the grounds are clean. Manning the office, manning the phone— it's picking up again but for while it didn’t ring all that much anymore, not like it used to—,” he lists, tick- ing off the tasks and saying that the same goes for Sycamore. When asked if the Fairgrounds
center in particular means anything to him, he replies that besides being his workplace, he feels that his own family is simply “part of the OC Fair family, albeit a distant cousin. If they need the rodeo arena worked, if they need to borrow our water truck or one of our tractors we do what we can to help them.” Though Hanson worked at other
lot of them, I feel very bad for a lot of the employees who—if the sale goes through—will not have a job." To Hanson, this family includes
not only employees, but trainers, boarders and riders as well, and he sees the equestrian center com- munity as a valuable asset. “There’s no safer place for someone to drop their kids off for the day, because you’ve got a hundred eyes watching for strangers to drive through the gate. Sycamore’s the same way,” he says. “I don’t think you’re going to find that very many places because they’re not really family run.” That sort of mentality is what
ventures during and after college, the majority of his time has been spent working at both equestrian centers. Those years seem to have fostered his sense of caring for this other family—the one he has come to know so well at the little equestrian center in Costa Mesa. “The future is pretty uncertain at this point,” he says, “as I’ve become friends with a
drives Hanson and his family to con- tinue to fight for the Fairgrounds in particular, and it is obvious that despite an uncertain future, Han- son has optimistic visions for the years to come. “My dream is to not only keep what we have but to ex- pand, because this is just an incred- ible location. There’s just no other spot like this. We don’t have trails, but to give kids and young adults
55
an opportunity to experience what horses are like, what horse owner- ship is like, there’s just no place else around.” Hanson wants more than for the
Fairgrounds facility to simply remain alive—he wants to recoup what was taken, to revitalize the center and see it return to its former glory. “I certainly don’t want to see this place go away,” he says with growing ex- citement. “I want to expand it as big as it was before or bigger and make it the show place that it used to be before they started whittling away.” To some, that goal might seem un-
reachable, but Hanson and his fam- ily have been around long enough to know that for all the setbacks and all the changes that have occurred over the years, there’s always room to hope. Hanson just may be able to build a better home for his ex- tended Fairgrounds family. “It’s just a dream,” he says, “but
since we’re just dreaming, we might as well dream big.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84