify Rapid City. You know, it really doesn't matter where you live in America. I think all of us pretty much have some memory somewhere tucked away of going to the fair. And I don't know about you, but for me, it conjures up all kinds of imagery. The Tilta Whirl, the Ferris Wheel, all the rides, the cotton candy, the music playing way off in the distance, and the exhibits everywhere. Even that wonderful aroma of funnel cakes. Well, I have a very special guest this episode. He is the general manager of our fair, the Central States Fair here in Rapid City. And I'm excited for you to hear his story, not just about the fair, but about himself. So let me introduce to you my friend and my guest, Mr. Ron Jeffries. Well, I was born in Peer, South Dakota, and grew up in Fort Peer, just across the river, the twin cities of South Dakota, as we refer to them when you're in Peer and Fort Peer. But the smaller of the two communities, Fort Peer had a great school system. Lots of close friends. We rode our bikes to school. We rode our bikes to the swimming pool. We rode our bikes to Sutley's grocery store growing up. It was all a very nice, small community in the middle of the state. My mom was a school teacher. My dad was an iron worker. Well, with six kids, we've always said that in our house, you either had to talk fast to get a word in, and you had to eat faster. There wouldn't be any seconds of anything else available at the table. So I grew up with a really, eight personalities, but a very loving and warm family setting on all fronts. My mom and dad went to all of our sporting events, all of our band concerts, everything that they could attend. My dad was on the road five days out of the week, so his was mostly a weekend participation. But really, you know, my mom was a saint, the way she was able to single-handedly raise six kids, and raise six kids in a three-bedroom house. So we had a boy's room, a girl's room, and mom and dad's rooms for bedrooms. And she raised six kids without a washer and dryer in the house. All the laundry had to be done at the laundromat. So I really, really, and she completed college. It took her about until I was 12 to finish college, because she would go every summer and complete her schooling. Finally got a degree, and we were all so proud of her getting her college diploma while raising six kids, and working, and carrying the laundry to the laundromat. So remarkable story about how she was able to do that, and my dad did the best he could to continue to put food on the table, and keep everybody in clothes, and sporting goods, sporting equipment, and everything else. Watching her juggle things, raising a family of six, and getting her college diploma, that had to be an inspiration for you. You know, my mom taught you how to work. You know, nothing's free. You need to work, and everybody's got to participate, and it's not always fair. Sometimes you have to do more than your share because of somebody else's circumstance. And I think that's probably one of the most important lessons that I've learned that helps me doing working at the Central States Fair. It's not always just my job, but it's a job that needs to be done. Step up and do it. You know, I think all my brothers and sisters would applaud the upbringing that they had with a hard-working, sensible, smart dad, and my mom, who was just a true caregiver in every sense of the word. And it was a beautiful upbringing. I became familiar with the Fair as an insurance agent. I wrote the insurance policy for the Fair, was not affiliated with the Fair, had been to it before, but came out and wrote an insurance policy for the Fair. And what I didn't know at the time was the Fair was struggling financially, and I kept seeing that they were hosting events, but they weren't ever getting any insurance coverage certificates in place. And the two things you do, you either provide your own insurance or you have the person coming to your facility provide you with a certificate of insurance. And the Fair wasn't doing either. And I was concerned that when finally something bad happens, they'll say, we had a bad accident, let's talk to our insurance agent, and I'm going to walk in the room and say, no, you didn't have coverage. And I didn't want to be in that position. So I started attending their Fair board meetings and just saying, I don't care if you buy insurance or don't buy insurance, as long as you understand when you don't have coverage. And as we went through that, I started giving a little bit more advice and they started seeking more advice on other topics. And eventually they asked me to come on the Fair board. So I went on the Fair board in March of 1997. And in December of 97, I went to work for the Fair as a general manager. So it was a kind of a quick transition and learning curve. But when I started with the Fair, we were about $350,000 in debt. You look back at the books and we hadn't made $25,000 in any year going into that time frame. So we were looking at a long process of just even getting to the point of being even. In fact, when they had my announcement at the Fair office and invited press and board members and everybody in to do a welcome party, I sent my wife over to a family fair, family thrift at that time, and asked her to bring some cookies over for the event. So we'd have some cookies. And she got to the family fair and went to charge cookies to our account. And they said, well, just a minute, I need the manager. And they came back and told my wife, you can't charge it. You can't charge at our store. You're, you're got too much of a bill here. You can't charge anymore. So my wife bought cookies, brought back and said, what did you do? You know, she asked me what, you know, what, what possessed you to take on this challenge? And really, it was a good timing for me. I was departing from the