McAlpin follows long line of fair supporters

Wes McAlpin has some long days ahead of him this week as the Northwest Montana Fair rolls into action.

As the livestock superintendent who oversees the Trade Center building during fair week, he’s on duty by 6 a.m. each day. If he’s lucky he’ll wrap up each day by 10 p.m., and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

McAlpin comes from a long line of fair supporters.

“It’s kind of in my blood,” he said, taking inventory of the hundreds of empty pens assembled for the onslaught of livestock entires.

McAlpin’s grandfather was one of the founders of the Lake County Fair in his hometown of Polson. Before coming to Montana his grandfather showed sheep and cattle at Iowa fairs in the early 1900s, even renting a rail car to haul his animals to the various fairs.

“Our family has been showing animals for over 100 years,” McAlpin said.

He started coming to the Northwest Montana Fair in the 1960s, first as a spectator and then as a participant. Lake County didn’t have a showmanship program, so McAlpin and his brother showed steers at the fairgrounds in Kalispell. While he admits to winning a few grand-champion awards, his son Reese, now 29, was an awarding-winning showman, too, with his market lambs.

McAlpin has gone to great lengths, literally, to attend the Northwest Montana Fair. In 1975, while stationed with the U.S. Army in El Paso, Texas, he and a buddy drove straight through from El Paso to Kalispell, “just to go to the fair.”

Eight years ago McAlpin was appointed to the Flathead County Fair Board, replacing longtime board member Paul Atkinson.

“I watched Paul with the livestock and he was excellent,” McAlpin recalled.

McAlpin stepped into Atkinson’s shoes, overseeing the entire livestock operation at the fair and working with the various other individual livestock superintendents.

“My role is to support the other superintendents and work with the maintenance staff,” he said.

He and swine superintendent Pete Woll do a walk-through of the Trade Center every morning because it’s a well-known fact that “pigs are escape artists,” he said. There’s no way to tie down the portable pens, but they’ve come up with ways over the years to better control the wily swine.

Calling himself “a farm boy through and through,” it probably was no surprise to anyone that he earned a degree in agriculture economics from Montana State University.

McAlpin, 64, worked for a time early in his career as an animal nutritionist for a feed company that eventually closed. Lucky for him, he’d taken water-law classes in college and became a water-rights specialist with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation in 1990, working in the Missoula office until transferring to Kalispell in 2001. He retired last fall.

One of McAlpin’s more obscure jobs early on, while stationed with the Army in Panama, was working in a dental laboratory, making dentures. He once made a mouth guard for Charlie Mooney, a boxer who won a silver medal in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Canada.

“It was like being a handyman,” McAlpin recalled about the dental work, plus it was an inside job in air-conditioned comfort, he added.

McAlpin has been a shooting-sports instructor for 20 years, long enough to see the next generation of youngsters take up the sport.

In the many decades he’s been involved with the fair, he’s seen the crowd shift from mostly farmers and ranchers to urban residents and tourists.

Events such as the rodeo continue to be crowd-pleasers, and tourists eat it up. Last year McAlpin said he sat in the grandstand with a large group of visitors from New Jersey who had never been to a rodeo.

Even though farming and ranching isn’t as prevalent as it once was in the Flathead, livestock numbers at the fair have remained fairly constant, he said. He’s proud of the annual livestock market sale.

“I call our livestock sale a five-legged stool” that includes the fair, 4-H, FFA, the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce ag committee and local meat processors, he said. “It’s the best sale in the country.”

Features Editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.