Frankfort College Journalism Student Steps in It at the Fair

By Alan Hovorka

My feet hurt so much.

For the past week, I have been bouncing around from attraction to attraction at the Indiana State Fair telling stories with other journalism students from Ball State University.

Tuesday I milled about our trailer area, not because I was nervous about going out and finding a story, which I was.

There was a rodeo Monday and Tuesday, and I tried to chat up some of the cowboys so I could do a profile. In all honesty, all I could think of when I saw the rodeo Monday night was a SpongeBob SquarePants episode. “Welcome to the Salty Spittoon. How tough are ya?”

However, I eventually got to know the announcer for the show, Anthony Lucia, and he pointed me to a pair of brothers who rodeo together as well as the handler of Whiplash, the cowboy monkey.

I quickly found myself knee-deep in interviews and horse poop. Not really, but I did manage to step in some choice droppings during an interview. I looked at my shoe and thought, “Oh s***, s***. Don’t pay attention to that, just keep listening. Don’t draw attention to it. Don’t look at it and maybe he won’t notice.”

A few hours later, my butt was glued to a chair as I furiously tapped my keyboard working on a general piece and three profiles with my friend Danielle Grady, another journalism student from Ball State. She and I tag-teamed profiling the cowboys and the rodeo. It was probably the most fun I have ever had as a journalist, especially the part where I got to meet
Whiplash.

A monkey in a cowboy hat and boots and leather chaps that loves “Sons of Anarchy” is pretty great—especially when your editor’s 6-year-old thinks the monkey was just a little man riding a Border Collie from Scotland.

Alan Hovorka is a writer for BSU Journalism at the Fair, a Ball State University immersive-learning project placing 25 student journalists at the heart of the Midway to tell the weird and wonderful stories of the 2014 Indiana State Fair.