insurance business in it. And it looked like something that I could, I could make a difference in. It took a lot of work. And I don't mean just a lot of work on my part. I mean, my brother and my cousin helped paint, hand paint the grandstands one year with all of my painting tools from home. But the three of us went out and we got the recycled paint from the Rapid City landfill and came back out and painted the entire grandstands by hand. The couple weeks leading up to the fair, there was a lot of elbow grease, a lot of dedicated service by board members, volunteers, members of the community. And, and, and really, that's been my best accomplishment is getting people involved with the fair. That's how we've survived. That's how we've thrived. So something had to have caused the fair to get to that point. I knew there was a lot of debt and I knew there was a lot of room for growth. And the, quite honestly, the manager just prior to me was a very good manager. She just had more on her plate than she could handle. A very good person and worked hard at trying to make it work. But it was, it is, and can still be overwhelming. But the manager prior to, to her did not do any good service for the Central States Fair. In fact, it was under her leadership that the debts continued to pile. We were, we were finding problems with many different accounting procedures and issues. And, and really we just, we were missing money. We just couldn't find what was wrong with our program. And when they let that manager go, we were on the road to recovery. Tell us what comprised the fair back in 1997 when you took over. Obviously things have changed. I'm they've changed, but, but what was the, what were the central attractions? What did it look like back in 97? You know, back in 97, of course we had livestock shows just as we do today. We had grandstand concerts, different, different levels and types of concerts at the time. The coarse tent was strong. The German tent was strong and we had some open class exhibits that were a strong area. But, but beyond that, we didn't fill in with a lot of additional activities or interests, public interest types of activities. And one of the things that we started early on was bringing in as many different creative events and activities that didn't cost a ton of money to produce, but would still serve as entertainment and attractions for people. We started using a number of local groups to come back in and provide demonstrations. We started this, the different things like the state rock, paper, scissors championships. It was something that cost very little, but we could put it on and have that go every single day of the fair. And people would come in and participate in that. We did pig wrestling contests. We did pig races, you know, lots of small activities that still drew an interest for people. And then we started adding additional entertainers onto the fairgrounds itself, jugglers and musicians and additional musicians and just a number of different things that makes a fair really a fair. And then came the equestrian center, which is now known as the James Kersted event center. Tell us about how that evolved. Well, when we started working on the James Kersted event center, we'd gone to the city and asked for, at that time, 2012 project monies and had been approved, but did not get to an agreement with the city to actually proceed with the construction of the building. So James Kersted and Ken Davis, among two of the county commissioners at the time, came back and decided, you know, we can build this building ourselves. Let's just build it and not worry about working through the city's loopholes of getting the project underway. And they passed a motion and decided to build the James Kersted event center. And what it really did for Central States Fair, in addition to giving us a building to host fantastic horse events, in the past we had very little winter activity. We had a fine arts building that we could rent out and that was about it. So the amount of people that were coming utilizing the fair and giving us an opportunity for revenue was really, really limited. I was able to maintain two maintenance persons and a total of three people, including myself, in the office. So we were a very small staff. We would have to try and hire people to come help us, just big time help for the fair, big time help for the stock show. Well when you're doing a business plan and you're looking at how do I get people that are good at doing this job day after day, week after week, you need to be able to keep those people employed year-round. And so obviously with these two big events and a big gap in between, we couldn't keep people employed. The James Kersted event center gave us the opportunity to operate year-round and that was probably the biggest step in making the fairgrounds successful. Now in addition to that, it also gave us a great stream for revenues because we're able to host events, primarily horse events, but we've had a variety of different types of events in that facility. We operate in the tourism industry but more the agritourism. For instance, similar to the hotel industry, we are a horse stall facility. So we are a horse hotel, if you will, and we make money by having people come to events at the Pennity County Fairgrounds and stalling their horses in the barns. And that was really the bigger part of the revenue, even bigger than the actual renting of the facility, is people bringing their horses to the fairgrounds and stalling them for those events now year-round. Tell us about the size of that event center and what it will accommodate. You know, I give a lot of credit to Lindell Peterson for leading the charge on putting the right people at the table to talk about what we wanted to build. And I can also tell you that they were very strict on making sure that we