Of all the fairs of summer, the Waller Road Grange’s is truest to tradition.

Sunday, July 25, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., the festival at 2708 64th St. E. will serve up slices of rural life, and from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. an excellent chicken barbecue. Admission and parking are free.

Kids bring their pets and farm animals to win ribbons in the judging. Cooks bake their best pies. The produce and flowers brought to the contests are enough to make an aphid die of despair, knowing there are such fine gardeners so close by.

Kids love this …

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Fans of egg tosses, penny candy, barbecued chicken and roving politicians will flock to the Waller Road Grange Community Fair from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

The grange, at East 64th Street and Waller Road, is a bastion of traditional rural skills. The fair will feature 4-H animals, pie, produce and preserves judging, displays of farm machinery and fire equipment as well as games for children.

It’s also a favorite stop for candidates and politicians.

Admission and parking are free, and the famous chicken barbecue is a bargain at $8 for a whole chicken dinner

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The folks who want to keep Faith Dairy in Summit-Waller have taken their battle online.

SaveFaithDairy.org provides background information and gives visitors a chance to help the cause.

The dairy at 3509 72nd St. E. closed last year. Its future hinges on what vision of the dairy and its property – 100 acres in Summit-Waller and 300 acres in Roy – survives. Sid Mensonides, who owns just over 50 percent of the company, wants to develop the 30 acres into a subdivision that would hold

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Change often begins humbly. For Andrew Bacon and others hoping to save the Faith Dairy, it began in an almost-empty community hall.

Bacon attended Tuesday night’s meeting of the Summit-Waller Community Association to raise public awareness of efforts to revive the dairy and to ask the group’s board to write a letter supporting the possibility of keeping it open. Seven board members listened to the presentation. There were five people in the audience, Bacon included.

“It’s a good start,” he said after the board agreed to support his cause.

The board and Bacon also floated the ideas of getting local residents and businesses – especially coffee shops and espresso stands – agreeing to purchase products from Faith. It also has more of an opportunity to grow market share after Wilcox Family Farms announced Tuesday that it would end its dairy operations in Roy.

The dairy at 3509 72nd St. E. closed last year. Its future hinges on what vision the dairy and its property – 100 acres in Summit-Waller and 300 acres in Roy – survives.

Sid Mensonides, who owns just over 50 percent of the company, wants to develop the 30 acres into a subdivision that would hold 16 housing units.

"He’s moving very quickly," Bacon said. "We need more time than we think we have."

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The lede to my election story in today’s paper described voting at the Waller Street Grange.

Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one there who wrote about it.

A few voters at the Waller Road Grange weren’t happy with the idea of no more polling places. And their concerns were all about knowing their ballot would be counted.

Richard Goheen is still hoping popular support will revive the polling stations:

I really want some evidence that my vote is registered. Whether that’s a paper trail or however, I don’t know. To me, there’s a good reason people had to show up in person and show ID that shows they should be voting. And there was a good reason that people saw that their vote was registered.

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Things were a little more active at the Waller Road Grange. It’s one of those locations that makes you forget there’s mail-in voting: It’s an old building with hardwood floors and big open spaces.

Winfield Giddings is the voting inspector there today. He’s been working the polls since 1993. He says the switch to ranked-choice voting would make life pretty difficult at polling places. And when the county does switch to all-mail-in voting, it won’t affect him much:

Personally, I’ve been doing absentee for a long time. Because this isn’t my voting place, I have to do absentee

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