came in on budget. We had no money available from the Central States Fair coffers to supplement any type of additional activity or growth or construction costs. So we needed to be on budget. And the one thing they knew that we needed to have was we needed to have an arena that was 150 feet wide by 325 feet long. And that is large enough that if ever we have the opportunity, we could hold an Olympic qualifying equestrian event. We've never had that opportunity, but we could hold equestrian events in that facility. To put that in perspective, if you took the arena that we set up during the Black Hills Stock Show in the Barnett Arena, if you took that arena and put it inside the James Kerr State Event Center, it would fit in there five times. So it's a large arena. Five Stock Show arenas would fit in the James Kerr State Event Center. So that puts it in perspective. And that makes us the largest horse facility really in the greater region, which is why we get so many horse activities coming to us saying, we want you to host our event. We don't produce those events. We simply are the host, just like the Civic Center hosts a lot of different customers coming in and renting their facility. And of course, it's not just a year-round horse facility. I took my grandsons there to see the dinosaurs one time. We had walk with dinosaurs here for a couple different times, and that's just a great deal. That was a fun event for us. We've had the Budweiser Clydesdales there during the Black Hills Stock Show. We've had numerous auctions and law enforcement trains in there quite frequently. About four or five times a year, they'll come in and actually do training in the event center because they need a space like that to use. It's been used for a variety of activities, and we've done a number of concerts in it. We call it more of a barn setting, but really, we are in Pennington County, all of the Black Hills is so fortunate to have that facility here to draw these agritourists into Rapid City. How has the Central States Fair evolved over the past 23 years? The biggest change that's taken place for the Central States Fair is our ability to collectively bring other groups to the table to work with us. Central States Fair could not operate in that capacity entirely as an island. We need support from businesses, from our Pennington County commissioners, from the city of Rapid City, so many players that need to be brought to the table and involved and included in planning and promotion production of the Central States Fair. We're very fortunate to have a great working relationship with the highway department and Pennington County Sheriff's Department and the commissioners. I think they all recognize what an economic tool agritourism is for our area. You know, we service a lot of areas that don't have the types of facilities that we do in Rapid City, and not just from a James Kerstad Event Center standpoint, but you know, you don't really get to go wedding gown shopping in Lemon or Caddoca or Newcastle. You don't buy your wedding sets or prom dresses or sometimes you don't even get your appliances in those areas. Rapid City becomes an economic hub for all those small communities to come in and do their school clothes shopping, etc. And we are one of the catalysts that brings that particular person to town on a regular basis. One of the things we use to describe our clientele is we say if you find the guy that wears his cowboy boots all week for work, he wears them to the football game Friday night, and he wears the same boots to church on Sunday, that's our client. And those are the people that come in regularly, and really when you live out in the country a ways, when you come to Rapid City, this is their vacation. It might just be their weekend away, but it's what urbanites might say, we went to Vegas or we went to Denver for a weekend. Our rural community comes to Rapid City for the weekend, and we really pride ourselves on being a major draw for that client base to come in and supplement Rapid City's tourism industry at times of the year when we don't have the drive-in people coming from Des Moines and from Minneapolis and from other areas coming through Rapid City to see the summer tourist attractions. How unique is Rapid City when it comes to that? I mean, what other city our size are you going to find the sorts of facilities that we have right here in Rapid City? You know, I'd be hard-pressed to find a city that matches Rapid City in that we have a lot of big community amenities without the big community problems. And the people still treat Rapid City as a local community. I mean, you can stop downtown and go to a summer night's events and see 50 or 60 people that you know from the community. And that's still that beauty that I like about Fort Pierre. When I go home, I see lots of people that I knew and that I grew up with and people to talk to, and you can still have that experience in Rapid City. It's not like going to Denver. We could spend a week in Denver and never see anybody that we know unless we went to see them. And I love South Dakota. I love Fort Pierre. But I love the Black Hills. I mean, the thing that we get in the Black Hills is, number one, it's a beautiful setting. We ride motorcycles. We take our Harleys all across the U.S. looking at different places. And I can tell you when my wife and I come home, the weekend after leaving, we'll go for a ride in the Black Hills. And when we get done going through Custer State Park or out to Neck Yolk Road or Highway 385, we will come back in and say, you know, we've traveled a lot of places, but it's hard to find someplace as beautiful as the Black Hills to ride motorcycles. We'll be back in 30 seconds. Spring cleaning time is here. 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Tourism is huge for our community, and it's got to be a three-legged race with a lot of different partners. With regard to tourism, so we don't market the fair as the tourist destination for people from Minneapolis to come to Rapid City to see the Central States Fair. We do, however, market the Black Hills Stock Show as a place for everybody in the U.S. to come to find the best quality cattle in the world. And when I say the best quality cattle in the world, I'm dead serious. We bring some of the best genetics to the Black Hills and offer that to improve beef throughout the world. And that's what our local producers, our regional producers that come to the Black Hills Stock Show do. They select their best bull, their best heifers, and they bring them to town with an idea of helping better genetics improve the beef herds across America. Rapid City is growing, and it's about to grow more rapidly. Does that present special challenges for the fair and for your growth and for your sustenance? You know, we're excited about the Rapid City. Anytime you bring new things like the Air Force is going to be doing for us here, you bring a new bomber in here, and it's just an incredible amount of economic impact that that has. Every time everybody gets another dollar in their pocket, that dollar is going to be spread throughout Rapid City. Again, if you bring people to town, even if we're not getting a bite of the first dollar, it'll eventually make its way around to us, and it'll be good for Central States Fair, it'll be good for the Black Hills Stock Show. Ron, you've put together a track record of maintaining an excellent staff. Tell us how you do that. You know, to work at the Central States Fair, you need to want to work. Everybody, and I mean every single person on my staff, I've got great people. We treat them like family. I love them like family. They would bend over backwards, just as my family would bend over backwards for me. These people, this staff that I have, will bend over backwards for the Central States Fair, but they do that because they know that's what it takes to complete the job. I love hiring people with an ag background for the fair, because those people know what it's like to go through harvest or calving season when you say, it's time to go to work, and we have to work endless hours in the day just to make this part of our business successful, and that's what I get a lot with my staff at the Central States Fair. Is there anything that sets the Central States Fair organization apart from all other fair organizations around the country? Every fair organization in America produces a fair each year. Out of all the fairs I've talked to, and I've talked to hundreds, we are the only one that I found anywhere that produces two major events like the fair and the Black Hill Stock Show a year. You end up working one fair, and then you turn around and produce another fair in the winter, and most fairs don't do that. They produce one fair a year, so you've got an entire year to plan, and we have to do all that planning basically in a six-month time frame. It's spread out over the whole year, but you've got half as much time to plan as every other fair in America. One time early in my job, my dad came in and watched me at the office, and I had an office line in one year, I had my cell phone in the other year, and I had somebody else talking to me in the office, and my dad watched this transaction of three conversations rolling back and forth, and we got done, and I was trying to find time to grab a bite of lunch with dad and mom, and dad got done with the conversation, and he said, well, you know, son, when you work at a job like this, you can say you've got four years experience in your first two years. So it was really cool that he understood that it was definitely a two-person job back then. I've got much more staff now to help support that, but it's a lot of work, but I don't think I would trade it for any other occupation. If you could just magically put the next building block in place for the fair, what would it be? Well, there's two parts to that question. If we were looking at what would be the next thing to help elevate the fair, I think the proper use of the new facility at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center and at Barnett Arena, which will be repurposed, that has absolutely phenomenal potential to really explode the Black Hills Stock Show with people on a national level wanting to come to Rapid City to participate. Second, when I look at the fairgrounds property itself, and I say where do we need some sort of support or something to happen for the fair itself to grow, you know, we don't have a large meeting space or community room, I'll call it, that a lot of fairgrounds have, and when I look at those fairs across the U.S. and I say how are they so successful, it's because they've got that additional clean meeting space. We've got the James Kerr State Event Center, a fabulous building, lots of horse traffic, but we don't have the opportunity to host other types of events that don't need the dirt floor facility, and so the challenge we have currently is to say how do we shift the events to make them flow and work the best for the event overall. The people that aren't from Rapid City, that aren't part of the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, or part of the Central States Fair, or part of the rodeo group, they don't care how things are put together or who does what. They want to have a good experience, and it's our job to find a way to make that experience the best it can be by coordinating all these things, and that's what I say about having one umbrella that makes the whole thing work. That would be the best thing for the people that are not from Rapid City. What is the biggest thing you've learned over the last 23 years managing the fair? Well, first of all, be humble. There are so many good people that have put time and effort, and more years than I have, into the growth and success of the Central States Fair. We have people that have volunteered for the Central States Fair or been involved with the for over 40 years, still working towards that greater good, and you know, I think they recognize how important the fairgrounds facility is to all of Rapid City, and I have been fortunate enough to be able to lead our organization in maintaining and caring and trying to expand that concept that they had 40 years ago about bringing people to Rapid City, let them experience great things, have fun, have a great family experience, and then say, that's something I want to do again, and I'll be back to do something like that in Rapid City. So Ron, someday you'll have to pass the torch along. What advice at this juncture in your service as General Manager would you have for the person who will someday succeed you? Well, first of all, you can't do everything by yourself. You've mentioned that there's been some awards that I'd received, and I'll tell you that not one of those awards was won by me. Those every single one of them, when you look back at this, it's because I had the right team, the right board of directors, the right staff, the right people in the community supporting our events and our activities and the growth that we wanted to experience, and I don't brush over that lightly. I know that the success we've experienced is because we've had all these players involved with helping the Central States Fair, and you can't say enough thanks and praise to the people who continue to put in time and effort to make our organization a great organization. It's just phenomenal the amount of time and effort people put in for this organization, and I couldn't thank them enough. When I look at what it takes to be a good manager, I think there's a few things that come to mind. First of all, you have to be open to a lot of ideas. We get ideas from the County Commission, from our board of directors, from staff, from other fairs, from a variety of different people, and we try to sift through all those different ideas and produce what we think we can produce within our time frame and our budget to be the best line of events and activities for a fair or for a stock show. So be open to ideas. Second, you have to be a good leader of people. Find the right people to work for you and with you, and when you find those people, being a leader of them is so much easier. They know how to get things done. They'll know what it means to produce a fair or an event, and I've been very fortunate throughout my career that I've had really good staff. I think the other thing is you have to include so many different organizations, from the North Rapid Civic Association to the Lions Club to the German Club to we had groups that come back in and provide cleaning services, Black Hills Works, just the Boy Scouts do a food drive, just so many different groups that come and participate and make the fair part of their fair, and it's not just 10 people putting on a fair and saying, here it is, come. It is everybody getting involved and being part of that fair, and now you've got a vested interest in making sure that things go well and that the fair is successful. In a general sense, how do you see the future of Rapid City? You know, Rapid City is poised to really explode, and I'm excited to be part of Rapid City at a point where, in what I would call the last part of my service to this community, to be a service that's going to be an opportunity for growth for whoever takes over the next challenges in Rapid City. What keeps you so motivated? Well, first of all, I work with great people. I don't feel like I have to go to work. I feel like I get to go to the place where I get to make things happen. We have a very creative environment. Every day is different than the day before it. That's nice. Something new is going to happen every single day. Don't always know what it's going to be, but something new is going to happen. The requests and demands that are put upon us vary greatly. We consider ourselves to be a great resource for the community. We try to share with a lot of other non-profits, the Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber Ag Committee, Visit Rapid City, a number of different places that have taken our stage and used them for the duck race or a variety of different activities. We try to be that community partner where people say this is where we can go feel safe and have help even if it's just ideas about how to make their events, their activities, their survival in Rapid City a great experience. I grew up, as you know, not far from you. 50 miles. In a town less than a thousand. Well, it was over a thousand when I was there. It's not a thousand anymore. I used to joke around many years ago when I moved to Rapid City that our city is made up of a whole bunch of people from small towns like where you and I grew up. Correct. That's changing. You no longer necessarily have a previously rural population who are occupying the city. You know, frequently I speak at different groups and when I do, I ask, how many of you grew up on a farm or ranch? And watch to see how many hands go up. And I say, how many had a parent that grew up on a farm and a ranch? How many had a grandparent? And over my 20 years, I'm getting into that fourth generation of being somebody that grew up on a ranch. So you're accurate in that the city is becoming more of a place where we have all of our inhabitants coming out of Rapid City, not people from a small town that moved to Rapid City. So how has that affected people's view of modern agriculture? You know, people don't think about technology when they think about agriculture. They think about we go out and we plow a field, we put some seeds in, it grows up, we harvest it, and then we go to the elevator with it. And, you know, we've been working, agriculture has been working with technology for years. You know, we can now grow 60 bushel wheat, dry land wheat on land that we couldn't have produced anything on 25 years ago. And you can produce that now out here in areas in Western South Dakota where the ground's not as fertile. And that's all due to research and technology saying, how can we help create a better wheat seed? The same is true in the cattle industry. Yeah, I liken the story of a racehorse to cattle. You know, everybody can understand that if you took the fastest stallion you had in the herd, and you took the fastest mare that you had in the herd and you bred them together, their offspring would be probably pretty fast. So everybody gets making faster racehorses by years and years of genetically breeding those into being the fastest. That same technology has been taking place in the cattle industry and is now moving into the buffalo industry as well to help produce the best beef in the world by genetically breeding the right bulls with the right heifers and the right cows so that we get offspring that are better than what the generation before them were. Is Rapid City the future place for that research to take place? I'd like to see SHOPGO building be one of those types of buildings. You're like a lot of other folks I interview, you're thinking ahead all the time. I mean, what a great way for Rapid City to still tie into the ag market, but to take the technology portion of genetically working with beef production and bringing that to Rapid City. Using the school of minds, using the resources that we have available in this community to say, we're going to bring people, and I'm not talking from just the people in the South Dakota area to come to Rapid City. I'm talking about beef production from around the world saying, Rapid City is dialed in on better beef production. Let's go there and figure out what they're doing. What's the biggest misconception people may have about Rapid City? I think the misconception people have about Rapid City is that it's cold in the wintertime, much like the rest of the South Dakota is because, you know, you've been Aberdeen and Highmore and Fort Pierre, and we do have some areas where it's colder. But when you get to the Black Hills, there's a reason the natives used to come to the Rapid City in the wintertime, and it's because we do get those inversions, and we have warm weather. And last year we had 31 degrees below wind chill factor blowing one weekend of the Black Hills Stock Show, and the next weekend it was 62 degrees. You know, that can take place in the Black Hills. So I always say that we definitely will have two weeks of winter, real winter, in the Black Hills. Any rest of the time of the winter, we could be in shirt sleeves. I think we've seen over the last few years that as more and more people become aware that our winters aren't as bad as they thought they were, that our shoulder seasons, which go prior to Memorial Day and after Labor Day, are expanding. Do you see us becoming a year-round attraction in the future, and how does that play into the fair? You know, I've always felt that Rapid City, the Black Hills, is a great place to be at any time of the year. Even when you put a foot of snow in the middle of the Black Hills, it casts a different beauty about the Black Hills that we don't get in the middle of summer, or that we don't get in the shiny green moments of spring. It's just a different kind of beauty, and that's one thing that I think that you can find in the Black Hills. You can find beauty in the Black Hills every single season out of the year. I agree with you that those shoulder seasons, particularly the fall, that's my favorite time in the Black Hills. The weather cools off a little bit. It's beautiful. The trees and leaves are turning colors, and it's a beautiful time to be in the Black Hills, and I think that is the easy piece to sell. People, once they've been here for that fall shoulder season, they will say, that's a beautiful time to visit the Black Hills. If you haven't been here in the winter, you need to look it up. We've got great snowmobile trails throughout the areas. We've got great cross-country trails in the areas. We've got downhill skiing in the area. You can go ice fishing. You can go sledding. You can go skating. You can make it to Main Street Square and skate in the middle of the winter, and then go in and have a cup of hot chocolate right next door. I mean, we've got a lot of things to offer year-round that a lot of communities would die to have. Any final thoughts? You know, the one thing that I would add is that if I had to rewrite my entire story, the chapter with the Central States Fair is not a chapter that would have changed. That's fantastic. Ron Jeffries, it's been a real pleasure to have you with us on Amplify Rapid City. I've worked alongside you enough times over the years to know that you are a true champion for our community, and so I want to thank you for stopping by. Thank you for visiting, and let's not let this be the last time. I look forward to it. That wraps up this episode of Amplify Rapid City. I want to thank Ron Jeffries again for stopping in, and if you want to learn more about the Central States Fair, just log on to centralstatesfair.com. They'll have information about the James Kirstad Event Center, everything that surrounds the Central States Fair, the staff, and lots of good photos and information. And once you're done with that, you'll want to log on to blackhillsstockshow.com to learn about the other major event that the people at the Central States Fair put on annually. As always, please subscribe. If you haven't already, tell your friends to listen in, and thank you for joining us on Amplify Rapid City.